Protecting myself from myself

Note: This is a COMPLETELY non technical post. Feel free to skip…

Back home (in Ireland…I now live in the US) the fall series of international rugby is in full swing. In order to watch every game I need to run through a few hoops and a combination of energy levels and other commitments means that I rarely get to see the games live on Saturday mornings/afternoons.

What is worst of all is that I have a subconscious tendency to navigate to the RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann – Irelands public service broadcaster) website many times a day, inevitably discovering game scores on the homepage and somewhat defusing the excitement of the games before I’ve had a chance to watch them.

image

I decided to take a stand and protect me from myself – I found a nifty little extension for Chrome named StayFocused which allows the user to define a daily allowance of time to be spent on a site per day. Setting this to 1 minute (while holding a notebook in front of my monitor to block the live score of the game :o) ) allowed me to block access to the RTE site on my computer for the day. Navigating to the RTE website I’m immediately redirected to the above page. Awesome!

Comments

George Birbilis said…
blogspot has added share buttons
January 11, 2011 at 8:44 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Excel - Adding an existing Pivot table to the data model

Image
  I've been working more with, and continue to be amazed by, Power Pivot. I recently ran into an issue where I needed to add the data for an existing Power Pivot report to the Data Model. There is a checkbox that makes this easy when creating a PivotTable: As so often happens, the analysis grew in scope/importance and I found myself needing to add the data to the data model. While it's not obvious how, there is a way to add an existing Pivot table to the data model. There's a More Tables... link in the PivotTable Fields pane.  Clicking on the  More Tables... results in a dialog confirming that you want to Create a New PivotTable .  Doing so will result in the creation of the new PivotTable in a new sheet. By default the data is added to the data model. You'll likely lose some formatting but for anything other than a trivial PivotTable, this should save effort, as it did for me.
Read more

Getting Started with Mirth (Part 1)

Image
This is the first post in a 2 part series. The second post is here Recently I posted about my positive experience when using Mirth by Webreach as an open source communication layer between one of our in-house applications and a third party and proprietary web service interface. That post received a large amount of attention (relative to my other posts :o) ) so now I will post a quickstart guide to creating a similar setup. In this post I will go over the very basics of using Mirth (please dig in and play around with some more advanced options/configurations), specifically I will demonstrate how to use Mirth to read data from a database, package the data up in a SOAP envelope, send the data to a web service and process the SOAP response. I'll also show you how easy it is to monitor channels once deployed. Once you've installed and opened Mirth for the first time you'll be presented with an empty dashboard - but it wont stay empty for long. This is where you'll s...
Read more

Mirth

Image
Introduction Let's talk about Mirth. At it's simplest, Mirth  link is an Open Source HL7 interface engine. HL7 (Health Level 7) is an NPO involved in the development of healthcare standards and the HL7 v2.x and HL7 v3 standards are commonly used in Medical Information for data interchange - including but not limited to clinical, financial, logistical and administrative messaging. I first ran across Mirth over a year ago on a personal quest to find an alternative to our client's legacy HL7 application. Academically, I wrote a number of lexical analysis tools using lexx, yacc, bison and JavaCC and knew the challenges of writing and maintaining complex parsers. I was simply looking for something that could parse HL7 for us, and perhaps log messages and provide a little more transparency than our application currently allowed.  A year later and our legacy application is still going strong (read: my proposal was declined), but Mirth is being used in production, far away from th...
Read more