I don’t know why I let it bother me, but I am constantly at a loss as to why people skip the first, and most important part of the problem solving process: identify the problem.
Problems generally begin with frustration over something that’s not happening as expected. Often, people will take that frustration and immediately start throwing solutions at it. In their haste, they aren’t taking a half a step back to look at their frustration and ask “why is this happening?” If you do stop to ask that question, you can isolate the root problem and fix it at the source.
I could be wrong in my assessment, but if my car gets a rust spot on it, I don’t slap some paint on it. Instead, I sand out the rust, prime it, and repaint the small area. If I don’t, the rust will just spread. Oh, and you might ask “what if I don’t want to spend that much time right now?” For me the answer is to just leave it be. Yes, it looks worse, but I would rather have a problem I can see than one that’s out of sight and out of mind.
Different strokes for different folks though I suppose.
June 19th, 2008
Posted by
josh |
General |
no comments
This is my first post with Windows Live Writer. So far, this tool looks pretty sweet. The main point I’m liking is the WYSWYG editor that imported my site theme. Now I am posting this in exactly the look I will get when I publish it. Well… maybe. After all, I haven’t hit publish yet!
Here’s a screenshot of the editor, so let’s see if it matches in the end.
March 1st, 2008
Posted by
josh |
General |
one comment
One of the most useful little utilities I have found. Ctrl+Alt+Launch (or Cal as it is usually referred to) is a shortcut utility that allows you to quickly launch programs on your computer. Here’s how it works:
- Click Ctrl+Alt (or designate your own shortcut key combo) and a small prompt box will come up.
- Start typing in the name of the shortcut you created, any program in your start menu, a web address, or a path on your file system and let the autocomplete do it’s job. You can even search the web!
That’s it! No more browsing through folders, no more digging through the start menu, it’s all done for you. Even if you don’t setup shortcuts this little utility is useful.
Did I say little? I meant it. Despite the program doing some background indexing, it rarely ties up processing cycles, and only uses 3MB of RAM on my computer.
For such a small program it is amazingly configurable. You can get to the configuration through the taskbar icon and setup many options from running on startup, turning features on and off, and even configuring 3 different web searches!
All that made a useful program for me with very little work, but what about the shortcuts? Shortcuts allow you to setup an alias for a program to launch it. Of course, there are times that you want to launch more than one program at a time. For this you can setup a keyword on each of these shortcuts to launch it. My favorite is one called “startup” that simply opens my e-mail and all the apps I generally want to check shortly after sitting down to the computer.
Ctrl+Alt+Launch is a powerful and easy-to-use utility that once you start using you will be hooked. Best of all, it’s free!
February 8th, 2008
Posted by
josh |
General |
4 comments
It’s been awhile since I’ve posted here. That’s mainly because I’ve been busy launching my software and trying my best to run myself completely out of funds. Both of which I am being fairly successful at. However, I did want to stop and point out another of my works.
As an IT Manager, one issue that was always difficult was tracking software licensing. I just launched my new software DGard Software Compliance Manager but more importantly in blog talk, I have created the Software Licensing for Small Businesses 101 course. This course goes over the basic features of a license agreement, and also goes through a strategy for tracking licenses and staying in compliance. It is an easy course of about 7 lessons that take around 10 minutes each.
I hope it’s helpful, and sorry it is not a part of this blog. Maybe some day I will add it in though.
January 18th, 2007
Posted by
josh |
General, The IT Manager |
no comments
Here I sit, once again typing into one of these blogs. I’ve done this several times before and each time I have gotten sick of it. People always tell me that I need to make my blog all about a single topic, and that I need to be very standardized about it. Well, that’s not going to happen. I actually have several completely unrelated topics I’ll be blogging about, and then, if something else comes to mind I will throw that in there too. Anyway, I hope at least someone enjoys my babbling.
October 15th, 2006
Posted by
josh |
General |
3 comments
