I have tried all kinds of tricks and solutions, and for a long time I thought there would be some computer software that could help me or at least serve as external memory for notes and task lists. However, no matter what I tried I always, without fail, ended up with another text file filled with pointless stressed out half baked notes and tasks the meaning of which I could never guess form just reading their title.

‘Set meeting with Suzuki’

About what? When? To what goal??

Anyways, after starting to study GTD it all came to me so clearly. No software will ever be able to organize you unless you first organize your head and learn or develop a great offline methodology that your head can wrap it self around. Then, once you have that first step figured out, you can map that onto a piece of software that can speed up the process of implementing that methodology. (Sounds really simple, but to me that was a revelation…)

For me, that combination of methodology has turned out to be (at least until further notice ;) :

GTD (Getting things done), implemented in
Things for mac (and my iPad and iPhone)

I’m not going to try to get you sold on how nice Things is, find out for your self at the link below:

http://culturedcode.com/things/

and get the Book:

On amazon

How do you organize your tasks and work items?

Anyways, guess who’s credited at page 2? :-D

http://www.ntp.dep.no/2010-2019/pdf/2008_10_09-foiler_til_oystein_engebretsen-toi.pdf

And my master thesis none the less! Never thought I’d have a hand in the Norwegian national infra policy making :))

Unrecognized attribute ‘targetFramework’. Note that attribute names are case-sensitive.

is most likely because of either of 2 reasons:

1. You installed the .net 4.0 bits after IIS was set up, resulting in the wrong version of the .NET framework beeing registered with IIS.

Most often the above results in conflicting versions of the framework, and so the easiest way of solving this is to re-register the .NET extensions with IIS using the aspnet_regiss tool. Make sure you run it from an elevated command prompt and that you use the correct version (in the v4.xx folder that is, not the v2.xx one). On my dev machine this tool is located in:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319

and you run it with the -iru flags like so:

aspnet_regiis.exe -iru

2. You haven’t set the framework of the IIS application to the correct version of .NET (4.0 that is)

Change this using either the IIS Manager or the command line. In IIS Manager you select ‘Application Pools’, click the Application you’ve pointed you site to use, select ‘Basic Settings’ in the ‘Actions’ pane and change the ‘.NET framework version’.

This post over at MSDN should also be of great help. Gotta love Microsoft’s documentation!

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd483478(VS.100).aspx

If remaking Grim Fandango doesn’t appeal, maybe a follow-up/alternative storyline set in Rubacava or something similar would have greater appeal?

Anyways, I’m sure I’m not the only one longing for a chance to relive the dark and moody open-mic nights at The Blue Casket!

The Blue Casket

But I DO remember Gods, and how mega-cool the intro music was!

HU! HU! HU!

Anyways, today I happened to stumble upon a little gem called Kamichu (かみちゅor神中). It’s a soft spoken, slow and easy show about a junior high school girl who one day discovers that she’s become a god (literally). But since being a god, and indeed the very nature and meaning of the word god is very different from what we are used to in the Christian part of the west, it does not actually have that much of an impact on her daily life.

As the story progresses her (and the viewer’s) understanding of the gods of Japan and Japanese Shinto deepens, and while she struggles to confess her love to a fellow student, and becomes the commercial hope of a local bankrupt shrine, we get a particularly detailed and accurate picture painted of many of the local traditions and shrines around Hiroshima prefecture where the series takes place.

The story is set in 1983-1984, which of course only makes it better!

If I will ever solve the Enigma

Listen. Read. Think. Communicate.

After doing tons of research that really wasn’t to much good, I decided to go for the Lenovo Ideapad u150. Mostly because it was cheap and I always had confidence (= good experience) with Lenovo machines in the past. Also, before reading further keep in mind that it’s a Japanese config, so there might be differences from the machines sold under the same name in Europe and the US.

Since it came without any form of optical drive, installation of Linux would have to be done using a USB stick. No problem, though, just format a large enough stick, grab the latest syslinux and write a MBR onto it, copy the files from your distro-iso and setup the correct files in the root dir.

I decided to go with Ubuntu for this machine. Normally I would have run Debian Testing, but I figured I could spoil myself with some support-wheels. Installing Ubuntu 9.10 was a breeze. Really, the whole thing went so smooth it was almost scary (=boring? ;) ).

A reboot confirmed that grub had recognized the win7 partition, which I’ll leave around for a while for the Lenovo diagnostics apps. Booting into the Ubuntu Gnome desktop I was pleasantly surprised that all the hardware (including fn-keys, wifi, bluetooth …) had been recognized and setup properly’ (except for one little detail, see below). Again, almost to easy to be all together comfortable…

The only thing that needs to be fixed is that sometimes the screen-brightness fn-keys wont actually change the brightness of the screen *lol*. Pressing them displays the nice little gui feedback and everything but sometimes the actual screen brightness just stays the same.. this I will have to look into.

The verdict: A very very nice experience indeed. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a decent, easy to handle and very portable PC.

Update 1:

Fixed the brightness keys issue with the solution described here:
http://github.com/zaius/bright