Okay, Im back. Sorry about the break, but during the two months since my last entry, Ive had a super vacation and now Im re-energized and ready to go! Well, not so much. Its both a blessing and a curse of a great vacation that it takes you completely away from the work mentality and sends you back with reordered priorities!
Anyway, several things on my mind today, so here goes:
Im always looking for quicker ways to do things on the computer. IMHO, the computer is a tool and should be used to save time and increase productivity. I use a lot of Excel spreadsheets to keep track of customers and invoices and only today learned that with a good scroll mouse, I can scroll sideways! Programs have to have been written to take advantage of this feature, but thankfully Excel is one of those programs, so if you use it a lot (and try this in other programs), heres the tip:
Hold down the Shift key and scroll….youll go sideways! Isnt that cool?
But wait, theres more. Hold down the Control key and scroll and you can smoothly zoom in and out to magnify portions of the document.
Im fascinated, disgusted and sympathetic at much of the discussion concerning copyrights, fair use, and rights management. As a writer, I want to own what I write and while the very act of writing it and putting it online or in a book is the sharing of it, I would rather other people didnt get rich off what I have struggled to put into words. On the other hand, locking up the use of these ideas and thoughts for the next 100+ years seems a little drastic to me and I think there should be a middle ground.
This is a huge subject and there is no way I can address it any more intelligently than those who are already involved. A paragraph wont do it, an entire blog entry wont, and for sure, laws in place and proposed, arent really pleasing to both sides of the fence. If you are having trouble understanding copyrights and fair use, etc. you should watch the following movie, which is perfectly within the law as it stands now.
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/documentary-film-program/film/a-fair-y-use-tale
I know I sound old when I say this, but so be it my first computers OS was on a floppy disk, and I was proud to have a dual disk setup, so I didnt have to keep swapping disks to get any work done. My next computer had both an internal hard drive and an external, and the external would hold an incredible 512 megs. I was walking in tall cotton with that one! Broke, but well equipped, or so I thought.
Without going any deeper into the old timers refrain, when I was growing up… Ill just say that I found some interesting facts about the cost of memory over the years. Think about this when you get depressed about the rising cost of gas:
Cost of a gigabyte of memory over time:
1956 $10 million
1980 $233,000
1990 $7,700
2000 $13.30
2006 $1.00
–Fast Company Magazine, November 2006
Thats it for today. Later I promise!