• Driving home — “Oh, I’m going to work you this weekend…”
• Eating supper — “Don’t make any plans for this weekend, buddy-boy…”
• While sleeping — “I vill break you…”

She was gleefully relentless*.

All this lead to me building up one big ol’ fear for this weekend… because housework eats at my soul like a mongoose on a cobra.

So, Saturday rolled around… and boy did I procrastinate. I lay in bed as long as I could. I made a really elaborate breakfast. I brewed a massive pot of coffee that I decreed I had to finish (“I can’t waste coffee — think of the poor children in Africa without coffee!”). Anything to hold off the inevitable.

And then I realised — this is ridiculous. It’s just housework. Why have I built this up into such an onerous task?

That’s when I saw the feedback loop I had created:

• Become aware of looming chore unit.
• Dread chore unit with every fibre of my soul.
• Perform chore unit as fast as possible, in an effort to get it over with as quickly as possible.
• Imprint on subconscious the difficulty and unpleasantness of the completed chore unit.
• Repeat.

This is not a good cycle, but all of it exists in my head… except for one step. The actual performance of the chore unit.

Why is it so hard and unpleasant? Part of it is the dirtiness and possible uncomfortableness of the actual chore unit… but a large part of the problem is that I put so much effort into doing the task as fast as possible so it will be over as fast as possible. And this makes the job harder. And less pleasant. Thus increasing the dread I feel everytime the chore unit comes around again.

So what did I do? I vacuumed the house and scrubbed the floors. But I took my time. I did it very thoroughly, but I didn’t push myself. I did the jobs with the base effort necessary to do it fully, but not a bit more.

And it was fine. And it got done. And it only took about ten minutes longer than it does when I rush. But my back didn’t hurt and I wasn’t bitching and moaning.

So that’s my new tip. Hard work is all well and good, but next time you have to do a job that you dread, see if your hard work is just making the work hard.

* To alleviate the draconian mental images these statements may have given you of My Lovely Wife, try picturing her saying these while wearing blue flannel pyjamas covered in snowflakes and reindeer. Believe me, she can get away with a lot wearing those.

When I realised that I was actually scared to look at my Bloglines subscription after not looking at it for a couple of days, I knew that I had a problem.

Friday afternoon, I went through my subscribed feeds and I unsubscribed to over two-thirds of them.

The hard part, but ultimately the most liberating, was forcing myself to cut the ties with feeds that I had had for a long time but I was really just holding onto for nostalgia (or entropy) and not for any real advantage to myself.

The hardest to get rid of was Slashdot. I finally had to admit that if there was anything interesting posted to Slashdot in the past few months, I had also seen it posted on digg.com or elsewhere. Slashdot used to be one of the very first sites I went to everyday, but I had to admit that it had lost its relevance for me.

That was my first attempt to clean some of the cruft that has cluttered up my day-to-day life. I still have more to do, including:

• Reformatting my computer
• Cleaning out the piles of crap in the computer room
• The basement. O, the basement. Throwing out the old boxes. Ripping out the ratty shelves. Repainting the walls… and the floor.

Sounds like fun, eh?

(However, worse than forgetting my iPod is forgetting my wedding ring on the ledge beside the shower. The ensuing grief from my Lovely Wife at that point is endless.)

However, there are a small number of things that it is effectively impossible for me to leave the house with. One is my glasses — I’m mildly near-sighted, so I’m okay around the house but as soon as I’m in the car, I know I need them. The other thing are my keys, as the house cannot be locked without them and the car won’t start without them. These are the things that if I step outside the door without them, within seconds I’m back inside to get them.

So, I’ve started treating these as my personal reminder flags. If there are things that I may forget in the morning (a charging iPod or cellphone, a DVD I need to return, bribe money) I simple take one or both of my reminder flags and place it on top of the item I want to remember. Also, I can leave notes for myself under the flags as well.

I find this easier than a having a box by the door in which I keep all the stuff I need to bring. The problem with such a “reminder box” is that sometimes I need to remember things that I cannot leave by the door overnight. (If you own cats, you know what I mean.)

With the reminder flags, which are small and portable, I can take them to the items that I need to remember. This has the added benefit, by making the locations I need to go to variable, of forcing me to remember why I’m going to that location, which further helps me remember the item or task that the flag is set for.

Reminder flags. It’s blindingly obvious. And thus I share it with you.

Some of the funniest things I see online are the “How-To”s found at eHow and on their wiki. Recent examples include “How to Draw a Frog”, “How to Meet Your Girlfriend’s Parents”, “How to Make a Paper Hat”, “How to Draw Bubble Letters”, “How to Make Great Photocopies”, “How to Do a Push Up”, and my all-time favourite, “How to Spot a Virgo”.

But this new one, “How to Deal With Impossible People”, has just got me wondering…

What sort of impossible people are we talking about here?

• The man whose nose was Wyoming?
• The woman that sneezes dryads and gnomes?
• The unfortunate children that live in a moth-eaten copy of a May 1952 issue of Life magazine?
• That guy that divided 24 by zero and got an elephant?
• And what about Jerome, the little man that lives in my head and gets to hear all the cool comebacks that I come up with ten minutes too late? What about him?! (I love Jerome.)

Impossible people.

You just gotta learn to live with them.

I’m all for shiny-red doo-dads that dry/warm your shoes. Looks really pretty, eh? Your technolust is rising, eh?

However, having had many — many — days where I’ve come home from a wet day of Ultimate with an absolutely soaking pairs of cleats. And I have yet to require a shiny-red doo-dad to get them dry for the next day. Instead:

1. Take some old newspaper. (I love using the multitude of flyers that are delivered to my door twice-a-freaking week. That way, I feel like they’re not a complete waste.)
2. Bunch them up into a plethora of wads.
3. Stuff the wads into the liquid-imbued footwear.
4. Wait.
5. Remove.
6. If you so choose, depending on the level of liquidity and on your own time requirements, repeat.

Result = dry shoes.

Cost = nuthin’.

[Ed. note: Did I eat a thesaurus or something this weekend? “Plethora”? Somebody smack me.)

• Lifehacker: “Knock down repetitive e-mail with Thunderbird’s QuickText”

This one tickles me to no end. If you are a user of Mozilla’s open-source email client Thunderbird (and if you aren’t, you should be), and if you find yourself having to use templated responses for any length of time, the QuickText extension is the way to go. In Lifehacker’s mucho thorough rundown on the tool, they describe it like this:

Is there an echo in your sent e-mail box? Do you deal with lots of messages that ask the same questions or require the same type of information in response? The QuickText Thunderbird extension saves collections of reusable text snippets that help you whip up personalized replies to repetitive e-mail messages with a few keystrokes.

Unlike other text saver utilities, QuickText is specific to e-mail because it recognizes variables that reference message details – like the recipient’s first or last name, the subject line or attachment file names. QuickText replaces these variables with the right info for speedy yet personalized responses. Easily reply to Lucy Wood’s message with a “Dear Ms. Wood” or Robin Cullen’s e-mail with “Hi Robin” using one keyword or click, no name-typing required.

Great for customer service reps, web site authors with e-mail contact forms, or any cube warrior who has to make sure there’s a cover sheet on her TPS report, Thunderbird’s QuickText reduces the daily tedious time-sink of processing repetitive e-mail. Live in your inbox less and get to the Send button faster. Streamline your e-mail inbox process by putting standard response text ready to go at your fingertips.

I love it!

• Lifehacker: “Compare and merge text with WinMerge”

Unix people will tell you to just use diff, but if you find yourself working in the Windows world a lot, any day where you find a program that compares two files and shows you where they are identical and where they differ is — and does it as prettily WinMerge does — is a special day.

Dare I say… a day to eat cookies?…

Thank you Lifehacker. Thank you for these tools. And thank you for giving me an excuse to eat cookies.

This is why keyboard shortcuts rule like Dr. Doom rules Latveria*.

Some of them everybody knows. They’re fine. Some of them are pretty freaking useless. And some… ahhhh, some are like hidden jewels.

So, in the interest of introducing my favourites in case they are new to you, may I obsequiously present…

Jason’s Jolly Pirate Ship ‘o’ Window-Centric Keyboard Shortcuts

General Windows Shortcuts

These are the ones that everyone should know and if you don’t, what’s your problem, chump? They work in a whole cornucopia of Windows programs.

• CTRL-o — Open
• CTRL-s — Save
• CTRL-a — Select All
• CTRL-x — Cut
• CTRL-c — Copy
• CTRL-v — Paste
• CTRL-f — Find
• CTRL-p — Print
• CTRL-F4 — Close file
• ALT-F4 — Close Program
• ALT-Tab — Cycle through open windows
• WIN-e — Open Windows Explorer
• WIN-d — Minimize everything and reveal the desktop (hit it again and it restores everything)

Microsoft Word

• F4 — Repeat Last Action (This one is so sweet. Select some text. Do something to it. Select some other text. Hit F4. It performs the last action on the new selection. Makes life so much easier, especially when some of those actions involve going through a whole series of menus.)
• F12 — Save As

Thunderbird (and a lot of other email programs)

• CTRL-Enter — Send Email
• CTRL-r — Reply
• SHIFT-CTRL-r — Reply All
• CTRL-l — Forward

Mozilla Firefox

• CTRL-l — Go to the Location bar
• CTRL-k — Go to the Search Bar
• CTRL-n — Open new browser window
• CTRL-t — Open new tab
• CTRL-Tab — Cycle through open tabs
• Keywords — This is not so much a specific keyboard shortcut as a way to create keyboard shortcuts for specific web addresses. Select “Properties” for any specific bookmark and in the keyword field enter whatever keyword you like. I find it easiest to use single-letter keywords for the sites that I visit most often (“j” for this site, “b” for Bloglines, etc.). That way, I just type CTRL-l and then the single letter keyword and then I’m at the page I’m looking for. Easy-peasy.

* Geek quota of the day

UPDATE: Ack! I forgot one of the very most essential of the keyboard shortcuts:

• CTRL-z — Undo!!!!

(Don’t know where I’d be without that one…)

Ever since I was a kid, the more “undone” projects I had looming over me, whether it be homework, chores, obligations, anything “work-like” that I just plan didn’t want to do, the longer I went without doing it, the greater sense of unease I would feel. It was like a light anxious pressure. Sometimes, I wouldn’t even know what the feeling was. I just knew that something didn’t feel right.

The fastest and easiest way I found to get rid of this feeling was just to do something and do it right away. One of the jobs, some of the jobs, part of a job, all of the jobs, whatever. Just doing an instant burst of activity was the surest method of releasing the pressure that I felt.

And now I have a name for it — the dash.

Wait… I’m feeling it right now…

Damn.

Okay. Breathe. Stay calm. Don’t freak out. Breathe.

As a palliative, perhaps rewriting the tip in a more succinct fashion will help.

How to spot a Virgo.

1. Take a large hunk of wood. (Hardwood preferrably, although pine can do in a pinch.)
2. Grasp it firmly with both hands.
3. Drive the hunk of wood briskly and with great force into your forehead.
4. Repeat until you have lost the desire to find out if someone is a Virgo our not.

Yes. That does help.