Hmm… That's Interesting

I get frustrated… a lot. Not genuinely angry, mind you, but suffice to say people often do things that tick me off. For the next 30 days, I will take a different approach. Instead of getting angry or frustrated immediately, I will make my best effort to say “hmm, that’s interesting,” and understand what led to my frustration, as well as the other person’s actions.
As I write this, I see that this is a version of Stephen Covey’s “seek first to understand” habit.
And, I am now typing this on my iPhone 4S, rather than dictating to Siri, who has very interestingly stopped processing my input.
Hmm… That’s interesting. Off to a good start!

An Eagle Died A Chicken

A man found an eagle?s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chicks and grew up with them.
All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.
Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.
The old eagle looked up in awe. ?Who?s that?? he asked. ?That?s the eagle, the king of the birds,? said his neighbor. ?He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth?we?re chickens.?
So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that?s what he thought he was.

Daily Exercise

Let’s be honest, New Year’s resolutions rarely work. That’s why I don’t make them anymore. However, from time to time, when I find something worthwhile, I will still resolved to do it. I have mixed results. Therefore, leveraging a new technique I just learned, I have vowed that I will resolve to get some exercise, whether it’s kettlebell, push-ups, crunches, squats, or suburi, every day for the next 30 days.
Continue reading “Daily Exercise”

Fixing Evernote Internal Database Error on Mac OS X 10.7

Yesterday, Evernote started crashing within seconds of launching on my MacBook Air. Here’s how I fixed it.
First, I searched Google and Evernote’s forum for help. I found this article, which didn’t help. The simplest thing, I figured, was to trash the custom settings for Evernote (in class Mac OS style). These are usually stored in the under my home directory called Library, and then in a folder called Preferences.
My first stumbling block was the lack of my Library folder! A quick search revealed that the Library folder is still there, but in OS 10.7, is now hidden by default. Rather than fiddling with that, I dropped to a Terminal to do the dirty work.
First, I found all of the Evernote data in Preferences,with the following commands. These could be shortened to a single line if you just want the “quick fix,” but these are the steps I took.
cd ~/Library # Go into the Library folder
cd Preferences # Go the next step into Preferences
find . | grep -i evernote # Find all Evernote files.
find . | grep -i evernote | xargs rm # Delete all Evernote files.

No dice. Evernote still crashed. On to the “Application Support” folder.
cd ~/Library/Application\ Support # Go to the Application Support folder
ls??? # Look around, observe the presence of an "Evernote" folder.
rm -rf Evernote # nuke it.

After that, I re-launched Evernote and waited as it re-synced my notebooks with the online version, and has been working happily ever since.