• Do a “reboot” of your iPhone. Hold down the power button and the home button until you get a screen with an option to “slide to power off”. This will turn off your iPhone. Once it’s completely off, hit the power button again to turn it back on. You’ll need to do this periodically. — This gave me a noticeable increase in speed.
• Clear your text message history. — I didn’t find a way to clear them other than one by one. I fortunately don’t do alot of SMS texting so this didn’t take long but probably did not have much of an impact for me speed-wise.
• Clear the Safari cache. Settings > Safari > Clear Cache. — This made Safari snappier for me but I didn’t notice any other speed increases.

Results from this? Rebooting your iPhone occasionally is just a Good Thing™.

Image via oskay

I’m currently very busy procrastinating on a speech class and finding ways to put off writing my speech is taking up all of my time. That leaves no time to make sure I get a post up every week.

/BS mode off

De-established. Is that a word?

I didn’t think that through when I made the posting schedule. I just don’t have enough to say right at this moment. Plus, writing, when you’re not used to it, it hard. Who would have thought? It doesn’t help that I can’t determine a theme for what I want to do here. I plan for this site to be fairly random (like my life) but it still helps to decide who I want my audience to be and what I want to get out of this.

So, what I’m going to do is post here when I feel like it. Hopefully I’ll get a habit going and will be able to fully commit to it in the near future.

In every company there’s always someone who everyone agrees needs to be in on the discussion anytime something might be changed. I’ve always assumed it was because the person was the most knowledgeable or had been there the longest and therefore had the most experience with the situation. Today I’ve realized that it’s a combination of knowledge, responsibility and most important — objection.

It’s the people that say “No”, or more often “Hell no!” that get invited to all the meetings. Everyone knows they’re not going to like you touching their perceived territory so you might as well start wearing them down from the beginning. It’s annoying and makes you want to find ways to work around them rather than with them.

So, if you want to entrench yourself more at your workplace, maybe you should start saying “Hell no!” more often.

I feel the need to create something and have some purpose to all the information that flows through my brain each day. So, what better way for an introvert to do that than to write.

Each Monday I’m going to post an article to my blog. It will have a minimum word count as soon as I figure out what that will be. These articles could completely suck but they will be posted.

Now, consistency is not my strong suit and I may be a horrible writer, but thankfully I have no readers to see me fail at this, so on with it!

See you (who I mean by this, I have no clue, since I’ve already determined I have no readers) next Monday.

His big question is, is of course:

How do I apply?

You can go to the unemployment office itself. However, the unemployment rate in South Carolina is 12% right now and it’s probably a very long line. To avoid that line you can apply online.

The site lets you register for work (a requirement) and unemployment at the same time online. Just click on the Online Claim Filing link on the front page. You can check your claim status and do your weekly benefit certification online as well or by phone.

I had two big questions which were answered on the SC Employment Security Commission’s FAQ:

How big will my unemployment check be?

If eligible, you can expect to draw approximately half of your regular pay, up to a maximum of $326.00 per week in South Carolina. The regular state program provides for a maximum of 26 weeks.

When will I get my check?

Most people can expect to receive a check in about 3 weeks.

Hopefully he won’t need the unemployment check for long but I’m glad it’s there.

SC Unemployment Claim webpage: http://www.sces.org/ui/claimant/index.htm

I originally posted this on April 18, 2007 but in redoing my blog, lost the post. I just found it thanks to the RSS feed! I’ve edited it slightly.

One potentially very large obstacle to self-employment is health insurance. I need to make sure my husband, my two stepsons and myself are covered. My employer provides a health insurance plan that covers the four of us for about $360 a month with a standard low deductible.

Growing up with self-employed parents, I know that corporate-world health insurance is not a given when you’re on your own and that I need to do a little research to meet my goal of working for myself.

My options that I’ve discovered so far:

1. Self insuring (i.e. no health insurance) — This would require some major lifestyle changes in the form of eating better and exercising more for my husband and myself. We need to do that anyway, but these things do take time. It’s not an option for my two stepsons as we are contractually obligated to keep them covered under an insurance plan.
2. Private insurance — We found out through a mistake of mine a few years ago that it doesn’t take much to be denied individual health insurance through a company such as Blue Cross / Blue Shield. Unless you live in a state that has laws preventing flat-out insurance denial (apparently there ARE some states like this), this can be a problem.
3. Group insurance — I am still researching this and hoping I can find group insurance through a professional organization that is comparable to what I could get through an employer. However, several articles I’ve read indicate that this option is becoming scarce.
4. Insurance through spouse — An option for some people but probably not for me. He works for a small employer that essentially has the same issues as a self-employed person would have because of the number of employees.

Supplemental options:

1. Medical discount program — You can subscribe to a medical discount card such as CAREINGTON. This appears to give you a similar discount to what you would get through an insurance company.
2. Holistic medicine — For every medical treatment, there are hundreds of possibly natural or holistic treatments available to try. Many of them are questionable in their success, but I’m definitely not ruling this out as one part of the health care equation.
3. Just plain good health practices — Eating a well balanced diet, exercising regularly and maintaining a healthy weight go a long way toward preventing health care costs. (If only this weren’t the most difficult option.)

This is something that will require a lot more research and will definitely play a factor in my own personal goal of working for myself.

Most companies buy servers from the likes of Dell, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, or Sun Microsystems. But Google, which has hundreds of thousands of servers and considers running them part of its core expertise, designs and builds its own. Ben Jai, who designed many of Google’s servers, unveiled a modern Google server before the hungry eyes of a technically sophisticated audience.

Google’s big surprise: each server has its own 12-volt battery to supply power if there’s a problem with the main source of electricity. The company also revealed for the first time that since 2005, its data centers have been composed of standard shipping containers–each with 1,160 servers and a power consumption that can reach 250 kilowatts.

via cnet news

The standard iPhone apps like Safari, Mail, iPod, Youtube, Stocks, etc do not neccessarily close themselves when you hit the Home button. You need to hold the button down for 8-10 seconds while in the application to force it to quit. Umm, okay.

An alternative is to shut down your iPhone a few times a week. (Hold down the power button till you get a screen asking if you want to power down.)

Heat really reduces battery life so this is definitely worth keeping an eye on and powering down whenever it starts overheating.

via Macrumors forum