Give Mom Tech Support for Mother’s Day
Aside from flowers, something Mom might appreciate is a working computer. Play tech support on Mother’s Day this year with a few free tools.
Clean up her computer performance by running basic maintenance. If she’s on a PC, do the usual: malware/spyware scan, antivirus scan, defrag, automatic backups, etc. Schedule these tasks to auto run if they are not already set.
Give the gift of low-spam e-mail. Set up a Gmail account, complete with mail forwarding for her old account, filtered and sorted by a separate label.
Set up a screaming-fast browser so she can surf without encumbrance. Firefox 3 beta 5 has solid performance and is user-friendly for a low learning curve.
Bookmark a few sites you think she’d enjoy. Create a Del.icio.us account or share some new links if she already has del.icio.us. Choose something based on her hobbies. Here are a few general interest sites most people enjoy.
Fun Reading
Eric Lundquist’s 10 New Rules of Techie Etiquette via Geek Like Me
Cool stuff done with CSS- a CSS Homer Head
25 Reasons You Might Be A Hardcore Graphic/Web Designer
Have a good weekend.
Not to Visit: Down the Rabbit Hole
At work there are many time wasters to be found. How to get things done, with the enticing lure of play just one link away? Set up banned links for yourself. At home, I don’t care if I fall down the rabbit hole, chasing link after link until I have stumbled upon a site that is both interesting and yet undiscovered by StumbleUpon users. At work, this is the blacklist: no visiting these sites at all, because if I do…oops! I just blinked and 3 hours have gone by!
1. Facebook – I can spend hours looking at the albums my friends have uploaded. I feel obligated to read every note posted by every friend.
2. YouTube – One video leads to another video, leads to another. Hey! Wait a second! All I was doing was watching a funny 2 minute video of some cats. How did I end up watching a video of some 4 year old playing the guitar like he’s the next Mozart?
3. Shockwave – Not for the reasons you may think. The web-based games and downloadable games do not work on my Mac. I keep away from this one because it encourages me to analyze how the game was built. Like everything else on the web, I enjoy pulling apart the pieces to see exactly how the insides work.
What time sinks do you ban, when you have to get things done?
