waiting for a train in San Diego

coffee & computing.
I didn't figure on the crowds of people wanting to take an Amtrak from San Diego to Los Angeles today, the train I was hoping for was sold out so I have to wait an hour to catch the next one.

Morning planning

morning planning, originally uploaded by JTrendler.

This is the second week of a new routine of waking up more than an hour earlier than normal and heading out to a cafe for coffee and planning.

The other day there was this post over at Lifehacker by Jason Womak about making time for the most important things. I can attest to the fact that a little planning goes a long way.

Pageflakes unsucks

I fired up my laptop today and Pageflakes loaded automatically, since I still had it set to my default homepage. There wasn't the obtrusive advertising that appeared the other day and I had forgotten that even happened.
What? Once again Phil Bradley's blog had some interesting insight.

Pageflakes now sucks

I really like Pageflakes, but this morning POW! completely obtrusive advertising, with no warning of any change coming up. Lame. I think I'll cancel/delete my Pageflakes account.
Phil Bradley noticed this as well & offers up this list of start pages. I suppose I'll either begin testing them out one at a time or return to either Netvibes (which I probably haven't used in over a year) or iGoogle.

Google announces TIME Photo archive online!

Google has teamed up with the LIFE Photo archives to bring what promises to be around 10 million images out of the archives and onto your screen! Apparently many of the images were never published, so they're not just releasing the famous images we've all seen before.

from the Official Google Blog:

This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Check it out here.

I'm thoroughly impressed. I need to spend some time digging around in there.

here's an article in the Gaurdian about the ordeal.

RSI Prevention with Poster Putty?

I have quite a few pictures up around the office, mostly cut out of art magazines and stuck to the walls with poster putty. Recently I decided to change things up and have been taking down certain images little by little. I have a small ball of poster putty now that I use to pick the stuff off the walls with, each time it gets a little larger. This growing poster putty ball usually sits on my desk waiting to be used, and lately I find myself cleaning it as one would a kneaded eraser - basically pulling it apart, balling it up, stretching it, etc. When reading a long article I find myself kneading the putty ball almost subconsciously. Today I realized that the activity is keeping my hand muscles agile and worked out, ever so slightly.

Over at Instructables someone detailed how to use an old kneaded eraser as poster putty. Now you might not need to follow all the steps if you're familiar with kneaded erasers and poster putty but in their Step 4: Go Nuts! they show several things stuck to the wall: a thumb drive, a quarter, some batteries and a usb cable. I really like the idea of sticking objects to the wall. in fact I used to stick a key that opened a cabinet in my office to the front of my computer with some poster putty. Now I'm trying to find things that would be better to stick on the wall instead of throw in a desk drawer.

Have you found any creative uses for poster putty or come up with any exercises or tricks to reduce the possibility of repetitive strain injury? Let's hear about them!