Life Planning with Excel

For a long time now I’ve used a series of Excel worksheets to provide a template schedule to organise my day and a place to record any tasks that need completing for the days ahead. The overnight they system received a big overhaul, which is the topic of this post.

Whilst utilising the spreadsheet system I’ve identified two problems with how I’ve been using it. Firstly I would populate so many tasks on the Tasks worksheet that it left me needing to utilise a variety of colour codes and highlights to identify what actually needed to get done that done, and what was merely there to fill any spare time I may find myself with. The second problem was that I became so focussed on this are of the overall system that I would neglect my Schedule work sheet, and would feel like I had finished for the day just because my tasks under the Tasks sheet where complete, or worse reordered onto another day.

Improvements were needed to make this system more beneficial. The first step was to separate important tasks that sooner or later needed to be completed from the additional tasks, that were mostly there to fill in during times of boredom and to encourage me to be more productive with my time. The result was a two sets of columns side by side, with the left hand column featuring a deadline column to record the final day the task had to be completed by. In addition I established another worksheet to serve solely as a reminder of what tasks needed to be completed the day, or the day ahead. You can see an example of this improved worksheet bellow.

Next came a new addition to the workbook in the form of an Upcoming Events worksheet. This was simply an idea to help me keep track of the various meetings, appointments and other commitments that I’ve been made aware of or signed up for, which can be quite tricky to keep track of in this day in age, with events posted on Facebook, meetings being arranged via e-mail and traditional appointments being made over the phone, etc. I really needed a place where I could record all of them down and see clearly if there were any conflicts and know ahead of time when I’m free or unavailable, I hope this solution solves that problem.

The final addition was a Budget worksheet, up until now I’ve simply jotted expenses down on a Word document, but having the figures adjusted for me as I had or deduct expenses is a real benefit and will hopefully aid me in keeping track of my expenditure. I’m already planning a couple of extra additional worksheets, so a menu system is definitely going to be required to avoid this whole thing feeling over complicated. Ideally each morning I’ll than be able to load up the workbook and be presented with an intuitive menu system that allows me to quickly delve into the areas of the system that I need to check for that particular day. I will upload copies of the individual blank worksheets and the complete workbook to the Downloads area of this website.

Working Hard for a Blue Screen

I’ve spent most of the day working on my backup PC which my mother has come to rely on. Their internet access has been really shaky today which has made progress far slower than it would have otherwise been, but it still would have been a lengthy job even without the internet causing further delays. Having re-installed the operating system yesterday, today’s task was to install the many updates, seventy four for the core system alone, not including the service packs. Having successfully installed SP2, and an additional boat load of patches, I setup the firewall, downloaded Open Office and installed several other applications, including media players and a PDF reader. It was very slow going, as the files had to be downloaded over an internet connection that kept on breaking up. Finally I was a good way into installing SP3, with a couple of final applications to install after completion before I could copy the changes to the default profile and setup a new user for the family to use, then it happened, the Blue Screen, I was taxing the system pretty heavy, but it was still a shock, its been a long time since seeing a blue screen was an all too frequent occurrence.

I rebooted the machine, and tried to resume as normal, another blue screen, ah well no biggie, I’ve been here before, and this time opted for Last Known Good Configuration at the boot menu, another Blue Screen. Hoping it would go away, I rebooted once more and mentally crossed my fingers, no luck. Finally I got a message to the effect that hall.dll was corrupted and need replacing, and they seemed no quick trick to get around that fact. With everyone wanting to go to bed, and being rather tired myself at this point, there wasn’t much I could do, so I headed home. In the morning I’ll try a few techniques to fix the issue, recovering or repairing the corrupted file if need be, the only other option I see is to go through the entire process of re-setting up the machine, after the time it has taken, that wouldn’t be a task I would relish doing. My parents may save me from that though, as there coming around to the idea of upgrading the system. I’ve already found a refurbished machine which I think would suit them, at a really good price. I expect I’ll be ordering the new system some time tomorrow, which will make my life a lot easier, though it’ll still be nice if I can get the older machine up and running, so I have a working backup machine once again.

An Appetite for Work

Having a few days doing little but watching video's at home as built up an appetite to get some work done. I've made a few small tweaks to the Socialist Party’s branch website that I'm developing, and its now putting this site to shame, so I'll have to spend some time improving this site once again. Regarding that, I’ve just added another new page to the site, called Downloads it’ll feature various documents or templates that I've produced and have made available. The first addition is a basic spreadsheet I have created to help track items that'll be going into storage whilst I move house.

I had to spend some time working on my spare computer earlier, which my parents have been using connected to their main TV for the past few years. The mouse and keyboard stopped working as soon as the Windows login screen was loaded, after all other options failed, I began reinstalling the Operating System, which as got the keyboard and mouse working again. Sadly another problem has developed, the wireless card is now not being recognized, I didn’t have the original driver discs with me, so either the latest version isn’t recognizing the card, whereas the original might still work, or its broken and will need replacing. As a temporary measure I’ll be using a length of Cat5 to connect the computer to the router upstairs and will continue setting things up tomorrow.

Unfortunately I’m still not fully recovered from my cold, but I’m miles better than I have been, and hope to get more done each day now.”

Computer Revives from Heat Stroke

A few days ago my computer suddenly stopped working. In hindsight the symptoms pointed glaringly obviously towards the true cause of the problem, but as I just replaced my DVD-RW drive in a rather too tired state, I temporarily lost all reason and became paranoid that in some way, I’d done something that resulted in a sudden failure of the display to appear, and soon after for the computer to even remain in a powered on state at all.

Thankfully, I returned to my senses yesterday and investigated other possibilities. It seems that my computer suffered a heat stroke. Don’t get me wrong, computers and heat problems sadly go hand in hand, there is nothing surprising about a computer suffering from a beat of electronic heat exhaustion, but when you have a good quality case and six or seven fans circulating the already freezing air in my home around the components, you do tend to take your machines ability to keep cool for granted. Unfortunately as great as my computer’s case fans are, they don’t clean themselves, and my graphics cards especially suffered from a worrying build up of dust around the fans. A good clean of the fans, and the memory chips was enough to revive my computer, saving me the expensive of replacement components.

The lesson I have to accept here is that I can’t continue to keep putting off cleaning the internals of my computer, something I tend to do, as my computer is usually in constant use, it doesn’t have much down time for cleaning. I now aim to clean the external surfaces and the front case fans much more regularly, perhaps as often as once a week, and will back that up with a thorough deep cleaning of the internals of the case unit perhaps every three months.