Bnpositive's Blog

I just came across this post on Joe Friend’s blog where he shares some great tips for Microsoft Word users both amateur and professional. The post is very old, but I think these tips are some great ones. Taking a spin on some TV lingo, if you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you right?

Joe’s post shares information on the following items:

• Copy just the formatting
• Move from one spelling errors to another without using the dialog
• Change the formatting of an entire list
• Save a set of formatting as a style
• Repeat an action
• Move between objects by clicking
• Scale the text in your document
• Change the formatting of the standard paragraph
• Show or hide the gridlines for tables
• Templates are a convenient way to store the starting point for a document

A few of these tips and tricks I’ve been familiar with for awhile, but some of them are new and really do help speed-up your use and effectiveness with the Microsoft Word application.

We’ve all had quite a bit of time to become more familiar and comfortable with the new ribbon interface in Microsoft Office applications. What do you think now? Has your opinion changed at all?

I thought it might be interesting to share a recent blog post by my friend Brian Layman, whom I work with at b5media. He has shared recently on his blog some correspondence between him and Yahoo concerning what appears to be a desired upgrade to one of their services.

Have you had this kind of service from Yahoo!? I’d love to hear your own stories, but let’s get this issue exposed and blown wide-open to as many people as possible.

Angry letter to Flickr/Yahoo by Brian Layman

Check-out the full video announcing my run for the President of the United States here.

With the choices available just not what I’m looking for exactly in Barack Obama or John McCain, sometimes to get things done right you’ve just got to do it yourself!

If you don’t like the choices either, have a little bit of fun yourself.

The social search technology in Me.dium is the latest partner in the IE8 search strategy. Joining with other partners like eBay, Facebook, and Yahoo! the IE8 software is coming closer and closer to the final product that we’ll be seeing hitting the market.

Me.dium’s Social Search has a unique ability to harness the activity of the crowds to let users find information that has relevance based on what people are actually looking at right now. This enhances Microsoft’s IE8 promises to deliver the best browser for what people do every day, making that experience faster, easier and safer than ever. Searching is the most commonly performed task on the web. By featuring Me.dium’s innovative search experience, IE8 now provides the user with an entirely new level of crowd-powered information on top of traditional search, and helps users to keep up with what’s hot, and see recommendations ranked by what people are actually looking at; reflecting the changing interests of the online community.

I like this type of integration into the browser, it’s just not quite the execution and functionality I’m really looking for yet. I understand that power of the “wisdom of crowds”, but for the most part it goes completely against what we were always told by our parents as kids right? "If everyone else was jumping off a cliff, would you join them?"

No.

That’s what I’m looking for things to change slightly. It’s not the wisdom of the "crowd" I’m really interested in, it’s the wisdom of "my crowd" of people. Who am I already trusting and who all is already a part of my extended social network.

I want to harness what the people in my address book are searching for and think is important. I want to hear from my twitter followers what they’ve found that’s interesting. To a degree I’m interested in what my friends on MySpace and Facebook say, but to a lesser degree. I trust the people I’m interacting with regularly. Not just the general Internet crowd.

Source: PR Newswire Me.dium Joins eBay, Facebook, and Yahoo! in Microsoft’s Windows(R) Internet Explorer(R) 8

I’m one of the weird ones. You know you’ve seen them. The people that are always in the theater 20 minutes before show time. The only time I’m not is when I’m with someone else hat has not shared my desire to be early or my love for watching all the trailers.

I love movie trailers. I’m not sure if it’s the idea of getting a “sneak peak” at something or just seeing what’s coming down the Hollywood pipeline for our future enjoyment.

For that same reason then, I absolutely LOVE the Movie Trailers section on Apple’s website. Although they’ve made it somewhat of a challenge to find it now, I always have to use the search form and search for “movie trailers”. Or if you just want to type some more you can use www.apple.com/trailers

Right now I’m looking forward to a new Jim Carey movie and Nicholas Cage’s new one.

Uncover a future film for yourself at www.apple.com/trailers

I’m not familiar with this movie. Is it a movie? Is it a TV show? Somebody fill me in. I feel like I should be a fan of this show. Where did it come from?

Hat tip to my friend Ben for uncovering this for me and exposing me to some additional pop culture.

I thought I?d written about this once before and posted it, but now I can?t find the post. Not sure if that?s a problem with my memory or the search function on my blogs. If this does happen to be a repeat though, please excuse the repetition because I?m still having the problem and still looking for an answer.

For the past few days now I?ve been receiving more and more comments on my WordPress sites like the one above. What?s weird is I only get the notification via e-mail for comment approval, but when I go into the Admin for WordPress, there?s no trace of the comment anywhere. Not even in the Akismet Spam folder.

At first I didn?t think about this being anything other than annoying. When I asked Douglas Karr about it though he wondered if perhaps they were legitimate comments from readers that were getting stripped and deleted. That would really stink!

And here we are wondering what the problem is still with no answer. Anyone else that might have an idea, please let me know. And, if you?ve left a comment and it hasn?t been posted, let me know about that as well.

Here’s another riot of a video from those geniuses over at JibJab.com

Eating some good cheese is one of my weaknesses, but I’m not sure if I can take it to the next level that these cheese eating combatants have in the video.

I’m not one of the few chosen or select few that has an iPhone, but the won’t keep me from letting you know about a slick little website that lets iPhone users really showcase and highlight the photos they can take with their iPhone.

The website that’s going to make that happen is Snapture.

What exactly is the goal behind Snapture and the folks that develop it though?

At Snapture, we believe that mobile photography is the way of the future. But although more and more people are taking pictures on their cell phones, we think the tools available to take such photos are still relatively simplistic. Our goal is to help people take better mobile pictures by enhancing the quality and sophistication of the camera software on your cell phones.

Snapture just loads your iPhone with a collection of additional features and controls that make taking photos more fun and more interesting. Just check-out this feature list to get an idea of what you can do: geotagging, color modes, multi-shots, thumbnail mgmt, gesture zoom, auto-rotation, set touch zone, quiet mode and more.

With Snapture and your iPhone, maybe you folks will actually move another step closer to having one device that really can do just about everything you need.

Now, go hang-up your phone and start taking some pictures with Snapture!

Sometimes I can be contradictory. I can?t really stand the idea of putting bumper stickers on my car, but the idea of ?customizing? my laptop with stickers that reflect a little bit about me and some of my connections around the Internet.

It appears that I?ve got a little bit of influence over some other members of the tech community, or at least Douglas Karr. He has this nice MacBook Pro that was all nice and pristine. After blogINDIANA had a couple schwag stickers in their goodie bag, he decided to be like me and show some personality on his laptop instead of being just one more brainwashed Mac user with no personality of their own. I?m just kidding folks, don?t need any Mac Fan Boys giving me a hard time.

My favorite line about him ?defacing? his MacBook came from his son who said

If they wanted you to put stickers on it they wouldn?t have made it perfect.

As you can see though, he?s not quite as cool as I am. Yet. But that doesn?t matter because he totally destroys me on actually monetizing his blog.