Month: July 2014

Categories
Inspirational Julia

The Little Things

In the spirit of taking time to appreciate the little things in life, both to be a respectful person on this planet and also to help boost your mood, here’s a few from me:

The Little Things:

  • being in the right place at the right moment to see something unusual or sweet: This weekend I was up super early Saturday and saw a couple who looked to be about 70ish, riding bikes with wicker baskets and yoga mats slung across their backs. I also saw a truck pulling giant jumbled letters – soon to spell out LOLLAPALOOZA on the grass in grant park.
  • A cool breeze across the back of your neck when you roll down the windows as your driving in the morning sun: Same Saturday morning I was dropping off my car, driving up an empty Lake Shore Drive. amazing in itself.
  • The way a baby sleeps: Got to take a nap with my niece who was visiting this weekend. 15 month olds sleep hard.
  • Watching sailboats on a lake as the sun sets: Even though I don’t own one, its a gorgeous site
  • Climbing into a bed with cool sheets and the reverse; being warm under blankets when the air around you is cold
  • Hearing a child ramble in your second language better than you ever could: A french family came to look at the apartment I am moving out of and I was struggling to keep up with what the 5 yr old was saying.
  • Sitting on a patio sharing a meal with people you love: Just, summer. nothing better.
  • Going to bed with damp hair and waking up with it curly in all the right places, and smelling so good: This is rare, usually I have some kind of fro going on. but man when this happens its great. No prep time!
  • Farmers Markets and fruit that looks too good to eat

There’s always a million more but this list was inspired by this past week/weekend activities.

Categories
Inspirational Samuel

A Simple Request

Today I read a very simple request.  It came from a 5 year old boy who has terminal cancer.  His birthday is coming up on July 25th, and all he wanted was to get a letter in the mail.  You see when he initially got sick, a bunch of friends/family sent him get well soon cards.  When he got these cards his mother was really struck by how much he enjoyed seeing his name on all of the envelops.  So she told this story to her local news station and they ran a small story about the boy, asking viewers if they would write in to a P.O. Box where the mother could pick up letters and give them to her son.

I’m not sure exactly what struck me so much about this story, but upon reading it, it was all I could do to hold back tears.  I think I was really struck by the simple request, and probably more so by the simple joys of a small child.  I could really picture him running to the door to greet his mother who was carrying a huge pile of cards for him to read.  I could also really picture the gratitude that the mother would surely have, being able to make her son so happy.  I’ve written more about Simple Joys before, to me it really is the key to life.  To not take yourself too seriously, slow down and just appreciate how amazing life is.

Anyway my friends and I went out, purchased 3 cards and all wrote a simple happy birthday note to the Kid. His name is Danny.  It felt really good to do, and while I was mailing the card I realized it was probably one of the funnest things that I have done all year.  If you have a second I encourage you to mail a letter to Danny.

Danny Nickerson

P.O. Box 212 Foxboro, MA, 02035

Categories
Julia Twenty Somethings

Budgeting

Apparently its common at age 27 to finally be holding all the adult cards in life. Your done with graduate school by then, and your loans grace period is up (and the period where you made so little money they didn’t ask for any. Oops compounding interest). You’re probably on you own cellphone plan and health insurance. You may have skated by with car insurance through your mom or dad but now they’re handing that over too. You’re paying rent and bills and living your life while realizing that that future with kids and a family really isn’t that far away…

Some of what is above is true for me and I am finally admitting I need to budget, for real. Thus far I have gotten by and “budgeted” by knowing I wasn’t spending all the money on my paycheck every two weeks, and when I did dipping into my savings. A year and a half of that later and my savings is dwindling quite low and new expenses are coming my way. I have had a Mint.com account since a friend showed it to me in college but I never really used it. I thought I should start with something more simple and then when a real budget comes together, transfer it over to Mint for upkeep and tracking.

A co-worker sent me this and its a really quick way to see what your budget is looking like. I’m on phase one of tracking my expenses for the month to see exactly how much is going out for groceries, food, entertainment, travel, etc. Panic attack coming soon.

http://www.kiplinger.com/tool/spending/T007-S001-budgeting-worksheet-a-household-budget-for-today-a/ 

I think my thirty, forty, fifty year-old self will be thankful I owned being an adult.

Categories
Fixing Stuff Samuel

Batch Re-sizing images in photoshop

This is mainly just a reminder for myself on how to batch re-size images in photoshop. I don’t do this all that often so instead of struggeling every ~6 months when I need to do this I’m just going to write out the steps below:

 

1.) get all images you want to re-size into 1 folder

2.) open up photoshop and hit File > Scripts > Image Processor.

3.) select the folder with all images in it we made in step 1

4.) set the photo quality and hit the resize to fit option then input your W and H

5.) hit run and collect the images in the same folder as the origionals

 

Categories
Fixing Stuff Samuel Technology

Changing Host File In Windows 7

This is simply a reminder post to myself because I always have trouble finding this file.  To update host file in windows 7 navigate to:

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

From there just double click the host file and input a url in the following format

IP address    example.com

This is really useful for testing website code once you have moved it from your local server onto your production server without actually needed to update the DNS of the domain and potentially sending live visitors to a broken site.

Categories
Fixing Stuff Samuel

Delete a paired device from kenwood kdc-bt555u car sterio

I had been struggling to find any documentation on how to fix an error on my kenwood Bluetooth car stereo.  Every time I tried to pair my phone the stereo screen would just flash “device full”.  The solution to this is to delete the current stored devices from the stereo.  Apparently you can only have 5 devices connected at a time, and if you ever “re-pair” your phone it stores as another device so I guess I had used up all 5 devices.

 

It was rather hard to figure out how to delete a device, since there were not any great or easy to understand instructions so I wrote down the steps below. If you have been banging your head on your steering wheel trying to get your phone to pair with your radio you are in luck, follow the 6 steps below and you will be have your phone paired to your stereo in no time!.

1.)    Hit the phone icon button on the radio (its right to the left of the volume knob and it has a picture of a phone icon on it)

2.)    Scroll the volume knob till “settings” shows on the screen, then push the volume knob in to select device settings

3.)    Scroll the volume knob to find “paring” then once “paring” is showing on the screen push the volume knob in again to select it

4.)    Scroll till you find “DVC Delete” then push the volume knob in to enter the DVC device list

5.)    Find the device to delete, push volume knob, then scroll to yes and push in knob in to confirm deletion.

6.)    Repeat until unit is free of devices

 

That’s the steps it took to remove a device from my model radio which is a kdc-bt555u.  Hopefully that helped you fix an annoying problem.