Steve Oliphant’s Musings

If you have ever wondered why you always seem to get the opposite of what you want, you probably Need to train your eyes to see color again. Check it out.

There is an oldish adage “count your blessings” that seems to be very appropriate at the moment. I have been feeling down because of some slight difficulties in my life, but those problems pale in the large perspective of things.

“Count your blessings - name them one by one” I am not going to do exactly that, but I did want to put down some things that are very right and good about my life that I am grateful for.

1. I have a wonderful wife who is intelligent and wise and beautiful and sexy and loves me.
2. I have children who each have their own unique qualities and traits and who I love and who love me. I am proud of all of them for various reasons.
3. I have a very good - better than I deserve - family that I was raised in.
4. I learn things easily. I enjoy learning and thinking and appreciating the beauty around me, both God made, and that coming from the talents of others
5. Music
6. Literature
7. Income, high (very high by most of the world’s standards) quality of life. I am never hungry unless I choose to be, I have a home and (too many) possessions.
8. I have the ability to find something to appreciate in every circumstance I have ever been in. I sometimes forget this and pay with a bit of depression. But when I remember and act on that ability, I cheer myself up quickly.
9. A sense of humor. I can (when I choose - need to choose more often) find something funny about pretty much anything.
10. The ability to assume that others are doing their best to get along. I attribute slights and insults from others to misunderstandings and circumstances I am not aware of. I am probably often wrong, but I like living in this world that I have created with my outlook that is full of good people.

That is all for now - I am going to bed - how wonderful to have a nice warm dry comfortable place to lay my head each night!

Tomorrow is going to be an absolutely great day. No matter what happens in it.

Whether you use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer that comes default with Windows Operating Systems, Safari with your Mac, or Firefox there is one simple change that you can make to your browser that will increase your productivity by an order of magnitude.

This change does NOT require you to add any of the multitudes of toolbars and widgets available for your browser. It does NOT take longer than 30 seconds. It WILL help you to stay focused and get done what you need to get done.

Think about your internet usage habits. When you first turn on, or resume your computer and bring up your browser, what do you see?

If you are like most people, you see a start page that includes all the latest news stories, human interest stories, and top trends in fashion, sports and entertainment. It takes more will power then I have got to keep from clicking on links that are interesting, and before I know it, hours have passed and whatever it was I set down at the computer to do, has not been done.

The way to keep this from happening is to set your home page to either something very non-distracting, like Google’s search page (NOT their iGoogle page or your gmail page), a blank page, or a page that you make.

This is easy to do.

First, navigate to the page that you want as your home page. You can do this by clicking on the location field, and entering in the url of that page. To use google, enter in http://www.google.com. If you are using file on your computer, the URL would look like: file://c:/mypage.html (assuming that you have a file named “mypage.html” in the root of your C drive.)

On the latest version of IE (Internet Explorer) find the icon in the tool bar that looks like a house. To the left of it is a down arrow that will pull down a menu when clicked. One of the options on that menu is “Add or Change Home Page”. When you click on that, one of the options is to “Use this webpage as your only home page” Check that and then click “yes” and then you are all done. The next time you open your browser, it will be set to a page that keeps you more productive and on task.

The following video shows how to do what I am talking about:

I have a young son who is a bit behind his age group developmentally. One of his favorite things is to listen to me sing. Very sweet right? Well after two hours or so of the same song, it gets a little old. So I recorded myself singing the song into the computer, and then whenever he begs me to sing it, I can boot up my laptop, and put the song on continuous play, and he is happy and I can work.

Except like most things in life, it is not that simple.

Now whenever he sees me sit down with my laptop, he associates that with the song, and sits besides me, and demands that I play it.

Which seems kind of sweet also, I mean, I do like him to sit beside me. But one of the things I do for work is record screen shot – how to videos, where the screen is recorded along with my narration. And of course, I can’t do that while he is listening to that song.

So, I found another thing that is a favorite of his. Popcorn. We have a hot air popcorn popper and one of his favorite things is to watch a batch of popcorn pop. But even more, he likes to sit down and taste the bowl of popcorn.

Yes, I mean “taste” and not “eat.” That would be better.

You see, he has an oral aversion, which basically means that he has a really hard time swallowing things. We feed him through a special tube that is in his stomach wall. But he doesn’t mind putting things (like popcorn) in his mouth, he just won’t swallow.

The dogs in our house LOVE him. Because he tastes, chews, masticates, and thoroughly slimerizes his food, and then spits it out somewhere. If a dog is around, he gives it to them. (Unless I am sitting next to him, then I am his first choice.) But if not, he just spits it back in the bowl. This can make sharing popcorn with him quite an adventure. Is that extra butter? Or is it one that he has thoroughly tasted?

And so while I have distracted him from wanting that song played (over and over and over and over) he is sitting next to me trying to share his popcorn, giving me all the pieces he has tasted even though I tell him to give them to the dogs instead. It makes it hard to get things done. So I better type this while I can.

Timothoy Ferris has a great blog post on
traveling with children. I am going to go show my wife.