Tech and life

Just a quick thought on political power and its abuse today. I don’t think many would dispute the view that political leaders cling on to power once they get it and, left unchecked, will usually long outstay their welcome. We’ve seen this recently in Tunisia and at present in Egypt as the former presidents finally get the message that they must move aside in favour of democratic reform. Many other countries, including for example Zimbabwe, are suffering under the dictats of leaders who just won’t let go of the levers of power. And democracies aren’t immune to this either. Certainly here in the UK we’ve had our share of leaders who have clung on to power for too long.

That’s why I’d like to see fledgling democracies and those advocating democratic reform to adopt fixed terms for their political leaders. I’m not a great lover of the US political system but I do think their policy of a maximum 2 terms of office for the President is a very sensible idea. Lets face it, if a leader can’t put in place his policies and define his legacy after 8 to 10 years then perhaps he should be stepping aside anyway.  No one is indispensible.

So if anyone from Egypt is reading this or indeed anyone who may be involved in a future fledgling democracy or campaigning for democratic reform, think very carefully about how long you want your leader to serve, and make quite sure that a fail-safe mechanism  is in place so they step down when the time comes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Drop a comment below.

I’m as guilty as anyone. It’s real easy to get into a routine in our daily lives. I work from home and in my case, every work morning is much the same for the first couple of hours. Shaving and washing, pretty much the same breakfast every day, check and answer emails, check RSS feeds…Not much variation in lunch routine. And so on through a routine kind of work day, shopping at the same store, etc. Routines can be detrimental. I guess you know you’re in a routine when you look back on the week and each day melds into the next with no real distinction or memorable events. So how can we get out of this dreadful routine thing and keep things interesting and fresh? I guess with the New Year coming up, this is a great time to start afresh and spice things up a bit, the objective being to make each day, week and year a bit more memorable.

Work

If you’re in a 9 to 5 set up working for someone else, then there may be little you can do in the work day to freshen it up. If work is reduced to a routine, innovative breakthroughs become rare. If your job is real drudgery, consider changing. Think about earning a living online. We really are lucky these days having the option to run our own businesses online. Pluck up the courage and give it a go. Selling, blogging, web design, whatever you feel you’d enjoy doing. You’ll have more flexibility to change your daily routine if you do.

I’m self employed and work from home. I do try and get out for a walk each day to give myself some time away from the PC to think or listen to podcasts. But I’ve been working in publishing for quite a while now and I’m looking to try some new challenge. When I look back on 2010, I can’t see much memorable to distinguish it from the year before (work and leisure time) and that’s a tell-tale sign that I’m stuck in a major rut. For me I’m considering trying something new – or at least expanding into something that I’ve already dabbled it – web design. I’m looking forward to this new challenge although I’m new to this and it may be a challenge too far pretty much from a standing start. Certainly judging by this excellent post on Nettuts+ recently. Still, in your 50s, you do tend to focus on the fact that you may only have say 15 years left to learn and master something new at work.

Leisure

There’s a bunch of things you can do here to cut the routine and make spare time memorable. It may also make us a little fitter and help the creative juices.

1. Try a new hobby. What about photography, blogging or cookery? If you have a young family, get some photos of them. Have a go at photo editing and see if you enjoy that.

2. Try evening classes to pick up a new skill, e.g. first aid, photography.

3. Get out more. Climb a hill, see a sunset and photograph it. Get out to the movies, the gym, meet up with your friends at the coffee shop or go out for a meal. If you’re out walking, you can listen to podcasts at the same time. You probably won’t create awesome memories sitting at your PC updating your Twitter or Facebook status. Do you neglect your friends in favour of a monitor? Aim to get to the end of 2011 and have some great memories to look back on.

4. If you are staying in in front of the TV in the evening, think how you could change that routine. Streaming the internet to your TV is a great new possibility to make some changes. Swap your radio listening for podcasts. I hate the old fashioned notion of radio forcing listening choices on you. Make your own choices with podcasts. Listen to what you want to hear when you want.

5. Try and get away on a memorable holiday. I know it’s difficult in these times but a holiday really will give you great memories.

6. Here’s another 50 ideas to break a routine life. The old adages ‘you’ll never get today back again’ and ‘you only get one shot at life’ ring true, certainly as you get older. Much better to think in terms of ‘so much to do, so little time’.

What can you do differently tomorrow, next week, or next year to break away from your normal routines and make life more memorable, interesting and fresh? Drop a comment below.

After my last post on Composing an effective blog post title, you’re probably scratching your head wondering what on earth this post is going to be about. Well, it’s just a trip into fantasyland. I’ve wanted to get this one off my chest for a while so here goes. If it’s not quite your cup of tea, please have a look at the recent posts listed in the right column instead.
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You wake during the night to the smell of smoke, and jump out of bed to find the living room of the house is ablaze. Your first priority is to get your family to safety of course and phone the emergency services. That taken care of, say you’ve got one chance to take something as you leave your home for possibly the last time. What would it be? Something valuable, something sentimental?

When I considered this scenario, I concluded that if I had a chance, I would take my photos with me if I could. Pretty much everything else could be replaced but, when I thought about it, my photos are priceless memories which I’ll enjoy for years to come… memories of my childhood, holidays, friends, our wedding, my own family growing up. Much of my older photos are still in albums, while some are still in their wallets piled in boxes in the loft. I’ve also got quite a few wooden slide boxes full of 35mm transparencies (yip, no chance in a fire!). More recently, my digital photos are on my PC and backed up to an external hard drive.

It’s very, very  easy to get complacent about this and hope it will never happen to you. So I guess I should make an effort to get all my photo albums and 35mm transparencies digitised and get everything onto my external backup drive. Another possibility would be a fireproof safe but could I trust it to save all my photos and transparencies? I doubt it. Anyway it would have to be pretty large and therefore the cost would be prohibitive. Going the digital route, ideally, I should have two backup drives and do weekly rolling backups, keeping one drive away from the house, say at my parents’ house and swapping these out weekly to update them. That way I’d be covered against fire, flooding, theft, etc. and wouldn’t have to hunt for a laptop or external drive in a burning house. Wouldn’t cost too much either, in fact I reckon buying two external 500GB backup drives would cost around £100 ($160). I don’t have videos so 500GB drives should be fine and I can always upgrade them when I need more storage. Alternatively, I could backup my photos to the cloud but this would take quite some time to upload and with an annual cost of around $50-100 per year, I think I’m better off with offsite storage. I wouldn’t rely on keeping everything just in the cloud anyway – I would have to have a physical backups. But surely two drives doing a rolling backup would be enough wouldn’t it. Any thoughts?

So what would you take with you from your burning home?

Image credit: 111Emergency

Imagine this scenario. You’ve just walked into your parent’s house. They’ve just popped out so no-one’s at home but on the living room table is a copy of their Will. They must have been reviewing it. What would you do? Turn round and immediately walk out the door… or have a sneak peak to see what brother Billy and sister Jill have been left… and of course don’t forget yourself!

I know what I’d do – turn round and run a mile for fear of seeing anything. If something is marked Private and Confidential and it’s not for me, I just don’t want to know. Finding out the contents of a confidential letter or what you have or haven’t been left in a Will beforehand could be a horrible experience and better left until the appropriate time. If it’s not meant for me, I would feel really guilty reading its contents and would hate myself for doing it. But I’m sure many would have no qualms about having a look.

My Will is with our solicitor safely locked away from prying eyes. Make sure your parents’ Will is too before it’s too late and you are tested to breaking point!

And of course, if you have any Private and Confidential files on your PC, make sure they are encrypted and password protected. I’ve been using a free program called Axcrypt to encrypt my sensitive files and it’s working fine for me.

So what would you do? Are there any circumstances when it’s okay to look at Private and Confidential information not meant for you and you’re not 007? Let us know in the comments. And cast your vote in the poll below – it’s the first time I’ve tried a poll on this site so I’ll be interested to test it out.

Image credit: Janielle Beh

A recent family bereavement got me thinking. What would happen to this blog and all my online accounts if I died tomorrow? I hadn’t really given it much thought before and I’m sure many of you are in the same boat. It’s hard enough to cope with a family bereavement let alone sit down and try and sort out someone’s online accounts so we really should give our loved ones as much help as we can to cover this unfortunate possibility. As it stands, I’m sure my wife would be completely at a loss to know where to start with my online life. Not surprising really as she doesn’t know which online accounts I have! So let’s have a look and see if there’s anything we can do to help deal with our virtual life in the event of our actual death.

What about your blog?

If you have a blog, have you thought what would happen to it if you died tomorrow? It’s actually an asset you own and I guess the first question is would any of your family want to take it on? Better find out now and if there is someone, you’ll need to be able to get your blog admin details to them somehow after your death. Don’t forget to include domain renewal dates and blog host renewal dates. More about that later. If you’ve monetized your blog through advertising for example, the income from that may be a nice little bonus for your loved ones and that may be another reason for keeping the blog alive. So remember to pass on your PayPal details. They’ll need that to be able to remit the advertising revenue back to the family. On the other hand, if no-one is really interested in carrying on your blog, they may consider selling it to another blogger. After all, a ready-made blog may well suit someone who wants to move into blogging and bypass all the hassle of setting it up and building up traffic. What will happen to your blog when you die is summed up very nicely in this post on Daily Blogging Tips.

What about Facebook?

Your loved ones will have the choice of terminating your account or keeping it in a ‘memorial state’ which removes features like status updates and contact details and lets only confirmed friends view the profile and post comments on it. Discuss this with them. Again, they’ll obviously need your admin details whichever they choose. You may also want to arrange a farewell message to be posted in the event of your death. You could keep that with your log in details as discussed next, but make sure your digital heir knows where to find the details.

Passing on the important details after death

Bear in mind that the terms of service of most online accounts don’t permit passing them on to a ‘new owner’. Each site tends to have its own rules about who can do what should someone pass on, and executors may need to make special requests to close down accounts or access your information. For info on the policies of Yahoo, MySpace, Google and Microsoft when it comes to dealing with the accounts of deceased users, read this Educo blog post or this MakeUseOf post.

If you can pass the accounts on, first you’ll have to identify someone who would be willing to tidy up all the loose ends, probably your spouse or partner. But don’t forget to cover the possibility that you and your partner may die at the same time. If you’ve already made a Will, this may all sound familiar. Of course keeping your online admin details with your Will may be a good solution. But I can hear you say, I change my passwords regularly and add new online accounts all the time, I can’t keep changing these details in my Will. Well, if you use a username/password manager like LastPass, you only have to add your email address and one master password to your Will documents. All you account usernames and passwords are held securely in LastPass. Once your digital heir accesses your LastPass Vault, they can see all your usernames and your passwords. Another possibility I read about recently on MakeUseOf is LogAway which allows you to create a single click log in for hundreds of websites. You will have to change the master password occasionally but this is all that will have to be updated with your Will documents. Of course, you don’t have to keep your details with your Will. Any secure place will do where your spouse, partner or executor can get hold of the details when required. You could also use a service like Death Switch to email your loved one with all the details after you’ve passed away.

There are also online services like Legacy Locker and Entrustet that allow the creation of a will for digital assets. Legacy Locker’s free ‘trial account’ limits you to listing three digital assets and two beneficiaries. Lifehacker have a post on Legacy Locker here and Entrustet here. Entrustet lets you assign an heir to access your accounts when you pass away. It lets you set up unlimited password-protected accounts to be transferred over to a trusted person upon your passing and lets you decide what will happen to each account.

So don’t leave it until it’s too late. You have a great opportunity to make these decisions now. Do yourself and your family a favour and make some backup arrangements to help deal with your online world in the event of your untimely death. Drop a comment below if you have already made these arrangements and you have some advice for us.

What would happen to your online accounts if you died tomorrow is a post from Tech and Life. If you’re reading it in full elsewhere, it’s been copied without consent. Please go to Tech and Life to read the original post and many others in the archive.

Further reading: Handling computer accounts after death – Rocket Moms

Image credit: Roy’s funeral

Away from Tech today. I’m sure some of you, your family or friends have been touched by the devastating effects of cancer. If not, you probably will be at some point in your life. Cancer struck very close to me recently and took my brother at the age of 52. He had been diagnosed with myeloma (cancer of blood plasma cells) a little over a year ago. It’s been quite a blow to my elderly parents, both in their mid-80s as they struggle to come to terms with the fact that their son has been taken before them – upsetting for any parent. We’ll all miss him.

My brother led a pretty healthy lifestyle. He wasn’t overweight, he exercised well, ate a reasonably healthy diet, and lived in a stress-free rural area. He was pretty much the last person I would have expected to be diagnosed with cancer, but that’s not the way it works I’m afraid. The causes of myeloma are pretty much unknown at present. Initial signs of the disease were easily misinterpreted: tiredness which he had put down to aging, and a very sore lower back, initially thought to be a prolapsed disk but later diagnosed as fracturing due to weakening by the myeloma cells. Renal failure followed.

He responded to chemotherapy initially but never sufficiently to undergo stem cell treatment. His kidneys started functioning again, but after a few months, his body rejected the first chemotherapy regime and later a second regime. He had an aggressive form of the disease.  The hospital staff were magnificent throughout and he had wonderful support through his final days. He never complained and bore the illness with great courage.

I’m not really sure what the message is here, other than don’t take life too much for granted – you just never know if or when a terminal condition will strike. Don’t put off doing the things that are important to you or that you’ve been meaning to do. And if you are 50 or over, and are experiencing tiredness and increasing lower back pains, see your GP, and insist on blood tests just in case.

Computers. Don’t you just love them! Time rushes by when you are in front of that screen. Oftentimes I’ve let the fire die, or the potatoes boil to a soggy mush as I try to solve a computer problem or devise a workaround. And I’m not alone. They’re supposed to make you more productive… save you time, but sometimes I wonder. I loved this recent post on thrive as the author tried to do some photo editing and the catalogue of problems that ensued and the time wasted – I could identify with so much there.

We’ve all been there – a seemingly simple software problem to sort out or routine to master but it can take an eternity to get a satisfying result. In my experience, with the best will in the world, even after reading software help files, checking the preferences, often you may not get the direct easy solution you wanted but have to resort to a workaround or even have to hunt for an alternative program. Many’s a time I’ve found that with computers, for some reason to get from A to B you have to go via C and D!

Some applications like Photoshop are complex and you need to invest a fair bit of time to master them. Then when these apps are updated, they lose functionality or do things differently and you have to relearn stuff. Other applications just aren’t intuitive enough. I’ve often found that during a software installation or when using an app, the choice of options and the result of choosing an option aren’t clearly explained. I’m often left scratching my head wondering what exactly will happen if I chose a particular option, check a box or follow a particular route – and of course often the wrong choice is made and you have to start over losing more time. If I get the wrong result when using an app, very often I just have to work though the possible options by trial and error, changing one item at a time until I get the right result – more time gone. And of course don’t change two or three things at once as a shortcut – invariably, if you solve it you won’t know exactly which tweak solved it.

But having said that, there’s a great sense of achievement when you crack it no matter how long it takes. I’ve blogged some of my tips when I’ve solved a PC problem so as to try and help people through the same problems – and that’s my point here. When I started with PCs many years ago, there was no real help other than the good old manual, if that. Nowadays, we have so much help, from a quick Google search to tech forums, Twitter and sites like Mahalo Answers and MakeUseOf Answers where you can ask tech questions.

And when you’ve cracked that problem, be sure to make a note of what you did in something like Evernote, so you know for next time. There’s nothing worse that sitting down 3 or 4 months later faced with the same problem and scratching your head wondering how you solved it last time. Use your PC to remind you!

Have you solved a PC issue that’s given you a great sense of achievement? How do you solve PC problems? What do you find frustrating and a real time sink? Have you ever given up in disgust and taken drastic action! Have you resorted to changing your operation system or finding new software? Tell us in the comments!

photo credit: ap

I’ve just finished our annual mailing of Christmas cards – after tracking down our old address lists and address books to find all those addresses I need. In the past, I have used a card list stored on the PC and printed out but always had to go back to address books for the details and any address changes. I’ve decided to make things easier next year. All the contact details from this year’s list will go into a note in Evernote (tagged Xmas) so that they’ll all be easily found in one place next year. I’ll update any address changes there too, and add new friends and also email details where I have them so I can respond with eCards to some.

Yet another great use for Evernote.

Image credit: Kibondo

Now that I’m the wrong side of 50, I’m finding it’s real easy to forget where I’ve put things for safe keeping. I’m reasonably organized and so long as I put things back where I expect them to be, everything is fine. Problem is when I haven’t needed something for 6 months or more, you try the places where you think it might be, and if you draw a blank, then you’re stuck. I hate that. In fact, there are few things worse than wasting time hunting around for lost items, searching the same places over and over again till eventually you track it down, if you’re lucky.

For quite a few years now I’ve been using a personal information manager called InfoMagic to keep note of things I need to remember – contact details, lists, when the car needs its next service, shop opening hours, when I planted out vegetables in the garden, how long it takes to drive to various places, etc. It’s a free form organizer and the data are stored in RTF files so there’s no problem getting the data out again if necessary. The program hasn’t been updated in years, but it doesn’t need to be – one of its key features is its simplicity.

In one of its folders I have a document which I’ve just called Where. In it I put information on where I’ve stored important things I don’t need all that often – the things I know I probably won’t remember where they are in a few months time. I just enter the name of the item and where it’s located. I’ve divided my document into subsections: electronic stuff, books and magazines, household, etc. but this is not absolutely necessary as the data are searchable. If you store stuff in boxes in the basement or loft, you could label them Box 1, Box 2, etc. and detail the contents of each box in this Where document. That way you won’t have to dig through the boxes in your search.

Of course you don’t have to use InfoMagic. There are numerous free searchable notebook applications out there, like for example Evernote and Springpad, both of which are searchable.

The one downside of course is that you have to be pretty conscientious about updating the Where document, particularly when you change your mind where you want to store something. Not much point in having it if it points you in the wrong direction.

So how do you keep track of important things? Drop a comment below.