Archive for the 'Work' Category

A week ago I got a FranklinCovey planner as part of a course I attended on time management. A week before that I found Toodledo (a friend of mine showed it to me). Now I’ve got this dilemma. I find that Toodledo does a great job of managing my tasks for me. At work we use Outlook for email and meeting planning. I am not terribly mobile. I spend most of the day sitting at my own desk at work. I’m struggling to find a use for the FranklinCovey planner. I tried to use it, but so far it just feels redundant. It duplicates all my electronic planning and to-do lists, but it doesn’t update automatically. I feel like it’s doubled the work it takes for me to stay up to date and on top of my projects.

GTD says I’m supposed to have one bucket, one place to collect my stuff that comes in. I have found that there are way too many buckets as it stands now, and FranklinCovey isn’t making things easier.

If there’s a good way to integrate GTD with FranklinCovey, I’d sure like to find it. For now, I’ll just have to stick with what I’ve got, I suppose.

UPDATE: I took the second half of the FranklinCovey class today, so now I know how I’m supposed to use the planner. I’ll report on my progress integrating this with Toodledo and Outlook.

My boss came in to the office with a little birthday present for me. He’s taking our group at work out to lunch for my birthday. He wants me to wear at least the eye patch when we go out since it’s International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

UPDATE: We went out to the Olive Garden. I wore the eye patch and scared a little girl with a teddy bear while waiting in the lobby. I wore the eye patch up until after we ordered drinks. When the waitress came back and I didn’t have the eye patch on she told me that she thought there was really something wrong with my eye! I felt a little bad for having unintentionally deceived her, but she seemed to think it was all right, and she gave me extra ice cream for dessert. Of course, I was so stuffed after the ravioli, breadsticks, and 2 bowls of Zuppa Toscana that I couldn’t have eaten a regular portion of the chocolate-caramel goodness.

Overall, we didn’t do too well when it came to talking like pirates. I guess there’s always next year!

I have been using Firefox for my normal browsing at work, but found it useless for browsing the company intranet because it asked me repeatedly for my network user name and password. There were other annoyances, as well. Many sites using SSL certificates made Firefox flash multiple warning messages because our proxy issues certificates instead of passing them through unchanged. I decided today was the day to fix these annoyances. The Single Sign-on fix only works with the Windows version of Firefox, unfortunately.

To fix the Single Sign-on problem:

• Type about:config in the Navigation Bar.
• Type ntlm in the Filter box.
• Right-click on network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and choose Modify.
• Type in the domains you want to have access to without typing in your password over and over again. This could include a list like the following: home,portal,service,hr. The format of this list is each domain is seperated by a comma without a space.
• Click OK.

These changes take effect immediately, so go ahead and navigate to another web site and test out your intranet. If the site asks for your user name and password enter it and try to keep navigating. If any more pages start asking for your user name and password and they are part of your intranet, note the domains and add them to the list using the directions above.

To fix the SSL certificates problem you need to export the certificate your intranet uses with SSL encrypted traffic. To export the certificate in Internet Explorer:

• Open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options.
• Click the Content tab.
• Click Certificates.
• Click the Trusted Root Certification Authorities tab.
• Select the certificate issued by your intranet (look for your company name).
• Click Export.
• Click Next, Next.
• Save the file somewhere and give it a good name.
• Click Yes, Next, and OK until you get back to the main IE window.

To import the certificate into Firefox:

• Open Firefox, go to Tools -> Options.
• Click the Advanced tab.
• Click the Encryption tab within the Advanced section.
• Click View Certificates.
• Click the Authorities tab.
• Click Import.
• Choose the file you exported above.

If all goes well you should be able to use your intranet and browse the Internet using Firefox as long as your intranet doesn’t use ActiveX controls.