Slightly OFF Communication

 (otherwise known as real-life Seinfeld situations)

I was walking to an office in Fremont when I noticed a man trying to simultaneously steer and push his car at the same time. Despite the pouring rain, I decided to lend him a hand. I quickly learned he wasn't trying to push his car, was was trying to push START his car. I eyed him smartly and asked "have you ever successfully push-started a car before?", he assured me he had. I was already committed (the dog was tied to a street sign), so I proceeded to help him push his car up and down the street. Eventually we gave up and pushed the car into a parking spot, which is what I wanted to do in the first place.

If you know my dog, you know he howls like the dickens when he's not within 2 feet of me in public. So throughout this entire ordeal there was the background noise of a howling labrador echoing throughout Fremont. While we were pushing the car into its final parking space, a woman approached me to ask if the dog was mine, because she thought someone might have abandoned him. Imagine a howling dog attached to a no parking sign in Fremont - yeah it wasn't pretty.

...

I got to the office and the door was locked. Was anyone there? I knocked, no answer, but a desklight was on far inside. I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to the person asking if they were in the office, and he replied "Yes!". He apparently did not get the hint that I was at the front door, which makes sense because I only occasionally work at this office. So I was about to text him a more obvious message when the (fall-off) hallway door opened, and someone familiar stepped in. It looked like someone who worked in the office, so I calmly waited for him to walk down the long hallway. As he approached, he acknowledged my dog and came up to pet him, so I just said "I'm in luck, you just saved me 25 cents". He gave me an odd look, which is when I noticed it wasn't who I thought it was, but some person from another office in the building. There was nothing I could do, so he oddly passed me by and I stood at the (still locked) front door looking like a tool.

Cord Cutter

I'm a cord cutter - which is just a person who got rid of their pay TV service (cable or satellite) in favor of another method. This post is just about the method I use, yours may differ. My hope is that it might give you some ideas on how you can also be a better cord cutter.

• Everyone watches TV differently, so it's important to figure out what's important to YOU.
• We enjoy having access to live broadcast tv, so we hooked an antenna to a DVR (Tivo Premiere) to record all the shows from the major networks. We supplement with Netflix, and for anything else we use Amazon Video-On-Demand (VOD), which costs about $2/episode.
• It might sound confusing, but remember the Tivo does 95% of the work. We setup which shows we want it to record and it does the rest. Everything else is available on Netflix, and if you find yourself still wanting more you can then turn to Amazon VOD. What makes it even easier is that Netflix and Amazon are hooked directly into the Tivo.
• Our goal was to shoot for a equivalent price per month lower than cable, which was around $70/month. I'm happy to report we usually pay about $20/month these days, depending on how you measure it.
• If you don't care about broadcast tv, or don't care to have a DVR, I'd recommend a Roku. It opens the doors to more online services, such as Amazon Prime Streaming for instance (a Netflix competitor that doesn't work with Tivo).

Notepad++: Launch Firefox, Chrome, IE to your heart's content

Somehow I lost my ability in Notepad++ to open a file in a web browser. I couldn't figure out how to get it back, so I turned to the internet and ran across a solution for people having difficultly setting it up with Google Chrome. I ended up just modifying their solution:

This post on super user (stack exchange) got me started, then I put together how to add Firefox, Chrome, and IE.
http://superuser.com/questions/306736/notepadis-there-a-way-to-fix-the-fact-that-i-cant-run-chrome-from-the-run-me

Shortcuts.xml

Notepad++ uses a "shortcuts.xml" file to store shortcut information. You'll have to poke around, but it's located in your AppData folder, here is where I found mine:
Win7: C:\Users\jmj\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++\

• It's important to note that this file acts like a registry setting. When Notepad++ is started, it loads those settings into memory, then when it's closed it saves them back to the settings.xml file. This makes it so that you can't edit the shortcuts.xml file in Notepad++ itself because when you close the application it will over-write your changes to the file!
• Unfortunately the best way to avoid this is to keep NPP closed and edit the file in (gasp!) notepad.exe

You place the commands in the < UserDefinedCommands > section, I've provided that section from my shortcuts.xml file below:

<UserDefinedCommands>
<Command name="Launch in Chrome"  Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="yes" Key="82">%LocalAppData%\Google\Chrome\Application\Chrome.exe                       &quot;$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)&quot;</Command>
<Command name="Launch in FireFox" Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="yes" Key="83">&quot;C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe&quot;    &quot;$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)&quot;</Command>
<Command name="Launch in IE"      Ctrl="yes" Alt="yes" Shift="yes" Key="84">&quot;C:\Program Files (x86)\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe&quot; &quot;$(FULL_CURRENT_PATH)&quot;</Command>
</UserDefinedCommands>

• I copied the "Launch in Chrome" directly from the superuser.com website, then modified it for the remaining calls. 
• I tried to line up the attributes above so that you can easily read them 
• You can use the Shortcut Mapper to change the shortcut calls after you have these loading correctly (I haven't bothered yet) 
• I had to use &quot; to handle spaces in the path (i.e. "C:\Program Files (x86)\Mozilla..") 
• $(FULL_CURRENT_PATH) refers to the html file you are editting in NPP (ex: jasonjeromeresume.html from the screenshot) 

There are other commands available, read about them in the npp docs:
http://npp-community.tuxfamily.org/documentation/notepad-user-manual/commands

That's it!