Keep in mind what are the most important priorities in your life. Merlin Mann describes how he figured this out.
2011 Fantasy Baseball preparation
This year marks 9 years in a fantasy baseball league run by an old college friend of mine. I have decided to prepare differently this year.
Usually, I go into the draft with lots of pages of paperwork, highlighters, pens, etc. I then sit on a cramped couch in a cramped room and frantically try to keep up with the draft, who has taken which players, and inevitably fall behind. Or worse, pick a player that is already taken. What should be fun becomes stressful at times. I am not naturally an organized person.
This year, I’m going paperless. It is just going to be my laptop with me. I made a spreadsheet in Numbers that lists the top 300 players in order, top players by position, etc. I can then just search through the spreadsheet when a player is picked, quickly highlight the player red (unless I picked the player, who then ends up being highlighted green), and move on. I can also quickly look up players to make sure they aren’t an injury risk or were just knocked out for the season.
I also normally have to deal with flakey wifi or worse, hosts who forget their wifi password. This year, I am bringing my MiFi device as a backup.
I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I already feel vastly more productive, organized, and less stress using this method. This is just when doing pre-draft preparation too!
I will post what my team ends up being once I get back later today.
Removing the search bar in Firefox
I like Chrome’s unified search/address bar, but Chrome otherwise just doesn’t fit how I use a web browser. Luckily there is an easy way to make Firefox’s awesome bar do something similar. In fact, it is even more powerful.
- Customize your Firefox toolbar and remove the search box.
- Go to your favorite search engine
- Right-click the search text field on the search engine page and add a keyword. For example, for Google you can simply call the keyword google.
- Now in the awesome bar, type ‘google searchterm’ and hit enter. The search is automatically done on Google.
The best part about this trick is that you can do it on just about any site on the Internet that has a search field. You can create many keywords to search your favorite sites, such as Amazon, Newegg, Twitter, etc.
Enjoying vacation
Those of you who know me realize that I work a lot and that is probably an understatement. I rarely leave my desk at work for breaks, I am constantly thinking about it (especially since I am on-call 4 days a week), and it is really hard to hit the off switch. The reason why it is hard to hit that off switch is simple: because myself (and the rest of my colleagues) love what we do so much.
On Friday, I finished up my day and officially entered vacation mode for a week.
I don’t think I have ever looked forward to a vacation more than this one. The mental relaxation you get simply from turning off my work e-mail (and Boxcar notifications for our status page) is quite amazing. My aim is to totally recharge the batteries this week.
Saturday my wife and I visited my brother Justin in Burlington and helped him purchase his first new car. Wonderful time, although very sick of driving (three hours each way).
Sunday our nephews and my sister-in-law visited in the morning. My wife and I then went out and did some scouting of possible houses in the Manchester area that we are interested in.
Today my dad and I are going hiking somewhere in the White Mountains. First time we have done something like this together in a long time, maybe years. All I know is that it is supposedly an “easy” hike. His definition of easy is quite different from mine. We will see!
The rest of the week, I am most likely doing lots of genealogy research and working on fixing some things in our condo so we can put it on the market.
Cutting what you don’t need
Recently I received my AAA membership renewal bill. I’ve been a member for over 10 years and quite used to these renewal letters. Looking the renewal letter over, I suddenly remembered that this is of no use to me now.
My wife and I currently have AAA Plus, which costs $121 to renew according to the letter. This was important when we had used cars that weren’t the most reliable. Generally we would use the towing coverage once or twice a year, which would just about pay for the membership. They always have been fast in response times and very helpful. Yet, we don’t have used cars anymore. In July 2009 we bought a 2009 Hyundai Elantra. In October 2010, we bought a 2011 Subaru Legacy.
This renewal letter reminded me of something that had been mentioned in passing when we bought both of our cars new. Both manufacturers included roadside assistance with the cars. In the case of Subaru, roadside assistance is included in the 3-years/36,000 limited warranty. For Hyundai, their roadside assistance is 5-years/unlimited miles.
That reminder is going to save me $120 per year for at least 3 years. Maybe once the Subaru’s coverage expires we will revisit getting AAA coverage. Since the Subaru’s coverage runs out first, maybe I would then get just a single membership for my wife (since she drives that car the most). I could never remember to use the AAA discounts or other perks of the membership, so we weren’t earning back the money for this membership.
This is a good reminder to keep track of what perks you get when you purchase certain items. Because I remembered that we have roadside assistance via the car manufacturers, we are saving at least $360 over the next 3 years not renewing our AAA membership.