A friend of mine directed me to the following link - A 7-minute collection of Horatio Cane’s one liners. Some of them make me laugh - hysterical.

I wish I could be so cool!

Horatio Cane One-Liners [Youtube]

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It is important for men to remember that as women grow older, it becomes harder for them to maintain the same quality of  housekeeping as when they were younger.

When you notice this try not to yell at them. Some are oversensitive, and there’s nothing worse than an over sensitive woman.

Hi,

My name is Jim. Let me relate how I handled the situation with my wife, Annie.

When I retired a few years ago, it became necessary for Annie to get a full-time job as well as her part-time job, both for extra income and for the health benefits that we needed. Shortly after she started working, I noticed she was beginning to show her age.

I usually get home from the golf club about the same time she gets home from work and although she knows how hungry I am, she almost always says she has to rest for half an hour or so before she starts dinner. I don’t yell at her. Instead, I tell her to take her time and just wake me when she gets dinner on the table. I generally have lunch in the Men’s Grill at the club so eating out is not reasonable. I’m ready for some home-cooked grub when I hit that door.

She used to do the dishes as soon as we finished eating but now it’s not unusual for them to sit on the table for several hours after dinner. I do what I can by diplomatically reminding her several times each evening that they won’t clean themselves. I know she really appreciates this, as it does seem to motivate her to get them done before she goes to bed.

Another symptom of aging is complaining, I think. For example she will say that it is difficult for her to find time to pay the monthly bills during her lunch hour. But, boys, we take ‘em for better or worse, so I just smile and offer encouragement. I tell her to stretch it out over two or even three days. That way she won’t have to rush so much. I also remind her that missing lunch completely now and then wouldn’t hurt her any (if you know what I mean). I like to think tact is one of my strong points.

When doing simple jobs, she seems to think she needs more rest periods. She had to take a break when she was only half finished mowing the lawn. I try not to make a scene. I’m a fair man. I tell her to fix herself a nice, big, cold glass of freshly squeezed lemonade and just sit for a while. And, as long as she is making one for herself, she may as well make one for me too.

I know that I probably look like a saint in the way I support Annie. I’m not saying that showing this much consideration is easy. Many men will find it difficult. Some will find it impossible! Nobody knows better than I do how frustrating a woman can get as she gets older.

However, guys, even if you just use a little more tact and less criticism of your aging wife because of this article, I will consider that writing it was well worthwhile. After all, we are put on this earth to help each other.

Signed,

Jim

EDITOR’S NOTE:

Jim died suddenly on May 27 of a perforated rectum. The police report says he was found with a Calloway extra long 50-inch Big Bertha Driver II golf club jammed up his rear end, with barely 5 inches of grip showing and a sledge hammer laying nearby. His wife Annie was arrested and charged with murder. The all-woman  jury took only 15 minutes to find her Not Guilty, accepting her defense that Jim somehow, without looking, accidentally sat down on his golf club.

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I have to say it now, though - if you don’t have it already, install Firefox. I have had clients replace Internet Explorer with Firefox across their whole company and within days the incidents of virus, malware and spyware problems reduces DRASTICALLY (90-95%).

• Download Firefox from here
• Read the Firefox support stuff here (on installing it)

One of the best things about Firefox is that you can install add-ons. These are little programs that give additional functionality to your browser.

My top 3 favourites are:

• Foxmarks (if you use multiple machines, or want to be able to access your bookmarks when you are away from your computer and have access to an internet connection, this is for you. If you have multiple computers it will automatically synchronise the bookmarks available on all of them)
• Piclens (Windows and Mac only - and wow! What an awesome way to look at pictures. Once you’ve installed it, go to Flickr or even Google Images, do a search and then click on the little ‘Play’ triangle that appears over images when you mouse over them… Wow is all I can say)
• Fireshot (Windows only - takes screenshots and allows you to draw all over them. Very useful if you need to highlight something from the web or explain things to people. Totally cool)

My Productivity Find for this week is something that could potentially be abused and allow you to procrastinate too much, however hitmelater.com is like a snooze button for email. Get an email that you don’t want to deal with until Monday - that’s OK, just forward to monday@hitmelater.com. It will be sent to you on Monday. This may just work for me as my email is like a to do list, and at the moment it is at 100 active tasks, but not all of them are for today. hitmelater.com allows me to forward it to the email address for a specified day (or even for a number of hours - eg. 7@hitmelater.com will resend you the email in 7 hours.

I love the idea of rememberthemilk, however it just isn’t in my face enough like email is.

Hope you find this stuff useful.

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Now when all my old friends reconnect with me on Facebook, I can now show them why I have put on weight compared to the stick figure I was back then.

Lately, due to work pressure, I have almost abandoned home cooking.

My latest recipe is:

1. Take S$3.50 from wallet (approx AU$2.70)
2. Walk downstairs and across courtyard approx 50 metres
3. Buy a bowl of noodles with green veges
4. Either eat it there, or take it home and give the prawns to the cats (cholesterol reducing move)

Well the last three days has seen me finishing work at 10pm or later, so can you blame me?

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I did find the Xandros operating system a little limiting, and the other desktop I have has Ubuntu on it, so I decided to go with the Ubuntu for the Eee PC instead. One of the key things was that the Asus installation of OpenOffice was an older version, and I needed v 2.4 for MS Office 2007 compatibility.

The picture shows what it looks like now:

This was not an easy thing to do, and it took me 3 tries to get it all as I like it, but here is what I did (all relevant to Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, and get familiar with the command line - aka terminal):

1. Ubuntu EeePC Community
   This is where I started for information and background reading
2. To download, install the disk image to a USB stick and install on to your eee PC, the Get Ubuntu Eee wiki is the absolute BEST resource. You do need to teak a bit after this, however this is the best way to get it all going.
3. Now the wifi doesn’t work straight off the bat with the reinstall, so ake sure you have an ethernet cable and access to the internet for the rest… Install the madwifi drivers (I found the command line instructions from this link the best - under ‘Enabling Wifi’). Wifi still didn’t work immediately - check the next step for that.
4. Autoconfig the remaining tweaks - go here and use the RiceeeyTweak instructions for the command line. Wifi started working for me after I did this - and it did take a little while.
5. I then followed these instructions to reduce swappiness - hopefully making the hard drive last a little longer. [Is swappiness even a word??]
6. I then installed the Netbook Remix front end, coz I just like the way it looks.
7. I have installed UCView for the webcam - I found the webcam worked no problem (but I didn’t try it until I had gotten to step 6)
8. I freed some disk space by removing applications I didn’t think I’d need.
9. I have then enabled processor scaling, to make it faster, manage processes and battery life better.
10. I have installed Jungledisk on it - so I can take my files anywhere on any PC through the cloud. This was really easy to do with Jungle Disk 2 - the configurator is very easy to operate now.
11. I then put a nice wallpaper on it to go with the front end.

Why did I choose Ubuntu?

For a few reasons - one was familiarity… I know the command line instructions on Ubuntu and looove apt-get. The Synaptic package manager drives me berko. Also becoz:

• Up-to-date apps
• I know it works with Jungledisk
• Really cool front end (the Netbook Remix)
• Connectivity - probably to do with the fact that I’m familiar with Ubuntu, but I just find it works with a lot of hardware that we have (printers, network drives, etc)
• Automatically resizes to suit the monitor/projectors I plug it into without the need to open any special apps, etc

What I Might Do Moving Forward:

• Install TiddlyWiki (for note taking)
• Sync my iPod Shuffle

I Love My Eee PC!!

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Our home is no different and the fur has been flying, accompanied by hissing and the ocasional piece of furniture falling over. The most notable thing in this period of adjustment is that Buster and Stamford have not been sleeping on the bed as usual, and that I don’t get woken up by them in the morning (they usually leave the bed at some point during the night, but return around 8am to stare at me until I wake up).

This morning, I was woken up by them… and I never thought I’d say this, but it was great that they were making me their sofa/mattress/recliner again! There is nothing like when a pet trusts you so much that they lie all over you and chill out with you.

I’ve missed you, boys!

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Anyway, I dropped Dearest off and came back to the following…

Most of the stuff on the floor belongs on top of the fridge (except for the magnets and bits of paper, which are from the front of the fridge - figure that out).

That was bad enough, and then I went into the toilet…

That bit of plastic piping on the floor connects the bottom of the sink to the drain (the way it’s often done here). How on earth did she dislodge that?

I think the boys were in on this one.

:/

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I’ve been following a series on the Simple Mom blog called ‘How to be Disorganized and Unproductive‘ and Step number 3 has been ringing true with me both from a productive standpoint, as well as enlightening me on how frugality is something that is desirable.

Now this might seem a little odd coming from me. Mum, Dad - don’t laugh. If you click through to the article above the first picture looks something like my old bedroom (from childhood) and my study (from about six months ago). I’m a terrible mess and a bit of a hoarder. I love gadgets as well. Fortunately my budget doesn’t allow me to accumulate too many of them.

However I have started reducing the paper and possession mess for two reasons:

1. To stop DH from nagging me
   Let’s face it - who likes to be nagged?
2. It’s surprisingly freeing
   Not having to search through mounds of stuff to find anything is great! Or to not feel all that stuff just sapping away your life force (and it does - sit in a room of clutter and just feel your motivation ebb) - a real WOW moment for me.

This is a series of before photos from our study:

Now it’s nowhere near perfect, but we have some decided improvements:

There is one corner that has a few piles of paper in it (which of course I’m not going to photograph til it’s cleared), but compared to the mess before, I’ve thrown so much out (and made use of a scanner to deal with the volumes of paper that I had on hand).

Feeling better already

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This morning I woke up without the kitten - she had wandered off somewhere (which was kind of a relief as you don’t get much sleep with a kitten pouncing on your toes during the night).

I got up and started going through my normal morning routine, and passed by the laundry section of our kitchen when a small meow drew my attention to the laundry basket.

[image cropped to cut out my bra - the one she was obviously playing with prior to the small good morning meow]

Now if she makes me coffee in the morning I’m definitely keeping her!

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