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Took an year to own an LCD of the model and size I wanted. It is a 42 inch LG80FR, a classic piece, you’d know if you look at the spec

One of the most annoying things and has become a part of my life is, I never leave work at work. If I’m home, then I’ll be again online doing stuff even on days when there aren’t any emergencies.

It just has gotten into me and am loosing family time! So today after the big release of a product that I manage, I thought of browsing about it and see how others see/tackle this problem and found out this Dumb Little Man site; Couple of points from there, I’m going to try out

Well, it may not work out for me but at the least I can be sure that I gave it a try!

• Change your route: What I mean by this is literally "change your route home". If you have a bad or overly stressful day at work, take the long way home. During the first half of your journey home, turn the radio off and think about what you have to accomplish at work and how you will execute. During the second half of the drive, turn on whatever music you like, talk radio, (whatever) and begin the process of thinking about things outside of work. Do not think about work during the entire commute, you must separate before you get home!
• The boss at work does not equal the boss at home: Just because you are an important guy at work doesn’t mean that you get to make demands at home. You have to remember that the people you live with are not paid to take your BS. If you love them, you will treat them better than those that report to you. On the flip side of this, your being an entry-level employee at work doesn’t mean that at home you can get the "power trip" your ego begs for.
• Vent: Venting is the art of blowing your lid and we all do it. Once you get home after work and kiss the kids, give yourself a 15-minute window to let it out. You should set this up in advance with your spouse but leave the time limit at 15 minutes. During that time, they have to simply listen and let you get it out. After that, you must agree that work is over.
• Blackberry/Laptop: Occasionally we all have to work at night or on the weekends. The key here is to set an expectation when honestly important projects arise. If you really don’t need to work, keep the electronics off. Don’t login just because you are curious. As we all know you will find reasons to email people or start completing tasks.
• Questions first: When you get home, immediately ask how your spouse’s day went (AND LISTEN). Many times their response is enough to get you to think of family tasks and break you away from work. In addition, you will probably earn some points for engaging them in the conversation. Remember, it’s human nature to want to talk about yourself so resist the urge.
• Survival: Whether you believe it or not, your company will survive without you. It is key to remember this as you choose where to spend time. If it is after hours and you haven’t turned off the blackberry, you have to resist the urge to get involved in something that isn’t really ultra-critical.
• No work, no matter what: This is a tough one but at my house we practice it like a religion. On Tuesdays and Thursdays from 5-10 PM I have sworn not to do work. These nights and times actually have a place in my calendar and I have told co-workers that I am absolutely unavailable no matter what. If I were a CEO making 10 trillion per year perhaps this would change but I am not so…I’m booked.
• 25% Rule: When I plan my days, I leave a minimum of 25% of the time open. This time is used for emergencies, task lists, etc. It is during that time that I accomplish smaller tasks that I would have reserved for off-hours.
• Get up earlier: Don’t be a crybaby about this one. If may sting in the beginning but if you are constantly running out of time, take time from you and not your family. As your family sleeps, you can easily get some stuff done by heading to the office early.

Been quite busy with the project almost over and swamped with the exit process! Life seems hell…

During the course, I screwed up my laptop and had to have IT reimage it, one of the worst things that happened was, the image they loaded on my lappy had Windows Desktop Search installed – Oh man, it was taking up memory/CPU and slogging my machine. So thought it’d be easy to uninstall it, but hell no – it just wouldn’t go.

So decided to Google on it, but guess what – there are different threads speaking about the same thing and they differ based on the version installed. Mine in question was Windows Desktop Search 4.0

Ideally, it should show up in Add/Remove programs and should be just one click to get it uninstalled but then it would be too easy, wouldn’t it be LOL.

So finally uninstalled it by looking into a lot of other blogs and stuff, so here is what worked.

You need the uninstaller like any other program but which gets installed like a service pack/KB format – pretty much you’re done if you don’t have those folders under the %systemroot% and I didn’t have it.

%systemroot%\$NtUninstallKB917013$\spuninst\spuninst.exe

The above is what we’re looking at which is not present in my machine; Worse still, even if you install it again, it doesn’t create this uninstall path.

So opened the registry using regedit and deleted 2 of the keys.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Updates\Windows XP\SP3\

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Uninstall\

and delete the key folder KB940157 from there.

Then install Windows Desktop Search 4.0 again from downloading it from Microsoft site. Voila, the uninstall folder is created…

Then just run this “C:\WINDOWS\$NtUninstallKB940157$\spuninst”

It’ll uninstall it completely and you are back with your laptop without performance hog.

As much as I like Microsoft products, these folks tend to bring some of these annoyances once it a while – Well, I’m perfectly fine with it considering the useful stuff they make.

It sure did take some of my time.