Author Archives: Maria Langer

My New Year's Resolutions

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The obligatory New Year’s Resolutions post.

Every year I make a New Year’s Resolution and every year I fail miserably at keeping it. Makes me wonder why I bother. I know a lot of other people don’t.

This year I have two New Year’s Resolutions:

  • Lose Weight/Get Fit. Yeah, that one. It’s the same one I’ve made for the past three years in a row. This year, however, I have a local gym membership and actually plan to use it. With a 90-minute workout 3 times a week and a more sensible diet, I can’t fail. (But we’ll see, won’t we?)
  • Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free ProductivityGet More Organized. I am organized, but not nearly enough to keep my mind from getting stressed out when a bunch of things need doing. Mike bought me a copy of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen. (From my Amazon.com wish list.) I started reading it last night and have already learned a lot of tips for handling the outrageous number of tasks that face me every day. I’m hoping it will help me become more organized so I can live life with a cleaner desk and a clearer idea of the tasks I need to complete daily.

So what I have here are the usual self-improvement resolutions. Yours might be the same. Or they might not. Care to share them with us? The Comments link is below.

Rewarding Reader Participation

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Because reading blogs should not be a spectator sport.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m blogging to myself. I know I’m not — the stats show more than 3,000 page views a week here, which isn’t too shabby. But the people who stop by seem to read (or browse) and hurry on their way without offering any feedback on what they’ve read.

Now everyone has an opinion and I like to think that everyone has additional insight they can share on many topics. That’s what the Comments links are for. So, in an effort to encourage comments from readers, I’ve decided to experiment with a little giveaway.

At January month-end, I’ll give away one of my books to a randomly selected commenter who posted a comment on one of my January 2007 posts. The book is reader’s choice from currently available titles. If this little reward program is successful at getting site visitors to participate with useful, insightful comments, I’ll continue the program for each month with similar rewards.

Keep in mind that this applies to comments posted using the Comments link for a particular post on this site. (Feedback submitted via contact form is not eligible.) The comment must pass muster with our spam prevention software, so if you comment and your comment doesn’t appear within 48 hours, it’s likely that its content was considered spam.

What do you think about this? Don’t keep it to yourself. Use the Comments link.

How to Use E-Mail More Safely and Effectively

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“Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips”

I just stumbled across this article on the Web today. It’s got some really great tips and advice for using e-mail.

From Hacking Email: 99 Email Security and Productivity Tips on ITSecurity.com:

The 99 tips in this article make up the best in email practices. From how to ethically use the “BCC:” to what attachments will make your mobile emailing compatible with everyone else’s, this list covers everything you need to know about emailing.

Highly recommended reading if you use e-mail in your day-to-day communications — and who doesn’t these days?

Wanted: A Few Good Feeds

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I need to feed Endo.

I’ve been trying for a while to use a feed aggregator to keep track of blog and site feeds. Although I prefer reading articles the old fashioned way (on the Web in my Web browser), I have since realized the value of using an aggregator to quickly identify and open the articles that interest me most.

A typical session with Endo (my reader of choice) works like this:

  1. I launch Endo and let it download entries from feeds I subscribe to.
  2. I open my InBox, which includes all the new entries since the last time I read them.
  3. I breeze through the entries at the alarming rate of 10-20 per minute, determining from their titles and first paragraphs whether they’re something that warrants further reading.
  4. I click the title link for an entry I want to read, thus opening it in a new tab of a Firefox window lurking in the background.
  5. I decide whether it’s worth continuing my subscription for each feed and delete the unworthy subscriptions. (Keep in mind that I sometimes try them again in the future.)
  6. I quit Endo and read the articles waiting for me in Firefox.
  7. I often link to the articles I find most interesting and want to share, either in a blog post or via del.icio.us, which automatically lists each day’s new bookmarks in my blog (see This just in…).

The topics I’m interested in most are news (real news, not celebrity news), blogging, technology (consumer and computer), Macintosh and Apple, productivity, and writing. That doesn’t mean I’m not interested in other topics — I am. I’m just not sure what they are yet.

And that’s why I’m writing this post — to get suggestions from readers about sites and feeds that might interest me.

Here’s the deal: use the Comments link to share your suggestions for RSS-published sites that might interest me or, considering the topics on this site, other site visitors. You can include your own site only if you include at least two other sites that aren’t yours that you sincerely think visitors and I might find interesting. Since SpamKarma is likely to flag posts with multiple links as spam, I’ll have to check daily (at least for a while) to retrieve messages marked as spam. So be patient if your comment does not appear immediately. I’ll leave the comments open as long as there is no abuse or until I think I have enough results.

If you recommend a site and I like it, I’m likely to link to it (formally), mention it in an article, and/or mention it in an upcoming episode of my sorely neglected podcast, Maria Speaks. If you recommend a site I think is a complete waste of time, I might mention that, too, but not in a way that would send any visitors there.

That said, please comment!

Free to a Good Home: Carnivorous Fish

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Banded Leporinus needs a new home.

They should have warned me when I bought it. No, better yet, they shouldn’t sell these fish at all.

Banded Leporinus closeupIt’s a Banded Leporinus and when I bought it, it was only about an inch long. With black and yellow stripes around its sleek body, I thought it was an attractive addition to my fish tank. Unfortunately, it liked to hide in the 55-gallon tank it shared with other fish (much like the incredible Ghost Knifefish I spent $20 on about a year ago) and I didn’t see it too often.

When I did see it, I was surprised to see how big it was getting. It seemed to grow like a weed. Soon it was about 10 inches long.

And that’s when I noticed that the other fish in the tank were disappearing. They weren’t dying and floating around the tank waiting for a scoop to the burial ground in kitchen sink’s disposal unit. They were simply disappearing, like they never existed.

I was down to about three fish when I realized what was going on. The Banded Leporinus was killing and eating his tank mates.

Banded Leporinus in my TankBy the time I got my old 20-gallon tank set up for his new home, he had just one neighbor left. I managed to catch him and put him in the new tank. He was not a happy camper. He kept bashing himself against the tank walls. Finally, he settled down in a natural “cave” I’d created for him by stacking a few rocks with a big rock over the top. And that’s where he is to this day, two years later. (And yes, I realize that a fish this size needs a much larger tank to survive in, but I’m not about to let him have my 55-gallon tank for himself.)

When I get down to the Phoenix area, I try to stop at a pet store and buy him some feeder fish. Those are the poor, defenseless goldfish they sell for about 12 cents each. I bought him 6 the first time. They were gone in 2 days. Since then, he’s managed to devour a dozen of them in less than 36 hours. He does it at night, when no one is looking. I’ve never actually seen him eat anything.

Nowadays, I throw some bloodworms (frozen or freeze-dried) and shrimp pellets in there for him. I’m tired of him and want him to either die or go away. But I don’t have the heart to kill him.

He gets very angry when I try to clean his tank. He bounces off the tank walls so much and so hard that he stuns himself and then kind of just floats around. I always wonder: Is this it? Can I get rid of him now? But then he recovers and slips into his cave, looking out at the living room and shying away from anyone walking by.

Anyway, this fish is free to anyone who wants him. Just come with a bucket (with a cover; he jumps!) or big piece of Tupperware and he’s yours.