Monday, June 22, 2009

A good samaritan

A refreshing experience it was at school today. Parked the car in an unobtrusive space to allow traffic to move. Following the traffic rules has its disadvantages too. Another chauffeur driven car came up and blocked us plumb with the chauffeur conveniently vanishing while we went to drop off the little one at school.

After due contemplation, I tried moving the bikes around to make some space to take my dinky little 800 out. Seeing me perspire, another man just came over and helped me move all the bikes around without being asked. He spent a good 5 minutes moving everything around just to give us space to take the car out.

t'was a reminder and a justification that people are still very nice and help out without being asked for it. God bless that man because I would've found it really hard to get the car out by myself. Humanity lives on!

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Trillian

There are two applications that hang my system just to see me cry. And these two applications take up a large memory print and will act up mainly when I've gone half way through some number crunching in excel, thereby forcing me to close my existing applications, lose 2 hours of work and redo them.

The two applications are IE7/IE8 and yahoo messenger, each robbing my RAM of 72K and 52K respectively. Eliminating the first problem was easy. I don't use IE7. Its that simple. I use k-meleon (firefox engine). Nothing fancy, just decent browsing and a small 30K footprint.

The second is a bit tricky since we all use yahoo messenger for internal communication and I risk being an outlaw staying outside the boundaries of ymsngr. With all its fancy skins, themes, sounds, croaks, bells, whistles and more blah, the basic fun of chatting and communicating is lost among all those pachydermal worthless cosmetic features.

Having mopped the floor two weeks ago with my tears after losing some Form 16A data in MS Word due to ymsngr, I decided to search for a simpler application and stumbled upon Trillian (http://www.trillian-messenger.net/) which imports all your contacts from ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, and IRC. It also stores your chat histories if needed and takes up a miniscule 3.7K of RAM.

Not having had a system hang in 2 weeks (1 week actually since I was chilling out the last week), I'm going to attempt completing my Form 16As today.

I've ranted enough. If you're interested in a little more speed (especially you humans out there who do not have the new fangled 4 GB DDR3 RAM) due to a lower RAM footprint, I invite you to try Trillian. Its an 8 MB download and is worth the install.