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Richy's Random Ramblings

Personal: Change Of Working Hours

January 22, 2003
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[Four Posted Bed]Is it really Wednesday today? I know what I eventually got out of my nice big warm bed this morning (it was one of those times when my body just wanted to lay still), I thought it was Tuesday. I went downstairs and made a cup of tea and picked up the post. There was just my copy of Private Eye magazine – which I thought was odd as it normally came on Wednesdays.

Went to work and it wasn’t until I was leaving and one of my co-workers asked how my first week and a half went did I twig that, yep, it was Wednesday.

Just before I left, my boss told me that they were going to have to change my working hours to fit in with other activities – so that means I get half an hour less sleep than I currently do. Bummer. Of course, I could always go to sleep before 3.30am.

Why did I stay up so late last night? Well, I wasn’t too tired and in that situation I normally just lay on my bed and watch a film or something on my computer – but Christina’s guess on the current “Guess That Movie” was so extremely close that I really thought someone would guess in the next 10 minutes. So I decided to have a bath instead (and my tub takes a while to fill), checked the GTM thread – still no guess, had my bath, came back – still no guess. Finished reading “A Fall Of Moondust” [Order from Amazon.co.uk] and still no guess. I went to bed thinking “I bet as soon as I fall asleep someone would guess”. I’ve now done a days worth of work and it STILL hasn’t been properly guessed. I’m in shock! Why? Because at the moment all the clues are sitting there and you just need to click on 2 links and you’ll have the choice of two possible movies that match the clues given to the guesses so far. So if you are intelligent, yet don’t recognise the film, you should have a 50/50 chance of guessing correctly.

I may actually have to revise my GTM schedule at this rate – I’ve now got 3 images all ready on stand by (I try and have the next one on standby anyway just in case the live one is guessed in 5 minutes), but the next “scheduled” one is even harder than this one (it contains no humans in the screen shot). I may have to substitute it for the one I did just before bed last night – a reasonably easy one IMHO.

Joke: Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder

January 21, 2003
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[Forget Me Nots]They have finally found a diagnosis for my condition. I have recently been diagnosed with A. A. A. D. D. – Age Activated Attention Deficit Disorder. This is how it goes:

I decide to wash the car; I start toward the garage and notice the post on the
table. OK, I’m going to wash the car. But first I’m going to go through the post. I lay the car keys down on the desk, discard the junk mail and I notice the dustbin is full.

OK, I’ll just put the bills on my desk and take the dustbin out, but since I’m going to be near the post-box anyway, I’ll pay these few bills first. Now, where is my chequebook?

There’s only one cheque left! My new chequebook is in my desk. Oh, there’s the cola I was drinking. I’m going to look for those cheques. But first I need to put my drink further away from the computer, or maybe I’ll pop it into the fridge to keep it cold for a while.

I head towards the kitchen and my plants catch my eye, they need some water. I set the cola on the counter and there are my glasses. I was looking for them all morning! I’d better put them away first. I fill a container with water and head for the houseplants.

Someone left the TV remote in the kitchen. I will never think to look in the kitchen tonight when I want to watch television so I’d better put it back in the living room where it belongs. I splash some water into the pots and onto the floor, I throw the remote onto a cushion on the sofa and I head back down the hall trying to figure out what it was I was going to do?

End of Day: The car isn’t washed, the bills are unpaid, the drink is sitting on the kitchen counter, the plants are half watered, the chequebook still only has one cheque in it and I can’t seem to find my car keys!

When I try to figure out how come nothing got done today, I’m baffled because I KNOW I WAS BUSY ALL DAY LONG!

Personal: New Job, A Week On.

January 21, 2003
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[First week]So how did my first week as a professional search engine placement engineer go?

Well, technically the job title on my contract (yep, I have a proper signed contract – first time in years!) is “Search Engine Optimiser” but since we guarantee to place our customers sites in the top 30, 20 or 10 (depending on how much they pay), I like the “SE placement engineer” title better 🙂 No, don’t ask how we do it (as I’m not going to tell), but when I started I thought I already knew every single “trick” in the book, however it seems I only knew around 75% of them. Of course, if you want your site promoting just drop me a line (leaving a comment will do) and I’ll send you the links. I’m not going to change my blog into an advertisement medium and I do want to keep my personal and professional life separate, but I also want the company to do even better than it is so I get a massive bonus so I can make my own hollowed out volcano *mwahhh*. Drat. Did I write the last bit out? Ooops… 🙂

My job’s at a company an “inconvenient” distance away – it’s too close to catch a taxi cab (1.8miles) – but it is practically on a direct bus route from the bottom of my road. However, the buses only seem to come once every 20 minutes and in that time I could have walked it there. So, of course like the fool I am, I’ve been walking to work and back again every single day. Previously I was used to catching a cab to the train station, going into Birmingham, having a mad 5 minute dash across the city centre to discover my next train had just left and then having a 2 minute walk to my old works front door.

So, of course, my legs weren’t/aren’t used to this amount of work. By Thursday my legs were knackered, and on Friday I didn’t think I’d actually be able to get to work – every 40ft of so the pain in my lower legs just got to much and I had to stop. I’m a wuss I know 🙁 It did give me strange dreams about running the London Marathon in record time and then running from Lands End to John O’Groats for the sake of it – I’m not even going to “go there” with the part of the dream where I ran across the Atlantic Ocean in a plastic “hamster ball”…

Continue ReadingPersonal: New Job, A Week On.

Techy: How To Grab Screenshots

January 21, 2003
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No, this isn’t the latest picture in the “Guess That Movie” competition (nobody’s guessed the last one yet so I can’t even announce a surprise I have waiting), it’s more a techy entry (haven’t had one of those in a while) about how I actually get the screenshots. Sorry for all the Linux, Unix, Solaris, Mac, and RISC OS users reading this – this post is for the Windows audience only…

First of all – how to get a screen shot of your entire desktop. Simply press “Print Screen” (it’s usually on the top right hand corner of your keyboard – it might be labelled “Prnt Scrn” and/or “Sys Rq”), then load your image editor (for example, Paint – I tend to use Microsoft Photo Editor that comes with Microsoft Office [Order from Amazon.co.uk] or Adobe Photoshop [Order from Amazon.co.uk] , create a new image and then press CTRL+V (the keyboard shortcut for paste). And you’ve got a copy of your desktop. Woo!

But, let’s be honest – most the time you want a copy of a single window on your desktop and not the whole thing don’t you? Again, this is extremely simple – just ensure the window you are active is ‘active’ (which usually means it’s the topmost window and the bar at the top is lit-up), then just press ALT and Printscreen. Do the load image editor, create new image and paste – and Bob’s your Mother’s sisters husband.

But wait! There’s more! (I’ve wanted to say that for ages). Here’s how to take a screen capture of a movie that’s playing in Windows Media Player, Real Player or Winamp 3!

Continue ReadingTechy: How To Grab Screenshots