When I was in university, I had a professor who advised us to listen to Mozart's music while doing our math homework, or writing an exam. He was a believer in the Mozart Effect. I tried it out, and fell into the habit of listening to Mozart and other classical music while solving math, logic or programming problems.

I don't know much about the so-called Mozart effect, and as a skeptic I don't really care about the marketing claims, but I do know this: listening to music can cause your brain to operate differently. Pleasing, complex forms of music like classical music (*and others) can alter your mood, bring about a sense of calm, and cause you to access areas of your brain in different combinations. This is useful for idea generation and problem solving. As testers, we're relied on to generate test ideas, so try listening to Mozart to help provoke your brain to generate new ideas, or when you are analyzing a difficult problem space. You might be surprised at how your brain responds.

* Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert is another good album for me, particularly on a rainy day.

For things that have to happen on a regular schedule (drafting release notes, checking ticket queues, crunching numbers for metrics, etc...) I use calendar reminders. My calendar is peppered with five minute tasks that I sometimes need a gentle reminder on. This was I don't have to worry about remembering to do them.

From the Windows command line, you can use netstat to displays information on the status of the network and established connections with remote machines.

From the Windows command line, you can use route print to display the routing table. The command route serves to define static routes, to erase routes or simply to see the state of the routes.

From the Windows command line, you can use tracert host to show the route that packets follow to reach the machine “host”. The command tracert is the abbreviation of trace route, which allows you to learn the route that a packet follows from the origin, (your machine) to the destination machine. It can also tell you the time it takes to make each jump. At the most, 30 jumps will be listed. It is sometimes interesting to observe the names of the machines through which the packets travel.