Why I'm so Tired (UK edition)

This is a modification of this page that I adjusted for 2012 UK statistics.

I'm tired because I'm overworked. Let me explain...

• The population of the UK is 62 million. 9 million are retired. That leaves 55 million to do the work.
• There are 12 million who are underage or still in school, and 30 people who are still working on their PhD's since the 50's, which leave 42 million to do the work.
• Two hundred thousand are in the Armed Forces, which leaves forty one and a half million to do the work.
• Of this there are 6 million employed by the public sector. This leaves 35.5 million to do the work.
• Now, there are 100,000 people in prisons, so that leaves 35.4 million to do the work.
• There are 1.6 million unemployed, leaving 33.8 million to do the work.
• There are 50,200 people being treated in hospitals, at doctor appointments, or on sick leave today. That leaves just 35,399,999 people two people to do the work.
• You and me.

And you're sitting there playing around on the Internet!

All that time researching the UK figures, and I realised the stats on the original page are completely made up.

Installing Windows 7 on a USB stick

This is borrowed from Dennis Chung's page about the same title. I've adapted it slightly.

1. Diskpart
2. List volume
3. Select Volume 5 (Replace 5 with number reflecting your USB Drive)
4. clean
5. create partition primary
6. active
7. format fs=fat32 quick
8. assign

Mount the ISO using Virtual Clone Drive. Then copy all the files from the newly mounted disk to the USB stick.

I've tried this out with a Sandisk Cruzer and had no problems (except a minor issue with a raid driver crashing).

Visual Studio 2010 plugin and tools

A long list of Visual Studio 2008/2010 plugins and productivity tools. Since the extension manager arrived in 2010, the plugins on the list are a bit redundant.

Click to read more ...

How to restore the 'new text file' option in the windows context menu

This small registry snippet can be used if you've lost the Windows context menu's (right click menu inside explorer and your desktop) New->Text Document option.

Save the snippet below as "install.reg" (including the quotes) in Notepad, and then run it.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00  

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt]  
"Content Type"="text/plain"  
"PerceivedType"="text"  
@="txtfile"  

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\OpenWithList]  

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\PersistentHandler]  
@="{5e941d80-bf96-11cd-b579-08002b30bfeb}"  

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.txt\ShellNew]  
"ItemName"=hex(2):40,00,25,00,53,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,52,00,6f,00,\  
  6f,00,74,00,25,00,5c,00,73,00,79,00,73,00,74,00,65,00,6d,00,33,00,32,00,5c,\  
  00,6e,00,6f,00,74,00,65,00,70,00,61,00,64,00,2e,00,65,00,78,00,65,00,2c,00,\  
  2d,00,34,00,37,00,30,00,00,00  
"NullFile"=""