TOPS

Okay, I’m back. Sorry about the break, but during the two months since my last entry, I’ve had a super vacation and now I’m re-energized and ready to go! Well, not so much. It’s 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:

• I’m 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), here’s the tip:

Hold down the Shift key and scroll….you’ll go sideways! Isn’t that cool?

But wait, there’s more. Hold down the Control key and scroll and you can smoothly zoom in and out to magnify portions of the document.

• I’m 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 didn’t 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 won’t do it, an entire blog entry won’t, and for sure, laws in place and proposed, aren’t 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 computer’s OS was on a floppy disk, and I was proud to have a dual disk setup, so I didn’t 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 timer’s refrain, “when I was growing up…” I’ll 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

That’s it for today. Later — I promise!

Just wanted to get into the blog a little today, but have no deep thoughts. Here are some things I’ve been reading about that have triggered thoughts:

Scary Thoughts:
There is an ongoing push by certain factions for national identity cards. Currently, even though we have been coached that our social security cards and numbers are not to be used for personal identification, certain actions in our lives require that we give up those numbers to identify ourselves. At one time the Indiana BMV made our SS numbers our license number, but I believe the federal government got involved in changing that practice. I am still required to give the last four digits of my SS number to identify myself when speaking to someone about my credit cards. That always annoys me. I can’t think of any other way to prove that I am me when speaking on the phone, but four digits meant to assure I will have access to my retirement benefits seems to be a very weak method of identification.

The national identity card might solve that, but as an American, I feel very conflicted about being required to carry an ID card that will be used to track my every movement, action and transgression. Carrying such a card will affect mostly law abiding citizens, but I imagine the criminal element meant to be controlled by these ID’s will need very little time to establish various ways around the requirements.

Work Related Thoughts:
Maybe related to the previous subject, maybe not, is a recent study done concerning computer support issues. Support Soft, Inc. who does contract computer support for large companies, did a survey of the types of calls they got. Studying calls from 75,000 users over 20 companies, they found that some 20% of their support issues were password related! I can certainly relate to that. Passwords are a constant pain in the computer chair for many of my customers, as well.

Any changes in email setups that require me to ask a customer what their password is or to have them enter it for me, will almost invariably result in a blank stare. As most of the hackers can tell you, if you are sitting at a person’s computer and need a password to to something, 5 or 10 minutes of nosing around the desk will result in a handwritten list of passwords you can try.

Security experts say that a perfect password is a random mix of letters and numbers, but the paradox is that any such password must be written down for the user to remember. Passwords are more often chosen for their ease — names of pets, spouses, children, birthdays and anniversaries. I remember a TV commercial where the guy at the computer yells to his wife, “Honey, what’s our password?” Her answer, “Just type in the date of our anniversary!” results in exactly the same type of blank stare I often see on my customers faces!

And a Mac Tip:
If you are using an Apple with OS X, you are likely using Safari to surf the internet. And if you have a broadband connection, you probably leave Safari on most of the time.

The fact is that Safari has a little difficulty releasing the memory it uses, so it’s a good practice to shut Safari down from time to time — maybe every evening when you finish surfing for the day.

An alternative is to download Firefox for OS X and use it, as it is more efficient at handling memory use.