Wes’s Life

I haven’t been posting recently as a result of traveling. I am currently at my sister’s house in Pennsylvania. On Wednesday I will be on holiday and be traveling to Greece. I am officially leaving on the first of June and I will be returning on the 13th. I am going to hate reading all of the news I missed on Bloglines when I get back from my trip.

Anyways, I saw The Longest Yard today. It was a great movie, funny and energetic. It also had a great soundtrack in the movie; however, the soundtrack CD ended up being all rap music, which I can not stand. Anyways, the movie was very good.

I bought Super Monkey Ball Deluxe for the PS2 and that turned out to be a ton of fun. The puzzles were fun, but the mini-games turned out to be awesome. My dad, brother-in-law and I played the mini-games for several hours. So I think it was quite a steal at thirty bucks.

So all is well here and tomorrow will be a lazy day as my dad, sister and brother-in-law will be at work. I will probably get in some reading tomorrow and sleep-in.

Last night I went to see Flogging Molly at the Mercy Lounge. They were great, probably one of the best live bands I have ever seen. They seem to flourish on the energy that is created by the live croud. They played my favorite songs: Salty Dog, Black Friday Rule, Devil’s Dance Floor and Drunken Lullabies. Everyone in the band was absolutely incredible. The lead singer cracked some jokes and told some anecdotes and was pretty funny. He dedicates a lot of the songs he plays to people which you don’t see to much of anymore. If you have never heard of Flogging Molly and want to listen to something different, give em a shot. Theres a little player on their website that has a few of their songs.

The venue was also very nice. It was more a hall then anything and standing only of course. There was a lot of smoking, but that is really my only complaint. I would defintely go back considering how close it is to my home.

So, I changed the look of the website, obviously, because I was getting tired of the green. I also upgraded both Gallery2 and the Gallery2 Integration plugin. Not much changed in that aspect minus the backend and the speed. Let me know if anything seems odd, out of place or if you have a recommendation or suggestion for the page.

I consider myself somewhat of a Minimalist. I try to keep things simple and easy. I used to go the line of complex and intricate, but quickly realized that that path leads to laziness and procrastination. Keeping things simple keeps me working because I don’t worry about taking a long amount of time. This kind of attitude is what lead me to use WordPress instead of writing my own. Why create something that has already been made?

I have some recommendations to get you started in your quest for minimalism:

• Remove all of your icons from your desktop except for the Recycling Bin, try to keep things on your Desktop no longer than a week. Folders are okay, only if you treat them just like your desktop and empty them on a weekly basis.
• Organize your Start Menu All Programs folder into Categories such as Internet, Utilities, System, Multimedia and only put the icons of the applications you want, not the whole folder.
• Get a nice simple wallpaper. I recommend Deviant Art’s Minimalist Section.
• Hide the majority of your System Tray icons. You don’t need to know about the majority of them. While some computer enthusiasts might scoff at my ignorance of the loss of memory, I have a gigabyte of memory and it is no loss for me.
• Keep a pad of paper / post-it notes or something similar near your desk and keep a list of things you need to do. Computer to do lists work just fine, but I highly recommend using paper.

While this dealt mostly with your computer, I will expand upon this later.

The name might make you laugh, but this TiddlyWiki is quite the powerful tool. It was created especially for the Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen. However, if you are a lay person then you might be able to use this as well. It’s pretty much a to do list with a twist of lemon. You can set up categories of things to work on and set them on the homepage. While it is not the most user-friendly device for this type of application, I find it to be exceptional. I recommend giving it a shot, especially if you are technically inclined.

GTDTiddlyWiki