Blog Master G

I’m shocked that I haven’t previously written a blog post on LinkedIn. But I just searched my archives and confirmed that I haven’t. LinkedIn is simply the best online networking tool I’ve seen. It’s like Friendster or Orkut for professionals, leveraging the whole six degrees of separation concept. You can search by names, titles, location, or even for specific skill sets if you’re looking for a contractor for a particular project. Recruiters also use LinkedIn to look for employees, so it’s a great way to find a job, whenever you might need one.

After you’ve created a profile and have added just a handful of connections, you’ll be amazed at how fast your network grows. You can browse profiles by industry, location, or company, and can send messages directly to people you know in the network. If you’d like to connect with someone who’s a couple degrees removed, you can request a connection through your mutual contacts.

I just searched my Gmail to see when I first learned of LinkedIn from David, and, coincidentally, it was a year ago tomorrow (January 27, 2005). I signed up for LinkedIn on January 28, 2005, and have been a moderate user of the service ever since. In a year, I’ve added 30 connections to grow my network to more than 119,300 professionals.

Let me know if you’re in LinkedIn and want to connect, or if you’re not already a member and want to join. I’d be happy to invite you.

Cool tip of the day, courtesy of persistent.info, is an easy way to always have your Windows Task Manager launch and minimized every time you reboot so that you can obsessively monitor your CPU usage (like I do):

To get the Task Manager to launch minimized at startup reliably, I’ve created a shortcut startup item with the target C:\WINDOWS\system32\cmd.exe /c start /min “Task Manager” taskmgr.exe

It works. I’ve zipped my own cmd.exe startup shortcut for you to download here. Just unzip, throw it in your startup items, and you’re good to go. Note that your startup programs are usually in the below path, unless you’ve changed it to be somewhere on your data partition with a tool like Tweak UI (a tip for another day, but something I’d recommend doing so you can comfortably reinstall your OS and not lose your startup items, among other things):

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

If you’re curious, the items in my taskbar in that screenshot are, from left to right, Trillian, Norton AntiVirus, GoToMyPc, Yahoo Desktop, Mozy, Task Manager, and Volume Control. I have other items in my task bar, which are not shown, but I’ll leave you guessing what those may be. I know, I know, the suspense is killing you.

It’s suddenly snowing like crazy this morning, so it’s starting off to be a very good day.

You gotta love PCs. A completely rebuilt PC suddenly starts spawning new and unexplained problems. This week it’s this WebDriveHidden window that launches in the upper left-hand corner of my right monitor. It looks like this:

Since this is one of those rare things that doesn’t yield a single Google result in a search for WebDriveHidden, I thought I’d better document it for the record and shared world knowledge.

It’s not something that happened before I rebuilt my PC, so I knew it had to be related to a new application I wasn’t using prior to the rebuild. Although the window name isn’t an exact match, it seems the culprit was NetDrive, which “allows you to map a drive on your workstation and, via the internet, connect to a folder on Novell, Windows or Linux server.” I just uninstalled NetDrive, rebooted, and no more WebDriveHidden window. Too bad, because NetDrive worked very smoothly and my plan was to combine it with SyncBack to automatically backup not only my local data, but my Web site data, too, as someone had suggested in this post on Lifehacker.

If anyone else happens to encounter the annoying WebDriveHidden window and has a solution for it besides uninstalling NetDrive, please let me know.

One of our favorite bars in town is the Tin & Lint. Its claim to fame is that in the summer of 1970 Don McClean wrote American Pie there. Our favorite booth is the Don McClean booth, which has a plaque with this inscription:

AMERICAN PIE WRITTEN HERE

DON McCLEAN

SUMMER 1970

Local lore says that he wrote the classic song while sitting in that very booth. He first performed the song at Saratoga’s Caffe Lena, the country’s oldest continuously running coffee house (since 1960).

As I mentioned yesterday, one of our stops Saturday night was the T&L, where it’s always a rockin’ good time.

The unusually warm, snowless winter appears finally to be coming to an end this morning when we woke up to several inches of the white stuff, which continues to fall with a fury. As of yesterday, nearly all the snow had melted and we could actually see our lawn, which never happens in mid-January. It’s also been freakishly warm this winter, with temperatures in the 40s and even 50 recently. Gotta love global warming. Finally it’s returned to a more normal 30 degrees and snow. Rejoice!

I spent yesterday evening backing up, reformatting, re-partitioning, and reinstalling my operating system and applications. It was my first full system rebuild since Thanksgiving 2004. Last time I went a little partition crazy and did not give enough drive space to my OS & Applications partition (only 10 GB), so I wasn’t even able to upgrade from XP SP1 to XP SP2 due to insufficient drive space. This time I gave that partition 20 GB and the rest to a second partition for My Documents. I neglected to backup the most recent version of my application data, the most important of which are my Firefox bookmarks. Enter Mozy, that great little app that runs tirelessly in the background, backing up your important data online. This will be my first test of it doing one of the four allowable restores per month. How cool is it that you can pick down to such a granular level of restore?

Saturday night we hit the town with Karen, Joti, and Justin. Following a deliciously greasy dinner at the Parting Glass, we spent the rest of the evening at Tin & Lint, including a trip to the bar within the bar, which was a first for us. It was a nice respite from the crowd and unusually loud juke box tunes. Earlier that day we had gone to Kinderhook for Seamus’ first birthday celebration, where the birthday boy dropped two really hard toys on my head and puked on my hand. Before that, we had a really ambitious Saturday morning — Jen cleaned the house, and I did some shopping and then organized my entire garage to make room for my minivan. I wish I had taken before and after photos ’cause I’m really proud of the job I did. Again I will say: There’s nothing mini about minivans. It barely squeezes into my garage; I had to do the tennis ball from the string trick to know when to stop without crashing into the end of the garage.

Friday night we picked my Dad up from the airport, following his first trip back to California since moving here. Before that we had spent a rockin’ evening in Albany for dinner and drinks with some of Jen’s coworkers.

Most of you who know me know that I love Indian food. In San Francisco, Jen and I were fortunate enough to live a block from the most excellent Naan ‘n Curry (Inner Sunset edition) — damn good and damn cheap. The two of us could go there for dinner, bring our own beer, and walk out full after a delicious $13 meal. All while rocking out to the smooth beats of Indian techno. I miss that place.

Here in Saratoga Springs, we’re lucky enough (for the time being) to have two Indian food restaurants: Haweli and Little India. However, come the end of January, Little India is moving off Broadway and into Haweli, so at least we’ll have one Indian food place left in town (the good news is that it’s not a chain taking over the storefront at 423 Broadway; it’s going to be a new restaurant courtesy of the local couple who runs Social Gourmets).

So what is one to do when one craves Indian food at home but doesn’t have the four hours or more it takes to make the samosas and other treats from scratch?

Enter the frozen Indian dinner, courtesy of the geniuses at Deep Foods, Inc. From the 9 Samosa offering to Palak Paneer to my personal favorite, the Kofta Curry, you can’t go wrong with these frozen Indian delights. And they’re ready in no time.

The directions on the box will tell you to put the plastic tray right in the oven. I tried this the first time, but it didn’t work so well. The only dish that turns out nicely in the oven is the 9 Samosa, but put ’em on a cookie sheet first. Everything else cooks best in the microwave.

Now if only they could figure out a way to offer frozen naan.

(Thanks to Anne and Tom for turning us on to these awesome frozen meals.)

In other news, great news this morning for the burgeoning Beekman Arts District on the West Side here in Saratoga Springs:

Project to boost West Side:

The area around Beekman Street is likely to see continued growth as the city’s arts district with the reconstruction of the house at 142 Grand Ave. as a three-story, mixed-use building with a sculpture gallery on the second floor.

The plans call for third-floor offices and a restaurant on the first floor with some seasonal outdoor seating in the alleyway that will be created next to the building.

I’m a big fan of ING and have written about the most excellent savings rates and other features offered by the virtual bank on more than one occasion. If you haven’t already opened an account, then there’s no time like the present. ING just announced a Winter Save Up Sale wherein you’ll earn 4.75% interest on any new deposits from now through April 15 (new and existing customers). The current standard rate is already just below 4%, so my prediction is that, come April 15, they’ll increase the standard rate to 4.75% — or at least close to that.

I still have a couple referrals left, so contact me if you want one, and you’ll earn $25 free if you make at least a $250 initial deposit.

I’m happy to announce the official launch of my good friends’ new wedding Web site, Alex and Cati (dot com). For a first attempt at a Web site, I think Alex has done not too shabby of a job (with minor sounding-board pointers from yours truly). Hopefully it won’t be long, Alex, before a search for “Alex and Cati” will send one not to the weekends section of my blog, but to your very own site. Now you’re almost famous.

And Jen and I are fortunate enough to have friends who have decided to tie the knot in Cati’s native Mallorca this summer. We hope to join them for the celebrations, and are really excited about it since Spain and its beautiful coastal islands have long been on the travel wish-list for both of us.

So far, this summer is shaping up to be a mild wedding season, which pales in comparison to last year’s five-wedding slugfest: Mollie & Tim | Frances & Andrew | Maria & Dan | Karen & Joti | Heather & Saahil. And Jane & Sarah‘s zoofabulous wedding in summer 2004, of course.

Come on, people! Get married already. You know you want to. I like weddings.

For those of us who prefer to see the world of the Web (remember back in the day when it was only called the World Wide Web?) through the elegant interface of Firefox, we’re accustomed to the beauty of the tabbed browsing experience. Gone are the days of so many IE windows that you can’t even keep track of what you were originally doing. Ditto for obnoxious pop-up windows. Remember the time you were at work and “accidentally” went to a porn site that spawned endless windows that could only be stopped with rapid-fire clicking? Come on, you know that’s happened to you. But I digress. Once you’re used to thinking in tabs, and if you work on the Web like me, then why would you ever want a separate window to open? Your primary Firefox window is like your work console. Why let more than one window distract you?

So you can imagine my delight this week when I stumbled across my new favorite option in Firefox, which you’ll find under Tools | Options | Tabs: Force links that open new windows to open in: a new tab.

You also have the option to open new-window links in the same tab/window as the link, but I prefer to send it to a new tab so I can keep my focus on the original content, then visit the new link when I’m ready. This is also most excellent for Gmail, of course, since any link you click there (be it in an email or a contextual ad) will launch a new window. Prior to discovering this little gem of an option, pretty much every link I clicked that I wanted to send to a new tab for later review, I did so via control-click, which has the same effect. But now I can give my left pinky finger a rest, while being assured that any click I do won’t be an assumptious new window in my face.

The last time I got a speeding ticket, I tried fighting it by mail using a radar trap speed defense. I didn’t win, but I did get the fine reduced and got to attend online traffic school to have the ticket wiped clean from my California driving record. Following last week’s 80 in a 65 ticket in Pennsylvania, the ominous yellow ticket sits on my desk as I decide how to handle it. I had 10 days to respond to the ticket and it’s already been 6 days. Part of me just wants to pay the $144 fine and be done with it, especially considering this info on NY drivers who receive out-of-state violations:

The NYSDMV does not record out-of-state violations committed by NYS drivers in other jurisdictions. The exceptions are alcohol-related violations, drug-related violations, and moving violations committed in Quebec or Ontario. Under special agreements, traffic convictions in Quebec or Ontario are recorded on NYS driver license records and carry points. Except for violations in Ontario and Quebec, points are not added to your NYS record for out-of-state violations.

But the part of me that enjoys a good fight and battling injustice — injustice not because I’m necessarily saying I wasn’t speeding, but because there were many cars on the road going faster than I was — makes me want to fight the ticket. I certainly don’t want to drive the 8 hours back to Pittsburgh for a court date, so I’m considering getting free advice from a ticket lawyer in the Pittsburgh area via TixNix. In searching online for info about fighting speeding tickets, many signs point to TixNix.

I wonder if TixNix is any good. Anyone have any success with the service? Is it worth the effort and potential cost? Or is it a wash, considering that this ticket won’t go on my New York driving record anyway?