Working Full-time and Study, Small Tips to Handle an Effective Life

It has been five months since I was back to school. Life has been changing dramatically. It's not easy to handle everything perfectly when you're stuck in the middle of a full-time job, part-time or full-time study and family. Sometimes you're exhausted. Many times you are disappointed. However, never give up! I will give some tips that I've been using to maintain my life balance in this post.

(Image source: http://v1shal.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2013/07/)
I'm ready for changes, so are you?

Free app: My favorite PDF Reader ever for both Windows and Android

I've been a user of Foxit Reader for more than 5 years. I feel like I'm responsible for a thank, and Foxit is deserved a post on my blog. Yeah, if you're looking for a free and compact PDF reader, you know its name now: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/. It's very simple and does the great job as a reader. 

Mass converting InstallShield Binary project files to XML format

It's been so long and so far, it seems like my blog carries just a few IT professional entries (or another way to say, there is only one, LOL). There were many reasons, but the most important one was that I've never thought I'm able to write anything here that you cannot find  an answer somewhere else on the Internet. Google is a magic wand, with just couple of key words, it will lead you as far as you are willing to go. 

However, I'm thinking in a different way now. If my expertise isn't that special, I still should share some simple tips for beginners (like me), who are struggling to reveal an answer from hundreds of Google returns as I was. Also, if I'm lucky enough, I may receive some good feedback to improve my work. Again, Google will introduce my blog to strangers and some of those strangers may turn to be my great supporters. This entry thus will introduce a tiny piece of work on InstallShield project format conversion from binary to XML by commands (of course you can use the same routine to convert back from XML to binary).  

Self-study, self-organizing and self-push are the strongest power for life

Today I just walked through the video titled "Shimon Schocken: The self-organizing computer course" on TED.com and I cannot refrain myself from sharing it on my blog. 

(from Internet)

Book Review: DK Essential Managers - Manage Your Time by Tim Hindle

This book summarizes some very good tips to manage time. We all somehow know all these tips but we never seriously sit down and sort them out. Sometimes we’re just too busy and let go everything by the order they appear into our lives. Happening more than once in our lives, we recognized that our days just passing by without getting anything seriously done. Sometimes we also claim that it’s wasting time to make a critical schedule since it’s very hard be practical enough and usually thrown in the garbage bin in a couple of days.

Make Use of Left Hand

I’m a computer guy and that’s why it’s not surprised that I can sit with my computer for the whole day long and day by day for the whole year. I’ve been doing that for almost 10 years so far. Yep, it’s my job and I cannot get away from that part. That job makes my top concern and pushes me to schedule for physical exercise as much as I can to compensate for the huge idle time in front of a machine.

(Picture source: tipandtrick.net) 

How to receive and send free Yahoo emails by email clients

Firstly, we know that free Yahoo email won’t support POP3 at present.  

Here are some descriptions for POP, POP3, STMP and IMAP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_Office_Protocol, http://ask-leo.com/what_is_pop_or_pop3_or_a_pop_account_and_what_about_smtp.html).
You actually don’t need to learn about those protocols if you just want to setup an email account.
Here is the informal and non-technical explanation for them:

POP3 is the protocol, or "language", that's used to download your email from your ISP to your mail program/client. SMTP is the protocol used to send mail. With POP3, you can save and send emails on your machine. With SMTP, you can send email directly from your email client software (Outlook Express, Microsoft Outlook…) IMAP is a protocol allowing you to view emails via browsers when you’re online only.

How to protect your personal info

What is personal info:

the info identifies you, makes you different from others and can make you lose your money/assets: ID number, SIN, phone number, name, mail address, email address, driver license, car license plate, motorbike license plate, academic certificates, visa, passport, signature, bank cards, etc.

Why do you need to protect your personal info:

You can show off your personal info 100 times and nothing happens? You may not know that just one time suddenly in those 100 times can cost you a fortune. Be secure 100% is much harder than showing off your personal life. Let’s be securing practitioners. Whatever you do, you just need to make sure no one can use your personal info to turn your life darker later.

 Here are some basic steps I’m doing in my daily life:

Windows7: Using Library to optimize operation on folder

I've been using Windows 7 Library some months even though Windows 7 was installed as default on my laptop for some years. Here is the reason I came up with Libraries. Recently, I open many folder to work at a time and yeah, my file system is complicated by time too. I always need to save many documents on these scattering folders. Let's say, I need to save new recipes into my Cooking folder, save skill-set knowledge into PM and its sub folders (Scripts, Leadership, Small Project, A+, Agile, IPv6 ...) and maybe some other folders for Health concern. It's tedious to browse into sub folders all the time when saving files into different topics.
Here is the solution: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/products/features/libraries