À la recherche du temps perdu

Time is the most valuable resource we have in our live. I thus try to minimize the amount of time I need for routine tasks, such as data processing, analysis and presentation. I'm not at all proud about the result, and I think that I can still improve a lot. Compared to many others, however, I'm a champion of efficiency.

For example, there's a very valued colleague who has Linux (well, Ubuntu) as a host system (no idea why) and Windows XP as a guest. He's using both in the same grandfatherly style: the left arm dangling down, the right one slowly shifting the mouse cursor around with his eyebrows drawn up and his mouth wide open.

He was shocked when an update brought Unity. Shocked! He messed around in the gconf settings, installed kde, reverted back, and managed that the file associations are now all wrong: when he's double(!)-clicking a *.txt, two Writer open instead of gedit, a *.pdf is opened by Karbon, a *.jpg by Krita, etc.

He's loudly complaining about that, day for day. I told him to repair his install or at least the file associations, which is a matter of at most 2 min. He found an alternative solution: he simply opens all these files in the virtual machine. Thus, to open a pdf, he's booting his virtual Windows XP, starts Total Commander (which involves explicitly agreeing to a license agreement since he—of course—did not copy the license file to the program folder), navigates (click-click, click-click) to the pdf, and double-clicks it. Acrobat Reader then loads all of its supplements and subsequently tries to load the file.

When the file is finally opened, I'm typically already 5000 km away.