Reality Upgrade

I have been trying to get my life organized for quite some time now, and some how I have never quite seemed to make it happen. The ultimate goal, of course, is to make my life a little more mobile. The last time I moved I filled an entire Uhaul, but when my roommate Lili moved to Kurdistan, she did it with only a few suitcases.

Jealous? Me? Noooo….

In any case, I have recently been inspired by this post over at Zenhabits.com, and I am going to be using the technique mentioned there of organizing by starting from a clean slate. I am putting (almost) everything I own into cardboard boxes, and taking things out of them as I use them. Sometime in December (to make sure I make it through a change of seasons) I will give away or throw out anything that is left in the box.

The ultimate goal, of course, is to come as close as I can to only having 100 things. 100 is a somewhat arbitrary number, but it seems like a good starting place.

In other news, here is some great advice on how to keep an organized office in a very, very small space, which is another goal of mine.

I’ll keep you posted here on the progress of my organizational quest, and feel free to share your comments!

If your summer reading list is starting to get a little short, and your favorite author’s next book wont be out for months, you might be looking for recommendations for great books to read.

If so, Lifehacker has made a neat list the top five book recommendation websites. I can personally recommend Good Reads, but feel free to check them all out and share which ones are your favorites.

Maybe we haven’t quite made it to the technology of “Beam me up Scotty,” but we do carry around little computers in our pockets. Little computers with GPS pinpointing, wireless internet connectivity, and a computing capacity that would have filled a small warehouse twenty years ago.

But somehow, the software does not quite seem to keep up. I want my phone to sing and dance, dammit!

Well, I should say that the software has not kept up, until now. This great program for Android phones lets you really and truly automate your phone. It lets you customize your phone the way a phone should be freakin’ customized.

Check out a great article on the program here, from Lifehacker, or download the program here:

Keep in mind this is a pay program, but there is a 14 day trial, and it is totally worth the $6.

This may come a little late to help my housemate who just moved to Kurdistan, with a trip through Tanzania, but I wish I had found this before she left.

In case you happen to be planning a trip in the future, take a look at this great universal packing list. You enter your destination, and some details about the trip, and it generates a great packing list for you to check off. It even has a map feature, so you can click on the countries you are visiting.

Speaking of my former housemate, and her trip to Kurdistan, she has a new blog that will be chronicling her journey. She is a great writer, and has a host of interesting adventures, so check it out here, at ALilJourney.com.

No, I’m afraid I haven’t come up with a new vampire repellent spell.

Unless by “vampire” you mean “blood-sucking insect” and by “spell” you mean “bugspray”.

The point is, with summer here in full blast everyone is going outside a lot more, and that means a lot more exposure to biting and stinging insects. And that is no fun for anyone.

Luckily, Lifehacker has our collective back. This is a great article about how to keep away the nasty little biters this summer.

Enjoy!

I once had jury duty while running my own electrical contracting business, and I actually had to run to a restaurant and do an emergency repair on their electrical panel during my lunch break. Not fun.

If only I had known that I could have been excused from jury duty simply by explaining that I was the sole proprietor of my business.

If you find yourself in similar situation, here is a great list of ways to get your jury duty moved or rescheduled, from Lifehacker. They got the list from MyTwoDollars.com, but they filtered out the stuff that is somewhat morally questionable.

Enjoy!

This is a fascinating article from the Washington Post about hoarding. It is the story of a man (Michael S. Rosenwald) who’s extreme hoarding was beginning to ruin his marriage, so he went on a quest to understand why he feels compelled to hoard.

It is a rather long article, and is more of an autobiographical tale than a scientific study, but it is interesting to see the world from the point of view of someone who has a hard time getting rid of stuff. As he mentions in the article, we see people who are buried in their possessions on television, but it is rare to see it from the inside. Enjoy!

Jonas out.

Routines. They are easy to acquire, and hard to change.

Humans are creatures of habit, and there is nothing wrong with that. Habits make doing repetitive things easier, it makes complicated tasks easier to remember, and frees us up to think about other things while we take care of routine tasks.

But habits are only useful when they are good habits. This great article by Lifehacker suggests that you might want to review your habits, and think about whether or not they are serving you well. Could changing some of your routines make you happier?

Probably so.

Most people under the age of thirty have an almost instinctive understanding of how to set up technology. We understand the basic rules of how these devices should work, and we think like the people who wrote the manuals. We grew up with this stuff.

On the other hand, this can make us complacent. This is a great article from Lifehacker about settings that you should change on your wireless router. Some of them you may have already done, but you might have missed some. I did.

I’m not telling which ones though. You would loose all respect for me.

Anyway, check out the article, and then go fix your router.

Cheers!

If you are anything like me, you have never, ever, ever had a vase full of flowers in your house.

On the other hand, not many people are like me…

In any case, if you do on occasion keep cut flowers in a vase, this is a great article from Lifehacker about how to keep the flowers fresh longer.

If you don’t feel like reading it, the gist is this: if you crush a few aspirin tablets up with the back of a spoon and dump the powder in the water with the flowers, the aspirin will keep bacteria from growing in the water, which will keep the flowers fresh longer.

Have fun!