When I started writing this post, I had high hopes that I would be able to recover the data from my damaged USB drive.  Sadly, my USB drive activated just long enough to say goodbye.  The LED on the drive glowed for about 30 seconds and then fizzled out.  The bad news was I lost my portable storage.  The good news is I didn’t lose all my data. But Wes, how can that be?  You just said that your USB drive gave up the ghost.  How come you didn’t lose all your data?  That’s because I used the USB drive as a file cache for transporting data back and forth.  My...

Lately, I have been going through my filing cabinet and old boxes in storage. Inside are old paper documents from years ago; notes, pictures, diagrams, charts, etc. Some of these documents have dates in the header or footer or on the back, while others have no hint of a date. The challenging part is trying to place a document that has no date in the proper timeline with others that do. Unfortunately, in the past, recording the date a document was created or updated wasn’t high on my list of documentation activities.  I do have to say that over time I have developed some better...

Get Ready I hate to break it to you, but this year Christmas is coming in December.  It always seems to sneak up on us.  Everybody seems to forget about it until just before Thanksgiving.  That’s when most of the stores dress up their aisles with decorations and start playing Carols over the PA system. During the week leading up to Thanksgiving, many avid shoppers are planning out their bargains and schedules for Black Friday; the crazy day after Thanksgiving when people get up at ungodly hours to fight insane crowds to get unheard of deals.  People start rushing about trying to...

Family Pictures How many times have you been to a dinner, social event or even a family reunion when someone asks if you have current pictures of the family?  This happened to me a while back.  I had to admit that I didn’t have any current pictures in my wallet. A bright idea I decided to take my advice in my blog capture your ideas, so I brought up notepad and added the following note “todo: update picture collection in wallet”  Before I was finished typing in the note, it occured to me this is kind of silly.  Your phone has a camera right? Your phone can...