For the family's New Year's gathering later, featuring Mae's famous death by cheese spaghetti! ^_^ #fb

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Back from the courts. Kysa has a wicked top spin, and she showed her Mama how she does it. Real proud of her!

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System for staying on top of priorities

I've tried a lot of productivity tools to get better control over my ever-bloating task lists, and none have been as effective for me, as using Gmail with the GTDInbox add-on, and Google Tasks. How I make these work for me is a result of several months of trials, using Google Tasks initially, then with custom labeling and automatic label switching with GTDInbox.

The goal was simple, and that was to attain inbox zero at least once a day. GTDInbox allows me to mark or tag emails containing tasks with action, wait-for, delegated, and finished. After the emails are tagged, they get added to Google Tasks, so that I'll have an easy way to pull up a related email for a particular task. Lastly, these emails get archived, keeping the goal of inbox zero in mind, always.

What tools do you use, and have you already gotten into a rhythm of using these efficiently while working?

Ready for her Christmas event in school. Thanks to mom-la for the makeup. I almost didn't recognize her hehe

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Supermom

I love my wife. She's all about the greater levels of thoughtfulness
that I don't have, and earlier today, she's outdone herself once more.

In a few hours she had completed all of her Christmas shopping for my
god-children and nephews and nieces. No thanks to me; I couldn't stand
gift shopping unless it's for her or my kids, much worse if it's for
some other people.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving gifts as long as it's in the
budget, but man, only my wife can think of what stuff to buy. Where
was I earlier while my wife was ticking off her shop list? In Roti Mum
having coffee and buns! Tsk..

My daughter also got bought some clothes and I can see that she's very
happy with them. Oh well, that's supermom for you!

Oh that's good! More please!

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And Miguel tries his first sip of soda.

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At McDo SM with Mae, Angela, Kysa, and Miguel.

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Updates, finally!

Some of the stuff I've been doing lately: grokking Postfix (again), remapping sites for migration this week, and domain auctions.

I also moved my non-tech stuff to posterous.

His ate and Mama are going to be just as busy dealing with them chicks as well ^_^

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I can see myself dealing with all the ladies who will be tweeting, texting, and calling Miguel some years from now..

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Cheez! (Ate, I'll post this here then I'll have Mama post in FB ok?)

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Miguel's ready for church.

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Just some of the things I’ve dabbled with this month: Google Voice and Postfix. Been reading more MySQL optimization hacks too. And oh, I’m starting a new blog with a colleague; an experiment of sorts.

And I thought I was getting good at packing

There’s just too many things to put in boxes, and the more I see old stuff the longer it’s taking me to organize them! If only I can use GTD principles here and not think about lengths, widths, and heights and just toss stuff in. ^_^

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Miguel looks like he just woke up and is giving everyone the foglamp treatment. Thanks to Pangga for the quick cam shot. ^_^

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I was installing the paddings on Miguel’s carrier and thought of posting a HOWTO, but I didn’t have a camera here; so I posted who’s using it instead. Does he look like me or what? ^_^

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I was installing the paddings on Miguel’s carrier and thought of posting a HOWTO, but I didn’t have a camera here; so I posted who’s using it instead. Does he look like me or what? ^_^

In other news

I’ve gone impulsive again. I was waiting for a good time to make this personal (more or less) blog, public.   But then I realize that I may have just been waiting for my hair to grow back.  Believe me, that’s going to take much, much longer!

I may as well chronicle everything now that my kids are growing up.  I also think that I and my wife are now going through that most interesting phase of life, and it’s probably worth writing about.  Nothing related to midlife crisis yet, thank God, but definitely worth sharing.

All of my tech posts are now on tech.doblados.net (about time!!) Do you think it’s better this way?

Export TweetDeck groups in Ubuntu

If you have multiple installs of TweetDeck on different computers, I bet you wished there were ways to save the groups you set up. These groupings are not saved in your Twitter profile, but are kept in a local database in your computer. This means that for each install of TweetDeck, you will have to re-set up your groups, and any changes won't replicate to your other installs.

This post about copying TweetDeck settings in Windows explains this in detail, and I have been able to do the same for Ubuntu, replicating TweetDeck settings across 3 machines. Just take note of some of the differences that I'm going to point out here.

Adobe Air for Linux uses the .appdata directory in your home directory, for profile settings, configurations, etc. In the computer that has your groups and is the source for the export, change working directory into .appdata, and look for the TweetDeckFast.{some hash here}.

jon@jedi-ntbk:~$ cd .appdata
jon@jedi-ntbk:~/.appdata$ ls
Adobe
cookie_file.txt
de.makesoft.twhirl.0EA062BC275E7ED1E6EC3762EFFD73C7158ADF33.1
jrcf_H7t6Ap
jrcf_RA5I7w
jrcf_wdLW48
Snippage.B28FB424FD6880E47B18D7D649F6CC93BDE9B29B.1
TweetDeckFast.F9107117265DB7542C1A806C8DB837742CE14C21.1
jon@jedi-ntbk:~/.appdata$

Change directory to the one that says TweeDeckFast and list the contents. Change directory into Local Store and you should find two files that has your username. In my case, they are

preferences_jjdoblados.xml
td_26_jjdoblados.db

Simply copy these two files to any target machine in the same directory where you got them. Make sure that TweetDeck is closed before copying. When done copying, start TweetDeck and you will have all of your groups intact!

In other news

I’ve gone impulsive again. I was waiting for a good time to make this personal (more or less) blog, public.   But then I realize that I may have just been waiting for my hair to grow back.  Believe me, that’s going to take much, much longer!

I may as well chronicle everything now that my kids are growing up.  I also think that I and my wife are now going through that most interesting phase of life, and it’s probably worth writing about.  Nothing related to midlife crisis yet, thank God, but definitely worth sharing.

All of my tech posts are now on tech.doblados.net (about time!!) Do you think it’s better this way?

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I’m trying to make heads and tails with how the live timing applet presents data. Webber’s on 3rd!

F1 Live Timing

I'm trying to make heads and tails with how the live timing applet presents data. Webber's on 3rd!

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This is my favorite group pic so far. Ate Kysa quit asking us to let her carry Miguel for this shot. What do you think?

And more waiting...

Mae was supposed to have given birth already, but all she ever had were a few minutes of labor, and they’d disappear and won’t come back until after a few hours.  The baby’s already a 7+ pounder and all he wants to do is eat more I guess.  He just keeps kicking until Mae munches on something.  Definitely, we don’t want him growing as big as Kysa when she came out; at 9.4 pounds, normal delivery! (Yeah, my wife’s a wonder woman)

I can sense that she’s really tired and wants to get it over and done with.  Even our daughter’s getting impatient.  Her exams are about done, and tomorrow, we head back to CDO.  My dilemma now is scheduling my paternity leave, because obviously, I couldn’t file for one before Mae gives birth.  So we’ll see.  I’m all excited to get home!

Back in 5.

So I renewed my domain name earlier and thought about writing more just to balance the traffic I get for the domain, which is around 20% HTTP, and 80% SMTP.

Mail is obviously important, and since I had Gmail handle mails, everything’s been very stress free. Google just works, right? So migrating once again back to Blogger for my rant pages is now a no-brainer. Stay tuned for more.

PIIX3 cannot attach drive to the Secondary Master

I use VirtualBox for my server experimenting requirements, and it's just great!  Just this morning, I got an error message when I started an FC8 virtual machine.

PIIX3 cannot attach drive to the Secondary Master.
VBox status code: -102 (VERR_FILE_NOT_FOUND).

This thread in the forums explains that the virtual machine was looking for a disk that was supposed to be mounted and could not find it.  I was using an external DVD drive and had removed it before I shut down the VM.

You'd get the same problem if you set up a VM to use a mounted disk or some other mass storage device.  To fix this, simply uncheck the non-existent devices in the VM settings while the VM is powered down.  Alternately, you can plug the devices back in before you power up the VM.

If after doing these steps you still get the error, check if the devices do get mounted and are accessible from the host as you may be dealing with broken or non-functional devices.