BetterFavicon for Google
Not loving Google’s new favicon too much?
Check out my quick and dirty hack… BetterFavicon for Firefox. (greasemonkey required)
Install it here: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/40367
Enjoy!
Managing your Life the Agile Way in 2009
We’re just a few days away from 2009 and it’s that time when we all start looking back at the last year and set goals for the coming new year. I felt like sharing some of my thoughts on how I’m aiming to approach the new year.
Historically, I’ve never been a huge fan of New Years Resolutions because my attempts were always too big to successfully measure. The goals themselves weren’t poorly thought-out, it’s just that it’s really easy to make a list of personal targets, without putting a lot of emphasis on how you’re going to achieve them. The biggest trouble that I’ve had with goals is allocating enough mental energy for implementation planning. (if only I had someone to and wireframe my life…)
Due to this, New Years Resolutions haven’t been a huge success for me. I’ve found it much too easy to pass the buck onto the usual suspects, which consist of: lack of time, energy, too much work, general life changes, health, etc.
So, for 2009… I’m going to try something different by focusing on a set of best practices that I can use on a daily-basis. I suppose that my main goal is to not place too much emphasis on any specific targets and instead place the responsibility on myself to follow these best-practices and see what good (or bad) comes of it.
By rephrasing my internal conversation from, “What did I achieve this last year?” to “Am I doing things the best that I can?” I am confident that the answer will usually be, “not likely.” I do believe that through this subtle change in context, I’ll be better apt to self-evaluate how (and why) I am doing the things that I do and refactor accordingly. If we’re not consistently Refactoring ourselves (as we do with our code), we’re going to retain a lot inefficiencies in our personal and work lives, which make it difficult for us to quickly respond to changes and opportunities.
Our life (personal and work) is just another project that we manage. Much of methodologies that we spend learning about and adopting can easily be translated to these other areas of our lives.
So as I brace myself for 2009, I find myself asking, How can I lead a more Agile life?
I’d love to hear how you’re adopting best-practices inspired by Agile methodologies in your life and I promise to share mine over the coming year.
Related Posts
Was away on vacation
It’s been quiet here the past several weeks and that’s because for the first time since I started Planet Argon, I was able to take an extended vacation.
My partner and I headed to France (Paris, Nice, Lascaux II, and Bordeaux) for a few weeks. It was a first time for both of us. I’ve posted some photos on my flickr (vacation set).
I’d like to thank my amazing team for helping make it easy for me to take off for that much time. :-)
In any event, I wanted to post a few non-technical links…
- Veggie Tastespotting (tastespotting without the meat)
- Robby’s Muxtape
- Robby’s Grabb.it
- Robby on twitter
- Robby’s feedflix (netflix queue/stats)
Link yours up!
In the coming weeks… I’ll be posting some more thoughts on Project Management, time management, and anything else that seems to come up. If there is anything you’d like me to write about, feel free to drop me a line with a request.
Rolling up my Sleeves, continued
It’s been about a year and a half since I wrote about my wrist pains that would often occur at work, which was being caused by something I bet many of us deal with from time to time… Repetitive Strain Injury. So, I’ve been wearing these gloves when I’m at work on my normal Apple keyboard. I knew that they helped to some degree because on the days that I forgot them, my wrists would begin to hurt after a hour or two of coding/writing emails. Not much fun.
A few months ago, I attempted to start typing with Dvorak, which started off with requiring myself to do it for about three hours each morning to start the day and then switching back. After about a week and a half, I forgot to continue doing it. The Dvorak keyboard sits next to my desk… whispering to me, “play with me”... but I haven’t had time to get back into it.
So, the strain continues from time to time. Over the course of a few months, I began to notice that most of the strain seemed to be in my right wrist and I started to wonder if the mouse movements were a bigger culprit than the keyboard itself. So, I spoke to a guy at Macforce (a cool and local Apple dealer) about the mouse pad that he was using. He said that it really helped him out and so I bought myself one.
It’s a Belkin WaveRest™ Gel Mouse Pad and cost me less than $30 USD. It’s been a few weeks and I’ve noticed that I can go almost the entire day without the gloves that I wore before. So, I think that there is still some strain occurring, but a lot less than before. So, I’m hoping to give Dvorak another shot and hope that combo helps alleviate a lot of pain that I’ve been experiencing at work.
If you’re experiencing wrist pains and it’s focused on the hand that you use your mouse with, you might consider something like this to help out.
I’m sure that I’m not the only one that has/is experienced motion strain at the computer.. so, what has been your experience and have you had any success making improvements to your work space to help?
Chad Fowler's Dirty Little Secret?
I saw this photo of the Microsoft team from 1978 on Anselm’s flickr and thought, “Hmm, that looks like Chad Fowler!”
Could this be Chad Fowler’s dirty little secret?..
Happy Saturday!
