I get a ton of ideas buzzing through my head 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This is great and all, but the problem is that I do not remember even half of them by the end of the day. Maybe even only one or two. I needed to find a way to record my ideas as sometimes, they are quite genious :). A quick search in Google brought these to articles that were right on the ball for what I was looking for.

• Idea Recording
• Ten power tools for recording your best ideas

These two articles cover everything from using a peice of paper, to Excel Spreadsheets, cassette recorders, charts, etc. Theres a good list and I am going to try to get in the habit of atleast using two of them. What I am going to try to do is bring a small pad, about the size of my wallet, with one of those neat tiny pens so when im on the move, I can jot down my ideas. At home, ill start using a Todo list. Something like, TaskToy or TaskThis! would work well.

Do you need to find things really fast, search for something from your favorite search engine, or find the definition of a word? Then Trip, created by Glen Murphy would be perfect for you.

Trip is a simple piece of software that will instantly present you with a free-floating text input field when a hotkey is pressed. From there you can type URLs or ‘quicksearch’ URLs like those that appear in Internet Explorer and Firefox. You can also use Trip to launch regular executable files/shortcuts as you would using the windows Run dialogue. Opening Trip is faster and less obtrusive than waiting for your browser to open and finding its URL field (the Trip textfield is automatically selected for you).

It is really fast and simple. Perfect. Go view Trip and give it a try.

Have you ever wished to create your own font? I certainly have and personally always had an interest in Bitmap Fonts, or better known as a Pixel Font. These are those really small fonts that are created as what looks, pixel by pixel. Well, now you can very easily with this Free and Online tool, FontEditor BitfontMaker.

I gave BitfontMaker a test run and it really works great. I have always wanted to create my own pixel font, and now I can. And even better, you can view an archive of Pixel Fonts that were created by others, free to download, by going to whats called the, Bitfont Museum.

Give BitfontMaker a try. It’s a lot of fun.

I stumbled apon the article, Estimating Realistic Project Deadlines, via Particletree. This is something that many of us had to do once before. Estimate the time to complete a project. It is very difficult as you probably know and I usually have to give it a big guess on how long it will take. But for my next project, I am going to give this equation a try and see how well it matches up:

Te=(To+4Tm+Tp)/6

• Te = Realistic time estimate
• To = Most optimistic time estimate (the Sunny Side estimate with no setbacks)
• Tp = Most pessimistic time estimate (with every obstacle happening)
• Tm = Most probable time estimate (this makes you think realistically; some setbacks happen, others don’t)

Let’s say we have a project of developing a departmental newsletter. The variables break down as follows:

• Tm = 14 days
• To = 10 days
• Tp = 30 days

The calculation would be:

Te = (10+(4X14)+30)/6

The best estimated duration for the project would be 16 days.

Continue reading the article, Estimating Realistic Project Deadlines, from Open Loops.

Came across OpenCubes Infinate Menu generator. “Keep your site clean and fast with Infinite Menus. Pure CSS, HTML lists, and a smattering of JavaScript are perfectly blended to create the ultimate professional grade drop down menu.” I must say, I am impressed to see an online menu generator like this that takes into account the use of pure CSS, HTML Lists, and a bit of JavaScript.

I had a nice looking dynamic menu created within minutes. It is worth a try and may save you a good amount of time.

View OpenCube Infinate Menu provided by OpenCube.