tips | Ain't Complicated

Monitoring Your Eyeballs

I need to remember to do this. And if you’re reading this on a monitor, so should you.

Reduce Computer-Caused Eye Strain with the 20-20-20 Rule

Repetitive stress injury RSI and eye strain are common ailments among computer users, and there’s no silver bullet for avoiding them beyond taking regular breaks to relax. Following his doctor’s advice, tech blogger Amit Agarwal suggests a simple 20-20-20 rule.

To help you deal with this problem, the 20-20-20 rule suggest that after every 20 minutes, you the computer user should take a break for at least 20 seconds and look at objects that are 20 feet away from you.

“Rule suggests” — isn’t that so…modern?

No wonder people treat the 55 mph rule as a suggestion and not a…well…rule.

But in the case of the 20-20-20 rule, I’m glad it’s only a suggestion. Otherwise, I need to be punished.

Well, that aside, apparently there are eyeball-rolling exercises to help eyestrain. But they shouldn’t be done just anywhere.

Security Software Recommendations

What McAfee failed to prevent in real time and what Malewarebytes Anti-Malware failed to detect later:

PC Tools Spyware Doctor warring for Mark Roth!

So I was twice disappointed. Read it all

Winning People

Alternate title: How to Avoid Being Avoidable

I’ve been thinking for a while about how some people have a “knack” for alienating others. Or if not alienating them, at least building walls or burning bridges between them.

So if you’re one of those, here are some things you — yes, you — should avoid in order to not flunk the “Winning People” part of real living:

Be critical of them or how they do (or don’t do) stuff.
Have a scornful or demeaning attitude toward them, even for “justifiable” reasons. 😯
Downplay their accomplishments or sufferings by raising up your “superior” ones. 🙄
Call attention to your accomplishments or your insights.
Make the conversation (if not the prospective relationship) primarily about you.
Hold them to your personal standards of whatever…and make sure they know it.
Pooh-pooh their personal standards and likes and preferences if you fail to meet them.
Be controlling of (and unjust with) those clearly under your authority.
Be demanding. (Hint: This is made worse when you have no “right” to be demanding.)
Be an ingrate.
Be impatient.
Be thin-skinned about criticism or less-than-complimentary input.
Be rhino-hided about criticism or less-than-complimentary input.
Be hyper-sensitive and imaginative (and then unduly inquisitive) about what other people say, do, think, imagine, and mean.
Have a Bah Humbug attitude toward this subject and this list. (No, really!)
Be disrespectful.
Fuss at and criticize and argue with your spouse in public…or in front of them.
Don’t apologize when you’re wrong or when you’ve wronged others. Instead make excuses. Or blame others.
Take a list like this…and put people on the spot with it (or with this subject as a whole).
Imagine I’m targeting this at you specifically. (Do you really think I’d be so careless or class-less? Especially in a wide-open public forum like this? Give me a break!) 😀 Also see #5. 😆

Is there more that should be said on so needful a subject?

Yup, I’m afraid so.

That’s what the Comments section below is about! 🙂

So if you want people to be around you or if you want people to look forward to being around you….listen up!

For all that I know (and for all that you know), some people treat being around you as something that must be done in order to “get it over with.”

Do you like being that kind of person?

Just askin’.

😉

PS: If you’re a Christian, this subject becomes even more important.

Don’t Use Your Debit Card There

unless you want fewer consumer protections -- #creditcards --

It’s too easy to use my debit card as I would my credit card, so this is a good reminder warning:

Sometimes reaching for your wallet is like a multiple choice test: How do you really want to pay?

While credit cards and debit cards may look almost identical, not all plastic is the same.

“It’s important that consumers understand the difference between a debit card and a credit card,” says John Breyault, director of the Fraud Center for the National Consumers League, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group. “There’s a difference in how the transactions are processed and the protections offered to consumers when they use them.”

While debit cards and credit cards each have advantages, each is also better suited to certain situations. And since a debit card is a direct line to your bank account, there are places where it can be wise to avoid handing it over — if for no other reason than complete peace of mind.

Here are the “ten” places the article goes on to expand on:

Online
Big-Ticket Items
Deposit Required
Restaurants
You’re a New Customer
Buy Now, Take Delivery Later
Recurring Payments
Future Travel
Gas Stations and Hotels
Checkouts or ATMs That Look “Off”

Source: Personal Finance News from Yahoo! Finance

This Is Urgent!

Have you ever felt that way about responding to something or someone electronically?

Blog, Twitter, email, Facebook, forum, IM, text message, chat — having the option and capability to hit Reply right away seems to impose an urgency to do just that.

Most times, such urgency is an illusion untethered from reality. “Most times” — not in a 51% sort of way, but more like a 92% sort of way, if you get my drift. Yes, at the risk of overstating my case, I suggest to you that the urgency of most digital communication is a pseudo-urgency.

I suspect that most of the time, succumbing to such false urgency has little consequence beyond social pressure, inner tension, and time consumption. (That all sounds like something far more than “little consequence”!)

That aside, giving in to such imaginary urgency has far weightier consequences when responding in circumstances that roil personal relationships, easily impacting them negatively.

So I urge you to grant significant weight to my five essential guidelines for digital communication:

If you think your attitude will be milder in five minutes or five hours, wait.
If you think your wording will be more careful after an hour’s worth (or a day’s worth) of thoughtful editing and review, wait.
If you think your present circumstances are affecting you even though they don’t pertain to the message in question, wait.
If you think your choice of expression would moderate significantly face-to-face, wait.
If you think thinking about your response will change it, wait.

Otherwise, figure on falling short of constructive dialogue.

Unless, of course, you’re just engaging in weightless, inconsequential back-and-forth techno-babbling because you can and because you don’t know what else to do and because you want to.

Then you need a different set of guidelines. 🙂

Networking Issue Resolved

For two years (if not more), I’ve been unable to get my two Windows XP machines to “talk” to each other on my simple little network using a crossover cable.

My client machine could access files off the host machine, but not the other way around.

This evening I finally found the answer quite by accident, so to speak.

I was nosing around in Control Panel –> Administrative Tools –> Computer Management.

I got to Services and Applications –> Services –> Server and upon right-clicking it and selecting Properties, I ended up solving the problem.

Crossover cable xp network server properies under computer management in administrative tools

It was paused on my client machine, thus making it impossible for the host machine to access it. I clicked Resume and it did the trick!

Praise the Lord!

Anyway, click the above image for a larger image with more helpful details.

So there you are: I connect two computers together (I know that’s redundant, OK?) using an ethernet crossover cable. I don’t need a router. I don’t need the Internet. Just a crossover cable.

That may resolve your home networking problems, like it did mine!