Thinking about buying a dula monitor rig... Here some good info on increased productivity from dual monitors and software to extend your taskbar (it doesnt by default... you need extra stuff).
Taskbar Extender Free*
NY Times article on productivity benes
I really believe that the way you percieve your world affects the way it percieves you. In other words, if you think things will go your way they generally will. The trick is to really believe. Steve Pavlina has an interesting article on his blog that talks about turning negative thoughts into positive ones.
He uses an image morphing method -- basically turn the negative thought into a silly, bright, animated image that represents the negative thought. Secondly create an image (similarly silly, bright and animated) that represents a positive thought. Finally morph the negative image into the positive one. Below is a link to Steve's orginal article. Theres other interesting stuff there if you are into this.
http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-squash-negative-thought-patterns/
This courtesy of Dave at blogs.msdn
Here's a neat little trick which a lot of people don't seem to know about.
The information provided on the Visual Studio 2005 start page comes from the MSDN Visual Studio 2005 RSS feed. It turns out that the RSS source is configurable:
- Go to Tools->Options
- Select Environment/Startup
- Change "Start Page News Channel" to point to your favorite developer related RSS feed.
While I'd like to suggest http://blogs.msdn.com/federaldev/rss.aspx, you might want to check out http://msdn.microsoft.com/aboutmsdn/rss/ for a good list of alternatives. In case you decide that you want to go back to the orignal feed, just change the "Start Page News Channel" back to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=35587&clcid=0x409
Web projects in VS 2005 are better, but once again MS has changed stuff. Ultimately for the good of development, but the transistion will be tough. There are some good resources online for project conversion and MS just released a tool to help.
http://webproject.scottgu.com/
and the add-in tool HERE
Upgraded to VS2005 "officially" today. I have played with it on other machines, but today I upgraded my primary development machine. I have been tinkering with it and the CLR Profiler... all said, nice stuff. Here is a link to using the profiler with the built in VS 2005 webserver and a snippet from this blog after the jump
http://odetocode.com/Blogs/scott/archive/2005/12/11/2611.aspx
I was involved with a project a few years back that sought to match angel investors with young start-up companies. It was an interesting and enjoyable experience. Part of that process involved helping companies with thier executive summaries and business plans. Here is a good blog from Guy Kawasaki (www.garage.com) that covers the finer points of executive summary writing.