The Manicou Report

Tech Thursday

Yo, it’s Tech Thursday however. And today I’ve got three.

First up a tool called Karen’s Replicator. If you have a back up hard drive like I do, making sure you consistently back up all your photos, music, and documents could be a pain. If you don’t have a back up hard drive, then think of what will happen on that day when you could quite possibly lose all your stuff – especially the irreplaceables like digital photos. That won’t be fun at all. So do the right thing and go and get yourself a backup hard drive. But anyway, Karen’s Replicator is a free, simple backup tool that you can set to copy files from one folder to another on schedule. I use it to copy my entire My Documents Folder as well as other important folders.

Name the job, set up source and destination folders and the time. Works like a breeze. Get it here.

Next is a Firefox Extension called Menu Editor. This is something I’ve been searching for for a looooong time. But I guess I never used the correct keywords since it was right there all along. With all the extensions I’ve added to Firefox, my right click menu had become epic. Just finding simple options like copy and paste resembled trying to find a needle in a haystack. And the thing is I never even used most of the right click options. So what the Menu Editor does is allow you the user to remove some of the options not only from the right click menu, but from all the menus on Firefox.

Check and uncheck to your heart’s content and feel how easy it is to rid your life of some clutter. My right click menu no longer has a scroll button and I’ve reduced the 35 or so items down to a more manageable 10. Get Menu Editor here.

And now the best for last. I’ve long wanted an extension that better streamlines search capabilities into the Firefox browser. As with Menu Editor, this is also something I’ve searched for for a long time. This is my new favourite extension by the way, and probably the one I’ve been using the most as of late. What I’d been looking for was the ability to highlight some text, right click on it and and choose the search engine I wanted to use to search for those words. Not too much to ask right? Web Search Pro does exactly that and even better. With it I can also highlight text and drag it across the screen. As soon as I begin dragging it a grid appears with my search engines and all I have to do is drag the text and drop it into the appropriate box and voila, the search begins. If that isn’t a lazy man’s tool, I don’t know what is.

The drag feature is so impressive, I removed Web Search Pro from my right click menu which is funny because that’s why I wanted it in the first place. By the way, you can remove it from the options menu itself – it’s not necessary to use Menu Editor.

The search engines in the grid are completely editable so you can switch and move them around at will. The default settings for Web Search Pro were a little too funky for me so I fixed them to suit me. There are lots of options to mess around with so you are bound to find a combination that works for you. The only problem with the extension (which really is nitpicking) is that when the grid is activated it pops up whenever text is dragged. I found out later that you can disable it by holding down “Shift” before you begin to drag. You can find Web Search Pro here.

I hope you liked this week’s selections. Be sure to let me know if you like Web Search Pro as much as i did.

Posted in Tech Tip | 3 Comments »

URP

Make-work programmes are worse than outright social security handouts, because people think they’re working when they’re wasting time. - BC Pires

We’ll get back to this quote in a little bit. I got back the internet this past Thursday after not having it for about two weeks. Not having access to the internet when I want it is not as bad as going without current or water, but it’s still quite distressing. You never really know how much you value it till it’s gone.

Anyway, I’ve been dying to share with you something I saw just before school closed for Easter. There’s a primary school near where I live that makes use of a bunch of URP workers. My guess would be about 10 or so of them which is easy to estimate since they’re usually sitting together in the shade talking and laughing scandalously i.e. they hardly ever seem to be working.

So one day I was looking out towards the school and I saw three of them doing work for a change, but the manner in which they were doing it was so ridiculous I couldn’t stop watching. Apparently picking up trash in a school yard is such an intricate and unwieldy assignment that it takes no fewer that three URP women working in tandem to accomplish this task - you’d think they were manning a bob sled or piloting Mr. Solo or something.

So these three people were walking together picking up trash in the school yard after recess. One walked with a garden rake, the next a long-handled dust pan and the last armed herself with a trash can. As they came upon a piece of trash URP Woman A places her dust pan in front of the trash while URP Woman B nudged it into the scoop. URP Woman B then completes the trash removal act by emptying the contents of the scoop into (you guessed it) the trash can carried by URP woman C. Rinse and repeat.

Well I was in awe. I never knew that trash collecting required so much manpower. And to think that I reenslave myself everytime my dogs make a mess in the yard. All kicks aside, there is something so obscene about seeing that the other day. What a complete waste of time, money and manpower.
Whatever happened to someone walking around with stick and a bag? That’s all it takes! I know that we here in T&T are not as technologically advanced as other countries, but for goodness’ sake we could put together a sharp stick and a bag. And the point isn’t really that they are making a mountain out of a mole hill, it’s that they really don’t have anything to do. This is why I put up that quote from an article that BC Pires wrote
(that can be found here in its entirety). I have to agree with him, this can’t be work. How can this be work? The scary thing is that these women probably think that they’re actually making a honest day’s wage, which if you really think about it really skews the debate on adequate compensation.

So how many URP women does it take to pick up a candy wrapper? The answer is not as funny as you would think.

(Before anyone accuses me of being sexist, I should tell you that all the workers at this school are women.)

Posted in Infrastructure, Personal Story, Social Issues | 9 Comments »