The Ubuntu Expedition

This week, I found myself without a decent working loaner laptop for the first time in a long time. And I needed to head into the office. And I needed to work on the train. So, I was left with no option but to pull out my old Dell Inspiron from 2002… Yes that hideous thing you see above.

Considering that it was slower than a sloth on Sunday, I decided to give Ubuntu a good old college try as my OS of choice. I downloaded the ISO file last night, burnt it to disk this morning, and tried to install it before I left for work. That didn’t work…

So I booted up XP, worked painfully slowly on the train, got to the office and tried again. And despite how long it took, I actually got it working – and the process was relatively pain free.

I haven’t tested it out fully yet – the battery went dead by the time I was on the train home to use it – but it seems to actually be not only functional, but comparatively speedy and efficient. I’m not that surprised – I had heard good things beforehand. It’s just nice to have a decent experience with a “PC”…

The problem now is that I have another loaner, and I doubt I’ll pull out the Inspiron again any time son, even to play with Ubuntu. I mean, I can play with Windows 7 now, and that’s the more exciting of the two, right? Right?

How I Organised My Workload And Emptied My Inbox

Time management is not my strong point. Organisation is not my strong point. Keeping my inbox under control is definitely not my strong point… I guess you could say that I’m a bit chaotic when it comes to managing my workload.

But that’s not where I want to be. I want to be organised. I want to manage my time effectively. That’s why I jumped at the opportunity to partake in a time management seminar last week put on by the guys from BlackBerry for freelance journalists and technology bloggers like myself. It was run by a gentleman named Dermott Crowley from Adapt Training Solutions, and all I can say is that I walked away a changed man. A changed, organised man.

The seminar lasted for a couple of hours – but in those two hours I learnt enough to completely restructure my work systems so that now I can manage my time much more effectively and improve my productivity tenfold. Here’s how I did it: