Something very strange and yet very cool happened to me yesterday. I was sitting at my desk in my office getting some work done; but being that it was a Saturday, I was also reading up on various tech news and best practices articles. I just happened to visit an old haunt, a site called Perl Monks; and while there, I just happened to visit my profile page. (This is something I haven’t done in quite some time, mind you.) And there it was, right on my profile page, staring back at me.
There are times both personally and professionally where I’ll get asked all manner of questions that could have been answered with a simple Google search. I suspect you’ve probably had folks ask you to do Google searches on their behalf as well. Now, that’s justifiable in cases like my wife driving and needing me to look-up an address for her. What’s not justifiable are folks sitting behind desktops who want to know Dragonfly Cinema’s weekend showings schedule. The commonality and frequency of these “please do this search for me” requests has spawned sites like Let Me Google That For You [lmgtfy.com]. If you use Chrome as your web browser, you don’t even need to visit Google Search; just start typing a search query into the URL field and you’re off to the races.
Google Search is a quite powerful little tool. (Little and simple on the surface, not behind the scenes certainly.) What you may not know is that there are some ways to tell Google to conduct your search in very specific ways. Most of the time, Google just gets it right. (They have a mind-reading artificial intelligence engine in their Columbia Valley data center.) However, there are times when you want to get more specific. Continue reading Let Me Google That For You
Due to the primary nature of my vocation, but more especially because of the way I established and kept my software company, I tend to do a lot of work behind a bank of computer screens alone in an office. As a self-employed professional, my livelihood (and really, the livelihood of my family) depends on my ability to maintain a certain level of productivity despite persistent distractions from the Internet, the real world around me, and even my own mind wandering off onto undirected brainstorming tracks. Here are 5 of the tricks, 5 keys I use to maintain productivity in isolation. Continue reading 5 Tricks to Maintaining Efficient Productivity