Simplify » 2008

If you’re anything like my family, you probably spend a considerable amount of time fantasizing about how you can be more like Peter Gibbons from “Office Space” when he says, “You know, I never really liked paying bills. I don’t think I’m going to do that, either.” Or perhaps you’re like us in the sense that this fantasy is actually inspired by a genuine desire to stop contributing all your financial resources to corporations, and put that money into your family instead.

Maybe you’d rather spend your gas bill in one lump sum on a tipi so you can move off grid and forget about utilities altogether.

Okay, maybe that’s just us. But if you’re still with me, it’s good to know there are options. And, believe it or not, almost any excuse you have for choosing to remain on the grid, when it’s not what you really want to be doing, is arguable.

I had some concerns myself when my husband and I decided we wanted to pack up our four children for the summer and live out of a tent complex we planned to create for this purpose.

They were legitimate concerns, I thought. And everyone out there would have their own, I’m sure. You know, all those really good reasons why off-grid life just wouldn’t work out for you. But honestly, when you break it all down, it’s living off grid that teaches you how to make it work.

Making the decision to live off the grid is like jumping from that proverbial precipice, leaping into the unknown. You can’t plan it all out, because your life from that point on will not be the same. There’s simply not a comparison that can be made. There’s no safety net. I suspect this is often why people don’t consider moving off grid a viable option to begin with.

We have become depressingly dependent as a society. Dependent on convenience, on money, on comfort, on each other. We spend our days working our asses off so we can give our money to people we don’t even like, for services we don’t even need. We are so far removed from reality, in our square, comfy homes, with our 2.5 kids, mini-vans and golden retrievers that we have completely forgotten our connection to the earth. (I can say this because I’m one of them.) We have removed ourselves from being self-sufficient, to the point where even the implication of losing our luxuries freaks us out completely.

While I am still quite the newb to off-grid life, I have done it, and ultimately the plan is to get back there. It does take some planning, but it’s completely doable. And far more rewarding than most people might think.

There’s something holy and empowering about living so simply. You open yourself to experience a relationship to life that is not possible under any other circumstance. Conserving water seems far more important when it doesn’t flow so easily from the tap, but must be carried 1/2 mile home. Fire suddenly becomes more than decor or something you get when you flick your bic, when it’s necessary to keep your family warm at night, or to cook a meal, and when you had to learn this to survive.

It’s time we started considering off-grid life as a genuine possibility and not just something for hippies and dirt-worshiping forest freaks (I’m also one of these). With all the viable options for cleaner energy and sustainable shelter that we have now, this is something we should be embracing as opportunity. Check out some of these links if you want to educate yourself further on the idea.

http://www.yurts.com/what/default.aspx

http://reesetipis.com/

http://www.aidomes.com/

http://www.homepower.com/home/

And for those of us who still have a streak of Peter Gibbons, imagine the resources you’d free up if you only had to carry a load of firewood to pay your gas bill.

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» Run your defrag tool for a faster machine*

April 30th, 2008 | Category: Uncategorized

I am continuously surprised at how many PC users have let a year or more pass since their last defrag, or never have defragged at all. “Why is my machine slower than it used to be?” That is a very common question. It is a question with no single, or simple answer. Yet there is a single and simple step you can take which will improve the speed at which your machine reads and writes data, and which, if done regularly, will keep it at near the speed it had when it was new–it’s called “defragging” (short for defragmentation). Defragmentation remedies file fragmentation, which occurs, invisibly to you, over the course of time.

Tip of the day: It is commonly suggested that you run a defrag at least once a month. I recommend that you schedule your defrags to run automatically using Windows Scheduled Tasks tool. Set it and forget it, as the old saying goes. Here are the steps to do it:

1) Start>Control Panel, click Performance and Maintenance and then click Scheduled Tasks.
2) Double-click Add Scheduled Task to open the Scheduled Task Wizard, and then click Next.
3) Follow the wizard to set a schedule for when to run the defragmentation program (I recommend running it late at night, as it can take a while to complete), and be sure to supply a password for the account on which you want the task to run, and mark the checkbox “wake the computer to perform this task.”
4) Check the box for Open advanced properties for this task when I click Finish. On the Run line, add the drive letter for the drive to be defragged. For example, %SystemRoot%\System32\Defrag.exe c:

(This example is for XP, but you can do it in earlier–all the way back to Win 95–versions as well)

Another thing you can do is get rid of the files on your hard drive that you no longer need: such as emptying your Recycle bin and deleting your temp files (a quick, safe, and simple way is Windows Disk Clean Up tool) and there are some nice applications to automate and/or simplify this for you, such as today’s free link. Also, use Add/Remove Programs to remove applications you no longer use. Go to Start>Settings>Control Panel>Add/Remove Programs and wait for the list to “populate”. Click on those programs you are certain you have no more use for and click on the Remove button.

Today’s free link: CCleaner CCleaner is a freeware system optimization and privacy tool. It removes unused and temporary files from your system - allowing Windows to run faster, more efficiently and giving you more hard disk space.

* Yes folks, I have posted this article before. I remind you that you should run defrag once a month at the minimum.

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