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Multi-tasking is the enemy

Ever sat in your room (or at work, or in a lesson), aware that you have so much work to do, and yet not managed to actually do anything - even though you’ve had three project documents open all evening? If you find, as I have done, that this is a common occurrence then I may have some useful information for you: multi-tasking is not your friend.

I always have several projects on the go. I’m quite a task-orientated person, so to me a project could be finishing an essay for English, or watching a documentary, or eating a Crunch Corner, or trying to shift some of the crap that is invariably threatening to obscure my desk surface.

Each project is important and deserves my full attention. But each project never does have my full attention - consciously or subconsciously, I am sabotaging my own productivity. Sometimes it is terrible - not only am I being lured by minor distractions such as reading my feeds, checking my email every few minutes, MSN or staring gormlessly at my own pictures; sometimes I actually try to do two or three ‘projects’ at once.

For instance, I am constantly fighting against my room - my room wishes to be untidy, disorderly and some sort of post-modern gallery for my unwashed clothes, whilst as I person I wish for my room to be clean, tidy, and reasonably neat (mainly to impress my girlfriend). This is fine when there isn’t a DiDA deadline looming, my Geography study isn’t 3 or 4 months overdue and I have courageously beaten back my PT to the point where the standard of my maths book is ‘acceptable’, but for the remaining 99.8% of the time the battle spills over into my other work.

Multitasking does not get your projects finished. This site has had a pending redesign for 3 months. I need to do my Business coursework. There is preliminary DiDA work to be done. Why are all of them progressing at a pathetic pace? Because I’m trying to do all of them at once, get distracted, and in turn just give up and read blogs and look at pictures.

So, here is what I suggest:

• Focus your energies on one particular task, be it waging war against your rebellious property or getting that report finished;
• Under no circumstances stray to ‘just check your email’, or ‘just put this sock back into its cage’ or ‘just check your MySpace picture comments’;
• Turn off the damn TV - when it is on you will not be able to concentrate, full stop;
• Concentrate on your one project for a sustained period, taking short breaks every 30 or 60 minutes.

Boost your WiFi reception with a homemade antenna dish

I found a very interesting article on MetaFilter earlier on how to boost your WiFi reception - or, how to make a WiFi antenna out of a cheap USB WiFi dongle, an extension cable, and Chinese cooking utensils.
During my last holiday, I discovered that I could log in to a free WiFi hotspot from my balcony if I positioned myself in a certain way. Unfortunately, the source was a fair distance away and more than a centimeter or two of movement was enough to cause my connection to drop. However, it has come to my attention that it is possible to build a homemade WiFi antenna which could eliminate this problem.

However, a word of warning from a MetaFilter poster beforehand:

“Cantennas” are technically illegal in the U.S. under Part 15 FCC rules, and in some states, including where I live, arrests have been made for use of such devices, where they are considered evidence of intent for unauthorized network intrusion. Using highly directional antennas to leach WiFi access from fixed locations also makes it much easier to accurately triangulate your location as an infringing user; I’ve had a couple of idiot neighbors try to grab access from my WiFi signal, and I’ve really appreciated the reliable directional signals they provided while trying to do so, as it made it much easier to locate them, and play reverse head games with them.

WiFi “works” precisely because it is a very short range service. Using directional antennas, “power boosters” or other mechanisms to intentionally circumvent the Part 15 range limits entirely for your own convenience is boorish at best, and can disrupt legitimate users operating gear in the intended manner. Don’t be a jerk.

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Rediscovering Photoshop, Pt. I

I take a lot of photos - between 5 and 15 on an average day, up to perhaps 50 if I get carried away. When I’ve got a focus (at a gig, or on a day trip perhaps), I’ll take something between 70 and 150 photos. Though I love photography and improving photos, I will invariably have scarce enough time to do my GCSE coursework, attend band practices and guitar lessons and see my girlfriend, let alone photoshop 100 images.

Because of my lack of time (and perhaps also a degree of lazyness), I turn to a program called Picasa to help me edit my photos.

Picasa is great because it fits it’s purpose perfectly. It isn’t made for graphic designers - it is a photography tool. It is both a highly usable image organizer - without which I would not be able to find most of my photos - and an image optimizer in one. Graphic designers will be turned off by it’s lack of selection tools, text tools… even a brush tool.

However, for the more artistic and adventurous photographer, there are a few effects built in. Picasa basically contains the most useful features of a photo editing suite, and cuts out the less commonly used stuff - tools to crop, straighten, remove red-eye, brighten, sharpen, (de)saturate, and adjust shadow and highlight levels are provided, excluding the very neat ‘I’m feeling lucky’ one-click fix for pretty much everything. There are also some other neat effects such as blurs, glows and focal black and white - the picture to the right is a good example of what can be done.

Picasa isn’t the holy grail of digital photography, though - there are few people in the world of IT who haven’t heard more than a faint whisper of Photoshop, the industry standard in photo editing. I started using photoshop a while back for adding an effect called vignetting. Notice the darkened corners around this image? It’s useful to give your photos a professional feel and to draw the viewer’s attention to the subject.

For a time I disregarded Photoshop, considering it a tool purely for those who enjoy manipulating images, creating blends and banners, that sort of thing. I did this myself for a while - my poorly done and inexplicably popular pink phonebox on Flickr is testament to this. But now I have started to use it again…

I have discovered some useful features in photoshop, such as HDR and the ability to fine-tune certain colours. The picture of the taxis below is the first in a series of images that I have used to experiment with Photoshop. This picture features heavy vignetting and also the slight de-saturation of every colour except yellow.

Those of you who are becoming interested in digital photography may be interested to know that I managed to get this focusing effect by using a small aperture of f2.6. Anyway, more photoshop goodness coming soon…

The Windows Challenge

Whilst wallowing in the boredom that GCSE Business Studies coursework induces, a peer who shall go by the flimsy alias of ‘worms’ decided to take it upon himself to discover how many programs he could run off a school terminal without it crashing.

The experiment (which focused on Microsoft-produced programs) was pretty simple:

• Find a program that creates a new instance of itself upon pressing the hotkey Ctrl + N;
• Hold down said hotkey until you get bored / the rate of creation of new instances slows to a crawl / the terminal starts to spasm, lock up, or is otherwise retarded;
• Take a screenie.

We were quite pleased with the results. It was discovered that whilst Internet Explorer is a surprising resource hog and crashed my computer after something like 20 windows (I knew it was bloated, but I didn’t think it was that bad), Word is some kind of self-replicating machine; it is possible to spawn around 170 fresh Word documents in about 20 seconds before the system even seems to notice what you’re up to.

Anyway, you can see the final outcome of the Windows Challenge by clicking on the thumbnail above - the terminal could probably handle more, but our ‘Worms’ character got bored and decided that passing GCSE business studies is perhaps more important than giving his computer a stress-test.

PC World rates MySpace ‘#1 Worst Web Site’

Yes, believe it or not, MySpace - the infamous profile and networking site, which has more than 90 million registered users - has been voted #1 on PC World’s list of 25 worst websites. Yes, believe it or not, I am right behind them. Yes, believe it or not, I know that I am turning myself into naked flamebait for saying this. It just seems like a justified time to vent my frustration.

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