Efficiency...

This may be too graphic, but I feel compelled to share it. En route to the bathroom to do my bid'ness, prior to leaving the house, I noticed my shoes sitting by the door. I thought, 'well, I'll just put these on in the john as I'll be sitting down already.'

I took the shoes with me, but just couldn't bring myself to do it. Something just wasn't right.

Oh, well.

;)

Protect your desktop...run IE ONLY as a limited user

This is one of the most intersting things I've seen regarding helping to keep desktops (more) safe from the perils of Internet Explorer (IE), although I very much like using IE as it is a defacto standard browser. This is very tech oriented, but if you're reading this, perhaps you are too.

http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2006/03/running-as-limited-user-easy-way.html

Mark Russinovich is the genious that created the ProcessExplorer application he references, among many other applications he's developed that I (and ALOT of other people use). He also almost single-handedly busted Sony for dirty privacy tricks they were doing to your PC with their music CDs. Sony caved in after a week or so from this guy's expose.

Enjoy!

Create shortcuts using group policy

Not being a scripting guru, but enjoying some programmatic apptitude, I enjoy using vbscript to push items around a domain with group policy. Here's one for copying a shortcut to whereever your heart desires. I'm always forgetting the syntax for it...

Set Shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
DesktopPath = Shell.SpecialFolders("Desktop")
Set link = Shell.CreateShortcut(DesktopPath & "\My New Shortcut File.lnk")
link.Arguments = ""
link.Description = "Shortcut to the file I want"'
link.HotKey = "CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+X"
link.IconLocation = "c:\Program Files\MyApp.exe"
link.TargetPath = "c:\Program Files\MyApp.exe"
link.WindowStyle = 1
link.WorkingDirectory = "c:\Program Files"
link.Save

Put this in a script file, call it 'make_shortcut.vbs' arbitrarily, and use the batch file in a login script. You can test the script from a command line by entering "cscript make_shortcut.vbs".

Cheers!

Buy houses from your customers. A tip.

Here's a good one.

I have several clients that pursue various professions. I try to avail myself of their services whenever I can possibly do so.

My wife and I are buying our first house after way-too-long renting. Being new to this process, I did not realise that I could have gone through my real estate broker client to purchase this house. As such, I did not. Instead, I assumed that I had to go thru the person who answered the phone at the listing agency. On top of that, I called my client to ask their advise on a certain procedure involving my purchase from their competitor.

I learned this after my friend told me about how this deal could have been done.

Here's the tip: if you are buying a house and your client sells houses, buy the house from your client.

I'll be grovelling for a while, I'm sure.

Cheers!

Disabling the network print notification balloon windows in Windows XP SP2

After installation of Windows XP Service Pack 2, a balloon window is displayed every time a print job is sent to a networked printer informing the user that the job has been spooled succesfully. You may wish to disable this option. To disable the network print notification balloon windows in Windows XP SP2:

Use a registry editing tool to navigate to the following key:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Printers\Settings

Change the value with the following details:

Data Type: DWORD
Value Name: EnableBalloonNotificationsRemote
Value: 0

Stop and restart the spooler service for the change to take effect