RTFM? Yeah, RTFM. Before you asked any moronic question to technical support, before you accidentally use the delete button instead of submit button, and before you wonder why the screen goes blue and give a biiiiip sound, just Read The Fancy Manual.

Yeah, sometimes it’s a boring job and strenuous exercises for your eyes, but it’s an important one. Why? Because technical support will have that oh-you-so-stupid look in their face or that i-have-to-hear-this-complain-again voice when you call. Here’s some tips to conquer your manual books for everything.

1. If you’re a beginner, find a beginner or even a dummies version.
2. Hands on. You cannot read your manual like you read your novel. Read the lines carefully and do every steps.
3. Repeat your steps so you cannot miss one step and remember the whole thing.
4. Search the internet for help or maybe the ebook version of the manual. Ebook is easier to keep.
5. Mark the important steps and if the manual is in form of description or narration, do bullet and numbering version of that manual.

One benefit when you read your manual is you can be your own technical support and even everyone around you. So, start to RTFM.

Dumbox is my portmanteau version of television. It composed originally from two words, dumb and box. The meaning is not a box that’s dumb, but a box that will make you dumb. No, it probably not going to produce enough waves that will actively damages your brain, but it come close to paralyze your brain. You must lessen your time and your kids’ time using these dumbox. Here’s some of the reason.

1. In my opinion, your brain is more active when you watch a blank wall than a television. Why, because your brain really works best when nothing happened around you. So, if you watched television five hours a day, your brain become less active than a prisoner that staring at four blank wall in the cell.
2. There’s dumbox and there’s smart box. Yes, there’s some good tv shows out there that deserve a mentions. But the rest is a complete junk. Trust me. Choose wisely your selections.
3. Your activity can vary immediately if you have enough will to touch the remote control and turn off the dumbox. You can read a book, do sports, write blog, talk to your family and join language class. All is more important than wanting to know what happened to that poor girl who being abused by her mother-in-law but in fact she’s a long lost daughter of a wealthy businessman.
4. Your opinion always based on information you watch on television and you become too lazy to find out more. It’s like a tiger who get meat everyday in the zoo and when he’s released to the jungle, he dies of hunger. You judged people, places and situations easily without enough information.
5. Ads on the dumbox will make you want things that you never really needed. You got this perfection imaging flashed every ten second and of course stuff that will make you reached that image.
6. You become agitated when your kids exposed by these too much violence on dumbox and blame the dumbox station and not your kids and yourself. All you need is really a windows to throw your television outside and interact more with your kids. Do not writing letter to newspaper telling everybody that you’re not smart enough to throw the television and attack the media instead.

Really, we should know better than staring helplessly to the dumbox. Especially with current indonesian show like the S word.

Picture taken from here

I have many, many attempts to change my habits. I try to make a habit of wake up early, exercise regularly and even eating healthy food. There’s a lot of failure and many self loathing, but on every failure there’s always a lesson to learned. Zenhabit collect 13 things you should avoid when you try to change your habit, including my favorite :

Changing focus too soon. Often we’ll start a habit change, and within a week or two change our focus to something else. Well, the habit probably isn’t firmly ingrained by then, and so we’ve wasted all that time trying to form a new habit and then abandoning it before it’s on autopilot. Instead, stick to this habit for at least 30 days, and be consistent as possible.

In order to become a habit, someone must do at least 21 30 days of those repetitive tasks. If not, there’s a big chances that you will become the old you again. If you know what to avoid, the chances of failing hopefully become smaller.

13 Things to Avoid [via Zenhabit]

So, the president were talking in Lemhanas when some of the participants fell asleep. He got angry and told the sleepy participants to sleep outside. We might never in the same room with the president but just in case it happens, here are a few tips.

1. Carry a mint/coffee candy in your pocket. When you’re getting sleepy just put some candy on your mouth silently. Do it without anyone see you because you’ll get scorned because you chew something.
2. Move your body a little bit. Stretch your hand and move the toe in your shoes. Hopefully with some movement you won’t get sleepy anymore. Make a small movement and don’t overdo it.
3. Play with your cellphone either playing games, browse sites, or just plain texting. You must do it quietly so the speaker don’t see you as a good listener.
4. Ask some question. This is only worked of course if you know what the speaker are talking about.
5. Take notes or just plain scribble on the notebooks.
6. Lastly, think something that will aroused you, like angelina jolie or maria sharapova.

When you’re sleeping during someone’s presentation, you will be seen by the speaker as someone who are uncaring. Don’t let this happened to you.