Posted on: December 25th, 2009 by Famous Phil

First, I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas!  This has been a long year for me!

6 score and days ago (clever huh? ) I was preparing for a new semester at the University at Buffalo.  Little did I know what I would be getting myself into.  I was enrolled in 17 credit hours (8 undergrad, 9 grad) with a really split schedule.  This and an unexpected Teaching Assistant position pretty much took all of my energy away for most of the semester.  Included I’d like to provide some tips after looking back that might help others facing similar schedules.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t make my schedule in such a way that I could have classes in a long solid chunk like I have had in past semesters.  I wasn’t expecting this to be hard to handle, but I was expecting a bit of lost time throughout the semester.  This is because most of my work is project based and I’m not very efficient with doing work when I have an hour here and there to do the work.

The reason why is because it takes me a good half hour to an hour to get into an efficient working rhythm.  I prefer having a large chunk of contiguous time to handle any chunk of work that I need to get done because I enter a mood and I work very quickly and efficiently.  Programming is one of the huge tasks that I do that requires large chunks of contiguous time.

During the semester I couldn’t find large chunks of time to get work done and this probably hurt me a little bit, but I did get through it.  I managed to get by through losing the concept of a “life”.  Most of my weekends were spent working on projects that were due, and I was limiting my sleep to 6 hours a night.  During the last 2 weeks, I had so much work left to do and so little time that I finally gave up on the concept of getting it all done in time.  I switched over to a “best effort” approach and started getting my 8 hours of sleep every night again.  This probably saved me the most because I quit worrying as much and I started being more productive.

After adjusting, I did start a paper todo list.  I found this to be very helpful compared to my computer based todo list because I could cross stuff off and it would still appear on the paper.  My computerized todo list removes my items from the list so I can’t see what I’ve accomplished.  This was a huge set back for me until I realized it was happening.  I will hopefully have a solution to this problem in the next few weeks to prepare for next semester.

Here are my tips: If you are in a situation where you don’t have enough time to do all the work, I recommend taking the stress out of the picture and start sleeping again.  I found that losing sleep wasn’t helping the problem at all.  I just couldn’t focus.  I also admit that I didn’t get everything done, but the tiny details were the things that I left out.  In my best effort approach, I quit doing the stuff that wasn’t worth a lot of points for my time and that was a huge help.  Another huge thing that helped was a todo list on paper.  This managed to keep me organized until I could finish and proved to me that I was moving forward.

All in all, I did enjoy the last semester.  I learned a lot from it in many aspects that I can hopefully take away into future tasks that I need to handle.  I would like to thank everyone who had to put up with me last semester, I probably wasn’t in the best of moods most of the time

Tags: christmas, school, semester, stress, time, work
Posted in Student Life
|| No Comments »

Posted on: December 24th, 2009 by Famous Phil

Wow, it has been a long time since I’ve posted here.  It is actually pretty sad since my goal was to post at least once a week on an interesting topic back before the fall 2009 semester began.  Anyways, now that the semester is done, its time to move on and start working in new plans for my site, I will probably disclose these tomorrow sometime since I don’t want my blogs to be too long anymore   I will also probably discuss the last semester sometime within the next few days… it was a rough semester!

Today’s interesting topic relates to my personal HP Laptop (Tablet PC – tx1000 series).  More specifically Microsoft Windows User Access Control (UAC) and the graphics card in it.  If you own any computer or laptop with an NVidia GeForce 6150 graphics card in it, this will be incredibly useful to you.  So, the problem is: does your computer dim the screen and take forever to come back up?

If so, I have a solution… but first some background into the problem. Normally with any new operating system, I normally wait at least a year before I consider running it in a production environment (I’m quite conservative).  My tablet originally came with Windows Vista about a year ago, and I threw Vista out the first day I got it to put Windows XP on it.  I would never consider running Vista on any of my computers because of its horrible performance!  Windows XP served me well, but Microsoft recently stated that they wouldn’t be supporting XP anymore.  This coupled with a few really good reviews of Windows 7 prompted me to try Windows 7 when I first got it.

Back in late August, I got my hands on a copy of the Windows 7 Release To Manufacturing (RTM) and I installed it.  To my surprise, it seemed much better than Windows XP ever could be.  There were a few bugs, but nothing that I wouldn’t mind suffering through.  Of these bugs, the only major annoyance was the Nvidia 6150 dimming the screen for UAC (User Access Control) prompts.  I will get to that in a bit, but first, I want to make something very clear.  Windows 7 is the first operating system that I have ever ran in a production environment without it being fully released!  Microsoft should be very proud of themselves for making me feel safe while running a possibly unstable Windows 7.

The Windows 7 update software is quite impressive because it also found all of the missing drivers on my tablet and installed them for me.  Out of all of the drivers, it also got the latest Nvidia graphics driver for my card.  Prior to the driver being installed, UAC prompts and key combinations such as ctrl-alt-delete popped up the appropriate screen immediately.  After the driver installed, the screen would dim and then go blank for a good 10 seconds before it would come back up.  Back in August, I found no good solution to solve this but it was the only annoyance I had, so I decided to stick with Windows 7 for the college semester instead of doing a 10 minute restore of XP.

Now that I’ve got some background and some time in to solve the problem, the solution to this problem was quite simple.  For some reason, Windows 7 scales your computer screen and this takes longer to dim it due to the scaling problem.  To solve this, all you need to do is right click the desktop and goto the Nvidia Control Panel.  Click the advanced button and ok it.  Goto the “change flat panel scaling” option and turn it off entirely.  Once you ok this, your screen will now dim quickly (and properly).

Hopefully this will help someone else out because it was a big annoyance to me for a long 4 months!

Tags: 6150, dim, nvidia, tablet, uac
Posted in Mobile Technology
|| 4 Comments »