The masters spracht : "Everyday, write something that's like a joke."
Get out of bed, think Setup, Twist, Punchline, write something. What's the setup? What does it mean? What else could it mean? Report it.
In the last couple of months alone I've come up with 20+ jokes. Think about it. In all the 10 years before, each time an original joke occurred to me, I gave it its own post on this blog.
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Wednesday, September 08, 2010
Designer's Toolchest
This'll be a full-fledged presentation in the upcoming days, but for now, to boost your productivity, consider developing expertise/familiarity in/with the following :
Perl, the swiss-army knife of scripting languages. Once you have savoured perl, you will see that you must know your data. And, when you internalize the fact that you must know your data, you will be more organized and start spotting patterns and solutions much faster.
perlTK - rapid fire GUI development for a better user experience. This is for those once-a-year times when your project will go much faster if you just had a better way of doing something. User experience is king. You must enjoy what you do if you do a lot of it.
AutoHotKey, the shortcut to Windows scripting. For all the hype about Linux, it has failed to deliver a method of scripting routine interactions.
HTML/Word/Powerpoint - when you have to sell yourself. Most things you'll want to do to make yourself look better only take a few minutes and most of the answers are already online.
Excel - Dashboard your way to success. We are all drivers or pilots all the time. Having access to the data that matters to you is the key to your success.
Cadence - The IC design suite with a user interface that could stand to lose a few pounds.
People skills - get the ball running faster and smoother. Politics is a fact of life. Get with the program. Be upbeat. You can make anyone's day with an uplifting remark or a joke or a witty observation.
Mindset : Think innovation, think victory, think initiative, tenacity, proactivity. Look for worthwhile things to do and do them without being told. Make things happen - where there's a will, there's a way - look online, participate in forums, make a nuisance of yourself till you've found the solution. Use paper - write down the possible outcomes and get to the future first!
ALT-ESC - The third dimension in productivity. It's amazing how many people (including my nice IT support guy) don't know about this trick in Windows (you can set your keyboard shortcut on Linux to do the same thing). How many times have you seen poor people click on the title bar and move the window to see what's beneath it? All you need to do is hit ALT-ESC and lower your window. Save yourself time, energy, money, hair, seed, etc.
Enjoy!
Perl, the swiss-army knife of scripting languages. Once you have savoured perl, you will see that you must know your data. And, when you internalize the fact that you must know your data, you will be more organized and start spotting patterns and solutions much faster.
perlTK - rapid fire GUI development for a better user experience. This is for those once-a-year times when your project will go much faster if you just had a better way of doing something. User experience is king. You must enjoy what you do if you do a lot of it.
AutoHotKey, the shortcut to Windows scripting. For all the hype about Linux, it has failed to deliver a method of scripting routine interactions.
HTML/Word/Powerpoint - when you have to sell yourself. Most things you'll want to do to make yourself look better only take a few minutes and most of the answers are already online.
Excel - Dashboard your way to success. We are all drivers or pilots all the time. Having access to the data that matters to you is the key to your success.
Cadence - The IC design suite with a user interface that could stand to lose a few pounds.
People skills - get the ball running faster and smoother. Politics is a fact of life. Get with the program. Be upbeat. You can make anyone's day with an uplifting remark or a joke or a witty observation.
Mindset : Think innovation, think victory, think initiative, tenacity, proactivity. Look for worthwhile things to do and do them without being told. Make things happen - where there's a will, there's a way - look online, participate in forums, make a nuisance of yourself till you've found the solution. Use paper - write down the possible outcomes and get to the future first!
ALT-ESC - The third dimension in productivity. It's amazing how many people (including my nice IT support guy) don't know about this trick in Windows (you can set your keyboard shortcut on Linux to do the same thing). How many times have you seen poor people click on the title bar and move the window to see what's beneath it? All you need to do is hit ALT-ESC and lower your window. Save yourself time, energy, money, hair, seed, etc.
Enjoy!
Monday, September 06, 2010
Essential All-The-Time AutoHotKey
Have you noticed that tables are so much nicer looking when cells are filled according to a theme? This is trivial to do with HTML, but Bill decided to make it really hard to do with M$ Word.
With Word 2007, all you do is select the cell, which Bill also decided to make hard to do (the trick sometimes is to just drag the cursor precisely to the boundary of the cell and hope for the best. With the leftmost cell, triple-clicking usually works. Then, you should see the Table Tools menu button on the very top bar, click that and you should now see Shading and Borders menu options surface. Anyhow, I just found that out, and the AutoHotKey snippet I have here doesn't apply to that unfortunately.
With M$ Word 2000 or older, you select the cell, then, Alt-o to go into the Format menu, then b, to pick Borders and Shading, then s to get to the Shading tab and you can then pick the colour you want. Which lends itself to this snippet that you should probably add to your Johnny-KDE-Style-Easy-Window-Drag script. Man, how much have Johnny and Rajat contributed to the well-being of the human race by just boosting my productivity?
SetWinDelay,2
Enjoy!!
With Word 2007, all you do is select the cell, which Bill also decided to make hard to do (the trick sometimes is to just drag the cursor precisely to the boundary of the cell and hope for the best. With the leftmost cell, triple-clicking usually works. Then, you should see the Table Tools menu button on the very top bar, click that and you should now see Shading and Borders menu options surface. Anyhow, I just found that out, and the AutoHotKey snippet I have here doesn't apply to that unfortunately.
With M$ Word 2000 or older, you select the cell, then, Alt-o to go into the Format menu, then b, to pick Borders and Shading, then s to get to the Shading tab and you can then pick the colour you want. Which lends itself to this snippet that you should probably add to your Johnny-KDE-Style-Easy-Window-Drag script. Man, how much have Johnny and Rajat contributed to the well-being of the human race by just boosting my productivity?
SetTitleMatchMode, 2
; default is 1
; default is 1
; This is the setting that runs smoothest on my
; system. Depending on your video card and cpu
; power, you may want to raise or lower this value.
; system. Depending on your video card and cpu
; power, you may want to raise or lower this value.
SetWinDelay,2
CoordMode,Mouse
return
return
^!RButton::Suspend
; M$ word, send key/mouse sequence to get the borders and shading menu on
; a table cell. Note, cursor must remain in the cell!! :)
$!b::
IfWinActive, - Microsoft Word
{
Sleep 200
Click 3
Send !o
Send b
Send s
}
Return
; a table cell. Note, cursor must remain in the cell!! :)
$!b::
IfWinActive, - Microsoft Word
{
Sleep 200
Click 3
Send !o
Send b
Send s
}
Return
Enjoy!!
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