New Year, New Goals, New ideas

Posted on January 17, 2008
Filed Under Family, Fun, Tech, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Everything you needed to know about shadowchaser

Jack Corzine has written 148 post in this blog.

I'm a 49 year old Union Ironworker who has numerous interests. Currently I am close to receiving my AAS in Network Administration in Security and am seeking a career change over to the IT field. I love to cook, love my wife and family, and love to live life as fully as I am able to and I try to reflect that in my writings here. Hopefully you will be able to take something from what I place here and put it to good use. Please feel free to comment on anything you wish to here, tell your friends about this website and come back for me. May the Lord God bless and keep you.

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Who knows, maybe a new me. Anyway here goes….

School has started, I’m taking an online history course this semester coupled with my second semester of Cisco (working towards my CCNA certification) at Heartland College. Now this is nothing really new to those who have been here before but I am still hard at work towards achieving this goal. I’m currently gone two nights a week (verses the 4 nights I was gone last semester) which will make my home life a little less hectic and make Jean’s evenings more interesting (oh no, he’s going to be home more now!!). My online class will most likely take up more time though due to the nature of online classes being more intensive than more traditional class work.

I’m still currently out of work but I hope that will change shortly. We are just having to tighten our belts a bit in between times and that is nothing new for us as I’ve been at this routine for 18 years now so it’s just the same old routine. That’s not all bad though as Jean now has both her and I on Spark People which is primarily a diet community on the internet but can be used for fulfilling other goals as well. I’m using Spark People to quit drinking pepsi (4 days and counting) and to lose up to 50 pounds or more. My immediate goal is to lose 20 pounds by St. Patties Day (mainly so I can eat more corned beef and cabbage LOL). Anyway as soon as I get my sig composed you can follow my progress through that. I would invite you to see my Spark People page but in order to do so you need to start your own account there (it’s free). If you decide you wish to start an account be certain to use me as a referral so I get the points. My account name is UFPShadowchaser.

So, anyway, here I’m sitting just trying to come up with some sort of interesting material to relate to you and I suppose it will most likely be items I’ve been finding on the net for me to share with you. I’ve made mention about this online radio utility before but just in case you missed it I’m mentioning it again. That would be Nexus, a free online radio that has literally hundreds of stations to choose from. It even has a toolbar that works with Firefox (and those of you who know me know I’m a huge fan of Firefox) so you can rock out while you surf the net.

One of the tools I’ve really fell in love with is Homepage Startup. Homepage Startup is a start page where you can arrange and enter 12 different sites per page that you commonly go to on the net. This allows you to use your bookmarks less and just click on the sites you really wish to check out first thing. For example, I have numerous message forums listed as well as my college sites and my bank login screen. These are shown as both text and a thumbnail of the site itself so you can’t mistake exactly what it is. Not only that but if you wish to have more than 12 sites listed you are able to add other tabs and to organize them as well. You could have tabs for forums, a tab for online games, a tab for music sites, etc., etc…..

For my messaging I’m using Pidgin. It allows you to be on multiple IM clients at one time (Yahoo, ICQ, MSN, AIM, etc…). So far it is working quite well and I’m enjoying being on all of them once again. Another tool I use on my desktop all the time is called RocketDock and is a taskbar replacement. It runs quite smooth and I’ve had no problems with it to date. I highly recommend it. Along with RocketDock I use another desktop tool called Desktop Sidebar. It has modules showing weather, clock, a slideshow, stock market ticker, news feeds, email, to do lists, and much more including a customizable quick launch section. There are lots of customizable plugins available on the website so do yourself a favor and check it out. Again, it’s FREE!

Just in case I need to access my home computer from some outside computer I am using UltraVNC with my flashdrive. This allows me to graphically view my home system as if I were sitting in front of it. There are some latency issues but that is to be expected and they are minimal. My largest problem is that I have two monitors (stacked one on top of the other) which means I have to scroll down to get onto my workspace (my upper monitor is not a workspace but one where I throw windows that are working in the background and may need to be monitored).

Later on I will post more of the freeware applications that I’ve found to be both efficient and useful tools. I’m certain that you will agree that if you are able to find freeware that is as good as comercial products it only makes sense to use them. After all, I believe that the Internet and it’s various tools should be free to use don’t you?

© 2008, Realm of the Shadow Redux. All rights reserved. reproduction of this post must include a link to the original post.

Related posts:

1. 2011, A Whirlwind of a Year, A Whirlwind of Change
2. Yet another new year…..

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