Jiggyboo

Today at work I had to kill Whatpulse!

Starting on October 5th, 2006 I’ve been recording my number of keystrokes and mouse clicks I make. I do this for fun. It’s interesting to note how many keystrokes I’ve made at a day of work. It is a good indication of how busy the department has been that day.

Today is the day it ends. My place of employment reminded me of an agreement I’d made (but had forgotten), and they are requiring that I remove this software item. Its a fair request, but its still sad.

If it were not for Whatpulse, I’d not know that the letter I type most is “E” (at 490,095). Or that on average, I perform 14,603 keystrokes per day. Or that in 480 days I’ve hit the buttons on my keyboard 7,010,049 times. Or that in 480 days I’ve clicked the buttons on my mouse 1,579,843 times. Or that in 480 days, I’ve moved my mouse 1,480.18373 feet.

Its okay though, I just think the extra info is fun to have.

Gah! This week was rough! I did almost nothing pertaining to my last To Do list. Not to say I did nothing, because there was plenty accomplished. Little of it seemed to be on my list.

Therefor, my list To Do this week, is to work on last weeks To Do list. Found HERE.

I logged into my stats account for ponderplace.com this morning. I was surprised to find my hits/visits, while relatively low (low teens), they still seem to be healthy. Especially on Mondays (when i post content). Just yesterday I had 33 hits.

Thats good (for ponderplace.com standards).

Also I spoke with my English teacher about finding other writers who might be interested in writing for ponderplace.com. She said she knew “thousands”. Well, i only need 5ish, but i’ll take what i can get.

Pebkac Consulting is at a crossroads. I’ve built the infrastructure, everything is in place (except that Merchant account, but i hope that will be cleared up by next week).

Despite the amount of effort, time, and energy I’ve invested in Pebkac Consulting; it still has quite the obstacle blocking its path to success. This would be the marketing and sales of my services.

In an effort to keep the sinking ship afloat I’ve taken the advice of Rachelle Jensen, who runs RadiantTree.com. Rachelle advised me to select 3 marketing methods, and to maintain those marketing efforts for at least 3 to 4 months. The idea being that most people don’t respond to ads the first time they see them.

I’ve created an outline for some idea’s I have. Over the next week I’ll be ironing those out and figuring out the details. I’m really excited for this. I think its going to change everything for Pebkac.

Side note: Its funny how paranoid I am. I would love to outline my whole marketing plan and effort here. But the tin-foil-hat wearing side of me wont allow it. I’m too afraid people will see it and steal my hard work.

For reference later in life (maybe I’ll post the document years down the road when it cant negatively impact me any longer; but will help those in my current situation.) The marketing details and plans are all outlined on a file on my thumbdrive \\domain and hosting\pebkacconsulting.com\Marketing\3 prong marketing attack\3 prong marketing attack.doc. There are also other documents and files in that parent directory containing details on my efforts.

Tonight I went over to Bryans. He was gracious enough to cut my hair for me. We used the electric clippers he had for his two dogs. It made the experience all that more manly (mohawkish?).

Pictures…

Mohawkage. (click to enlarge)

Unfortunately I gave away my straightener (a useful tool in forming the hawkage) to Angela. Fortunately she is kind enough to lend that item back to me until I move on to my next hairstyle.

The point of this post is to detail a Utility which I would hope to find or have developed. While I am currently a Windows XP user, I think this utility would be useful on any platform (Linux, Vista, etc).

Widget Looks and Placement
The widget would have 3-5 lines for displaying information to the user. It would be placed somewhere out of the way, but would have the option of being a constant (ie next to the system trey, not necessarily in the system trey); or being hidden until information needed to be displayed to the user.

Widget Functionality
The widget would monitor system Processes running on the host machine. It would be looking for any process that rises above a set percentage of CPU usage, as defined by the user. However, it would have a lag/delay time. This means that a process would have to exceed the specified percentage of CPU usage for a specific amount of time (3-5 seconds) before it would be displayed on the 3-5 lines.

This also works in reverse. Meaning that a system process will not be removed from the list until it has fallen below the set percentage point for the specified amount of time it takes before it appears on the list.

Additionally a log would be maintained showing any process that envoked citation on that list. It would also store the vital details, such as CPU percentage usage, how long it stayed above the limit, etc.

::New::
Find a credit card solution (the plan fell through)
Pay $408 from bank account to Credit card for Spring 2008 tuition
Create server backup solution
Integrate new Merchant account with Pebkac
Revise Scene03 of The Red Balloon

::Old::
Add to Pebkac a “Computer Build request form” (after migration)
Apply for grants on Fafsa.ed.gov
Edit Ponder Live! video’s
Organize and collect my Pebkac Toolbox
Reformat computer using new 250gb drive
Setup Quicken for Personal & Business
Take body measurements in prep. for Food Pickler thing
XML my newly setup computer

I’m thinking I need to review my To Do list creation strategy. I noticed last weeks list (1/14/2008) had a number of items which are not really “items” but are habits that need to be formed.

Here are the ones i’m thinking of…

• Do any homework that is needed
• Go to bed early each night so i can actually think in class

Okay, so there are only two items. But you see my point. These are habits, so I’d need to start a To Habit list, but that is not what this is. Its a To Do list.

This weeks list will reflect these changes.

Add to Pebkac a “Computer Build request form” (after migration)
Apply for grants on Fafsa.ed.gov
Do any homework that is needed
Edit Ponder Live! video’s
Go to bed early each night so i can actually think in class
Organize and collect my Pebkac Toolbox
Reformat computer using new 250gb drive
Setup Quicken for Personal & Business
Take body measurements in prep. for Food Pickler thing
XML my newly setup computer
(done!) Submit my Back-Taxes
(done!) Call City and provide State Tax #
(done!) Fax Merchant application
(done!) Mail in Rebate for hard drive thingy
(done!) Pay for Spring Semester 2008
(done!) Write Andrew on Monday instead of Tuesday
(semi-done) Fix Mats Computer (bezel buttons still dont work)

Bonus Round! - I cleaned by bedroom. This is actually a huge deal because my bedroom was a disaster and I have the hardest time cleaning my room. I never know where to put my stuff.

Lets talk about showering.

I shower by first turning on the hot water knob all the way. After a minute all the cold water is out of the pipes and I’m able to adjust the cold water knob to get the water temperature just the way I like it.

Tonight while in the middle of my shower, i decided to try something out. I put my hand on the Cold water knob and slowly cut off the stream of cold water. I continued this until the cold water was completely shut off. At this point I pulled my hands into the water, just to get an idea of the difference in heat. It was hot.

Generally speaking I’m a person who likes heat over the cold. Maybe thats why I live in Arizona.

Somewhere in the midst of this heat test, I decided it would make this experiment (and I guess up until this point it was not really an experiment as much as me messing around) more complete by taking this thermal experience to the opposite end of the spectrum. The much disdained cold.

To do this, i first cranked up the cold water knob all the way. I did this much faster than I had when turning it off, but not too quickly, because I’m a sissy and I don’t like the cold.

At this point I had both the Hot water knob and the Cold water knob opened all the way. This is where it gets rough, because its already kinda coldish (especially considering i had just doused by body in very hot water).

I gripped the hot water knob and ever so slowly reduced the amount of hot water a few centimeters at a time. This took much longer to do than going from normal to hot.

Because I was going to slowly, i kinda thought it would be easy, unfortunately there was a lot of turning off left to do. Eventually I started shivering; this is when I wondered if I’d actually be able to make it all the way.

Perseverance paid off and after too long I finally felt the knob hit the “full off” mark. The water was really really cold (granted, I live in Arizona, so my coldest water temperature may not be that of other locations). I was shivering quite a bit at this point, but decided that in order to make this official, I would stand in the cold for a good while (which in the context of my experiment was 15-20 seconds).

The interesting thing is that the cold was much more painful than the heat. Kind of weird. But it was a successful experiment. I don’t really know what I was trying to determine. But i think it has to do something with the Toad. If you place a toad in a pot of water and slowly heat the water to a boil; the toad will remain in the bowl and die. But if you place the toad in a bowl and dump in boiling water, it will jump out.

A few summers ago I performed a “test” similar to this. Only dealing strictly with heat. It was fun, read about it here.