Why Books Are Better

In a nutshell, books are Attention Deficiency Disorder (ADD) proof. With books, recording your progress is easy and you don't have worry about going off on a tangent that has nothing to do with your study goal (e.i. With books, you can't go from reading about calculus to listening to youtube songs about calculus that honestly don't teach you anything about calculus but in the vast sea of procrastination that is using the 'internet'...). With this said, the iPad, although still on my wishlist, is an ADD factory. The iPad is disguised as a device to increase productivity but we all know what most people will be using the iPad for, and we know it's not reading. The iPad will be the death of us all! I'm just kidding.

don't make your bed

let's say that you spend a minimum of 5 minutes making our beds each morning. in a year, you spent 30 hours making your bed. you could have spent each 5 minutes to read a page out of a book instead.

I don't structure the blankets on my bed. I don't see the point in ordering the blankets when I'm just going to disorganize them later. I wonder how much time the average person wastes in a life time structuring their blankets. If your bed is against a wall, you have to move your entire bed to 'make your bed' adding the wasted time. I don't think anyone should take pride in fixing their bed. "I'm a responsible and disciplined person because I fix my bed" says the wrong person, but the truth is that you could take pride in having read maybe more than just one entire book by the end of the year. If someone uses their bed as a work place, I can see the point in making the bed, but you could always just move the top blanket aside.

Grease Monkey

I just started using Grease Monkey with Mozilla Firefox. Grease Monkey ends the debate for me. Until Google Chrome supports Grease Monkey (I don't know that Chrome does yet), I'm going to be using Firefox. Java Scripts and Grease Monkey are ultra useful. For example, I just installed a script that allows me to highlight any text, press a key for instance 'w' that automatically wikis the highlighted text or if I press 'g' the highlighted text is googled in a new tab. I had to modify the script a bit since the searches were in French. I even added my own search key to the script to translate any word I highlight in English to Spanish at wordreference.com.

Gmail This!

I just discovered the awesome bookmark Gmail This. Just drag Gmail This into your bookmarks bar and click it whenever you want to G-mail someone the current website you're visiting. I wish the Gmail This bookmark had Google Reader's bookmark Share This feature where any text you highlight is what users you are sharing with on Google Reader see before they decide they want to view the full website or article. In the case of Gmail This, users would highlight text, click Gmail This and any text highlighted would appear in the G-mail. Another feature that would be nice for Gmail This would be automatically embedding youtube videos or pictures.

Pastebin

The picture above is dedicated to www.pastebin.com. I was helping someone out with their homework and having him post his source code at pastebin was a great way to keep source code out of chats. Pastebin made the code easier to read and whenever we wanted to refer to the code or make changes to the code we could always do that within the amount of time we wanted the pasted to remain at pastebin.

Planning Procrastination

I haven't been following the schedule. I have been following up with university applications and yesterday I studied for my driver license, but I've been putting off C++ and Calculus. I did reinforce some CPP with my new little project that calculates the fractional part of someone's age, but I'm learning new techniques at a slower pace than I should. The problem is I spend too much time on Counter Strike and TV shows.