Archive for February, 2009

When using bginfo, have ReconnAct run this on every login and reconnect:

bginfo.exe terminals.bgi /timer:0 /NOLICPROMPT
Where the terminals.bgi includes:

<Full Name> = WMI query:
SELECT FullName FROM Win32_NetworkLoginProfile WHERE FullName is not NULL

login:<User Name>
server:<Host Name>
Default Printer:

<Default Printer> = WMI query:
SELECT Caption FROM Win32_Printer where Default = True

Please call the IT Department
if you need assistance.

Tabbloid (free service from HP) has very nice output and is simple to use.

Go to http://www.tabbloid.com/

Add your feed links, and enter your delivery options, including your email address. When your first issue is sent, there’ll be a link in the email for you to edit your settings.

“My Outsourced Life” (A.J. Jacobs, for Esquire) is still one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read.  Go ahead; it’s a great read.

If you don’t have time to read it, you could have a “virtual assistant” summarize it for you.  TimeSvr has “virtual assistants” for the low, low price of $69/month.  For 30 days, that’s only $2.30/day for: “Unlimited basic Tasks on your behalf. No limit on phone calls, reminders, reservations, bookings.  Up to 8 hours a month for complex time consuming tasks(long web searches, transcribing, etc.).”  They’ll manage your contacts and calendar.

The first thing I’d do is schedule a daily wake-up call.  Who wants to hear an alarm, when you could have some foreign college girl wake you up?

The second thing I’d do is offload my RSS aggregation duties.  I have a number of websites I like to check, and I just hate poking through them.  Copy the content into a well-formatted PDF and email it to me every morning.  RSS is such a great idea, but all the aggregators suck.  Honestly, can’t you just specify content to automatically be inserted into a paper/newsletter format?  XeTeX plug.

That includes my email.  The 4-hour-a-week guy who makes a living out of not actually doing anything has a guide for outsourcing your inbox.

That also includes my finances.  List the prior day’s checking account activity.  Stock prices.  Weather forecast.  Current house price on zillow.com. A daily newspaper of things relevant to me (and mostly only me). [Yahoo! Pipes can do much of this, but I'd prefer better formatting, and there are some things it can't do.]

The third thing I’d do (“up to 8 hours of time-consuming tasks”) is to get a monthly meal plan amenable to all parties familia.  Aldi (I love Aldi’s!) has a great starter meal planner (the chicken corn tacos rock).  The first month, I think, would pay for itself.

I might try it for one month….

ReconnAct has been updated, and now “adds support for all Windows client and server operating systems from Windows XP/2003 and up.”  ReconnAct allows you to script events on remote desktop logon, disconnect, and reconnect, which is handy for things like remapping printers when a user reconnects to a session from a different location.