It was back day so deadlifts!

I think the hardest part is stopping when you say you would, but that's the part that keeps you coming back the next day is the fact that it doesn't take long and you get some amazing benefits. 

So I just had an awesome idea. There are plenty of amazing wordpress templates out there that are free. Well you can "View Live Demos" … so scrape the ones you like, repurpose to your sales page needs and BAM !!! Awesome, free sales landing page. Of course this assumes you know how to code, but for a nerd out there this is perfect!

PS: I am still sweating my balls off from the workout in the previous post and it's been like 20 minutes.

Disclaimer: The Tabata method is very streneous, and lifting your maximum weight to failure can prove hazardous without a spotter or the proper machinery. Check with your doctor and if you're not sure what you're doing don't do anything. I'm not responsible for any negative effects or no effects at all if you chose to follow this workout. I am simply experimenting on myself at the moment. 

http://manos.malihu.gr/jquery-custom-content-scroller

I spent hours … literally HOURS! … trying different plugins to style my scrollbars. This thing was a Godsend!

I have an MSDN subscription and this is what my copy of Windows 7 started to display for no reason.

Has OSX ever done this? NO!!!

I have also had my copy of Office die after an auto-update spewing out a similar error message. That thing lost the key or activation and wouldn't open until I went and fished that back off of the site. Now there is some kind of "super important" update and I'm afraid to apply it because I don't want to be offlined.

Shame Shame Shame !!! Microsoft… This will be your undoing, you are going the way of IBM.

I don't want to spend my whole day reading meaningless E-Mails, you know… the ones that everybody and their brother got copied on because someone abuses the Carbon Copy ( CC ) feature. Believe it or not, those people don't know that the boss and the rest of the team does not care about the size, color, shape, and smell of … well everything they do, and neither do you. 

Set Up An Important Inbox 

I had to come up with a solution to all of this and the solution is… The Important Inbox! Simply go into Outlook and create a Folder titled:

@____IMPORTANT_INBOX_____

Why the funky name? Well after reading David Allen's GTD I started putting a symbol in front of folders I want to pop above all others. The @ sign in front of the folder name will move it to the top. 

Here's my Important Inbox: 

(notice the 155 emails in one day, and only 1 that made it to Important, that's the start to a 4 Hour Workweek)

Creating Important Inbox Rules

Now that you have your Important Inbox, you need to set up rules. This is easy. As you monitor your Inbox over the next two weeks be a skeptic, and allow mail from only people that you specifically work with or with whom you need to have direct contact. 

• Right Click the E-Mail 
• Mouse Over Rules
• Click Always Move Messages From: [ name ]

Here is a screenshot of how:

Once you do this you're going to get a popup asking you where you want to move this persons E-Mails, so pick your Important Inbox. Like this:

Create Desktop Alerts For Your Important Inbox

.:: This is critical! ::.  You need to set up Desktop Alerts for your Important Mail. That means that when a sender that was White Listed sends you and E-Mail you will get a meeting style notification pop-up.

You can ignore it, but more importantly you are now "That guy or gal that's dependable and always responds right away" … At least you are that to the people you care about and work with. 

In Outlook 2010:

• Click Rules on the Home ribbon. 
• Click Manage Rules and Alerts.
• Find all the rules for your Imporant Peeps and Highlight them.
• Click Change Rule and then make sure that Display in the New Item Alert window option is checked.

That's it… Here's a screenshot:

Now when you get a new Important E-Mail you will see something like this come up:

Note: Make sure you Close the window whenever it pops up, othewise it will just aggregate E-Mail in the list and not pop up. So open the item, and then immediately close the popup.

Summary

So in the course of the next two weeks, when you get E-Mail from your direct co-workers that aren't spammy or from people you need to respond to because it DIRECTLY involves your job duties white-list that E-Mail by following this process.

A special note to all those content consumers out there. This technique is used to make you more productive by reducing noise. You should NEVER move mail into your Important Inbox from news sites, funny sites, Facebook, Twitter, that guy that sends fun chain letters, etc. DO NOT POLLUTE YOUR IMPORTANT INBOX WITH CRAP!

That's it! Get ready for junk free mail!

Cheers!

Part 2: The Rule of Three's ( Next part will follow in the coming days …  )
Part 3: How To Stop Losing Stuff 
Part 4: How To Stop Forgetting To Do Stuff
Part 5: How to Prioritize Tasks
Part 6: How to Archive Stuff
Part 7: How to Clean Up Your Desktop

However that is not what this blog post is about. This post is about why I will no longer support Internet Explorer older than IE9 or even consider what it does as it interprets CSS/HTML. So here goes …

IE has been losing market share at an alarming rate. If I worked for Microsoft I would seriously wonder about what I could do with that project since the numbers are very clearly showing that it is failing. Here are the latest numbers from W3 Schools a site I use quite a bit for how-to and other things

The numbers very clearly demonstrate that I will lose 16.7% of my potential clients. That is a total number of IE users. So I would hope a good deal of them are on IE9. However, let's just say that we split that percentage between 7/8/9, I would miss out on about 11%. I think that this is an acceptable loss, not to mention that I will attempt to steer them toward Chrome. So at the end of the day I may lose about 8% of clients due to this choice. Again this is acceptable. 

We also have to consider the IE drop rate. In one month IE lost 1.4% market share. THAT IS HUGE !! Chrome gained 2.4 … 

No I don't hate Microsoft…

All that being said someone reading this may wonder if I really despise Microsoft, love Apple and think the world should just hold hands and be friends. Well I don't fall into any of those stereotypes. I am writing this application using Visual Studio 2012, ASP.NET MVC 4 … I could write an entire post as to why Microsoft is beating the pants off of any other Dev tools provider out there, but that's for later.

So if I'm not an Apple fanboi or some kind of hippie, why am I hating on IE? The answer is simple…. IT'S UNSTABLE!

You're thinking I'm talking about it crashing, loading slow, having security flaws,etc. Well I am not. I am referring to it's poor backward compatibility, the obvious shortcomings when it comes to following industry standards and the list goes on. However the kicker for me is the gargantuan amount of effort I would have to put in to support older versions of this browser. It's not worth the trouble. 

Need it summed up?

IE versions older than 9 are not developer friendly. Period. 

I wish I could talk to Steve Balmer 1 on 1 … 

You're probably thinking I would give him an earful, and "let him have it" … well that's not the case. Microsoft is a great company, I would hate to seem them go the way of IBM ( I do HATE!!!! IBM with a deep dark burning passion of sheer red hot hate ! ) … ahem … 

I see Microsoft as the 75% company, they never finish anything. Many products that could have had amazing impact and continued to innovate were allowed to slowly die. Here's a small list:

• Zune
• Silverlight
• LINQ
• BizTalk Server

Those are in no particular order and off the top of my head. Let's examine one whose mishandling REALLY disappointed me… Silverlight.

I loved this idea! A small installable framework that could deliver rich apps to my users!?! That would be amazing! However it suffered from what I see as lack of interest. The whole company did not get behind the movement and provide the AMAZING dev platform that Visual Studio became. WHY!!? 

I know Silverlight 5 is coming out, but I have heard a great many people say that Silverlight is dead. That is really sad.

So what would I say to Steve Balmer? Believe in your company, your people and your products. Silverlight could have been great, heck it still could ( please don't drag up HTML5/JS assuming I'm not aware is ignorant ). Silverlight could be more than a video player. 

The point ?

Microsoft needs to believe in their products, stabilize them and follow industry standard or I believe more developers will follow in my footsteps.

Agree/Disaggree ?  Am I wrong ? Not seeing something ? … Leave a comment

I have spent countless hours in the past trying to figure out how to vertically align the contents of a DIV element using CSS… I am a CSS noob of sorts. I know the syntax but I don't know all the hacks and tricks. 

So here's how:

HTML:

CSS:

Why Does This Work?

Simple explanation is that vertical-align:middle only works for <td> elements. There's a whole inline element discussion I could get into but you don't give a shit. 

Setting the inner div(s) to have a display:table-cell will make it so that vertical-align works since it will be treated as a table cell. 

The reason you need an inner div is because you don't want the container div behaving like a table cell. That screws all sorts of crap up. 

Cheers !