Finding a Sustainable Course in Life

As I look back on the past 20 years or so I see a trend. I start to get caught up on things I need to do, then something comes up that side tracks me, then I get back on course but starting farther back than where I had left off. As a result I never seem to actually get ahead, but slowly find myself falling farther and farther behind.

I see folks at work like this, their offices stacked from floor to ceiling with papers, journals, etc. Each time you walk by the piles slowly growing until there just a path to the desk and one place to sit. I don't want to live like this and earlier in life didn't do so.

A while back I gave some thought to my typical week and it hit me - I'm out till 10 or 11P four days a week and gone at least one day out of the weekend. Little wonder things on the home front never seem to improve. I've noticed folks at work who seem to stay on top of things generally stay focused and say No if someone tries to dump more work on them than they can handle. I tend to say Yes more than I should, one of the main reasons I'm out of the house so much. In an effort to form a more sustainable course, for the last 6 months or so I've focused on staying home more, especially on the weekends when I seem to get the most done. This starting to bear fruit, with little signs of progress here an there.

Currently the living room floor covered with tools as I'm consolidating and sorting through all my hand tools. Over time I had built up a hodge podge of tool boxes and trays. A real mess. Now the tools are finding their way into two, 3 drawer portable chests I bought. This will also make it much easier to tote them along when needed. In the dinning room I've set up a filing system and am tackling a pile at a time. A couple weeks ago everything on the coffee table tossed or filed as appropriate. Now I'm tackling the tax piles. All the returns in folders by year and I'm ready to jump into this year's taxes. About a month ago I tackled the couch and pushed through the backlog of mail that had built up. Now my cat and I have lots of room.

I trust once I have things at home on more of an even keel it won't take so much time to keep things in order and this will allow me to focus a bit more outwardly again.

Giving up an old friend of sorts

A couple posts ago I relayed my adventures installing Norton AV 2007 and Ghost 10.0. Ever since my computer has slowed down markedly and further more I discovered the Ghost Recovery Disk won't boot on my machine. After doing some forum searches it turns out the Nvidia video drivers on the Norton disk not compatible with a lot of older cards, evidently mine included.

Last year I looked at the ZoneAlarm Security Suite, but passed it by after seeing on the ZA support forum the legions of folks who couldn't get it to run properly. I took another look and discovered things greatly improved. I noted they also offer a simpler product, ZA w/ AV for a very reasonable $20, with the option to try it out for a 15 day free trial. I ended up buying the ZA w/ AV which now uses the Kaspersky AV engine, CNET's current editors choice for AV software. More than the $0.01 I paid for the Norton combo, but my computer usable again. At work they use NOD32 which also gets great reviews, but I didn't pick up on this until after I'd bought the ZA package. We'll see how it goes and I can always give NOD32 a try if things don't work out as hoped.

For my backup software I'm giving Acronis True Image Home 10.0 a try. It seemed to work well during the 15 day free trial, so I bought a copy from Newegg today. We'll see how it works in the long run.

I'm thinking I need to give more thought to replacing my 4 year old laptop. It a top of the line Toshiba multi-media machine in it's day, but it seems the 1.7GHZ Pentium M starting to show it's age. I upgraded to 1GB of RAM a year ago, which helped, but it seems most modern software designed assuming more under the hood than my machine has to offer.