Jan/100
My MW2 builds
I’m a big fan of Modern Warfare 2 (on the Xbox 360) and here’s typically how I play.
Dec/090
Working from home today
It took me three hours to drive the 25 minute journey home last night through the extreme weather conditions (2 inches of snow). Luckily I was allowed to leave early so it actually averaged out ok in the end.
So above is my little setup.
- Dell Mini 9 netbook
- hooked up to my 24″ monitor
- with my N97 providing my music for the day
- and Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox providing lunch time pressure release
Completely different to my usual remote working setup where I take my 17″ laptop to my girlfriend’s and work from there. Now I just wish that work’s VPN had Windows 7 support.
Dec/092
My online presence
I’ve got accounts on a scattered selection of different websites with snippets of content on each. YouTube for videos, Flickr for photos, Qik, Twitter etc. I’ve also got this blog, which sits here mostly gathering dust while I don’t write anything. On the rare chance that I do write something, I’ll save it as a draft and delete it a few weeks later. Not particularly useful.
So today starts the rework. I’ve said this before, but this time I actually have an aim.
An aim? Yep. I want to increase my online presence. In an ideal world this means that a) searching for “david carrington” in various search engines brings back this site as the top result, and b) this site actually contains useful information about me and projects I’m involved with.
This particular blog post is aimed at myself. It’s a pile of textual nonsense inspiring me to do something new: blog frequently! (Can it be done?).
I’ll continue to write about similar topics to the past, but this time I actually want to get something useful blogged each week. That means planning ahead, writing drafts, and putting some daily thought (half hour?) into writing some useful posts. Along the way it will make me look at my own website and think eurgh, that’s butt-ugly! and hopefully make me do some spring cleaning and visual improvements.
Give it a month, you’ll see I fail.
Oct/080
Where’ve I been?
- Playing around with Twitter ideas as a Windows Mobile application.
- Creating dabr, an open source mobile website as an interface to Twitter.
- Buying an 18 month contract for 5Gb of mobile internet (with USB dongle) for half price from Three UK.
- Playing too many online games, which I’ve quit! But still playing Spore a bit.
- Spending all my weekends in Nottingham to spend time with Kris.
- Ordered a nice Dell Studio 17 inch laptop in Spring Green.
- Flying to Canada tomorrow!
Nov/071
The psychology of two screens
At work I’ve got a pretty nice dual-screen setup. Recently I have become more aware of the personalities that each screen has developed. Personalities? Sure. They don’t talk back to me, but what they show me and how I use them differs greatly:
Screen 1: Mr Left
Mr Left is a creator and a developer. He loves code, databases, and image manipulation. This is where all the real work gets carried out. If I’m being productive, I’m working with Mr Left. Left is currently showing me a SQL query. We’ve also been working together in Visual Studio on some reports. He has the windows start menu, so he’s the one that dishes out work to everyone.
Screen 2: Mr Right
Mr Right is about results. He loves websites, files, task management, and emails. As soon as Mr Left has done his thing, he passes the work over to Mr Right to test. Mr Right gets the final say on whether something is right or wrong. If the final result on the Right isn’t good enough, it gets given back to Left to deal with.
But Mr Right has a secret: he’s all about fun and media. He runs Mozilla Firefox and browses the web. He listens to music on Winamp through the day and occasionally watches videos for lunch. He loves to keep in touch with people, through Outlook E-mails, internal IM using Office Communicator, and keeps an eye on the web in general using Google Reader.
Thank you, Mr Left and Right, for making me more productive.