Newsletter Issue 124, December 2006

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 124, December 2006

Hi guys,

How do you fare when that report has to be finished now? Get some tips on Writing Under Pressure.

Recently I had a computer problem that proved very hard to solve, so I have published it here in case any of you ever strike the Lsass.exe System Error. 

Removing Old Outlook Addresses   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Writing Under Pressure

The Public Relations Society of America have graciously allowed me to share the article below with you all on how to best write under pressure. Enjoy!

We’ve all been there. The clock seems to tick at the same tempo as the cursor blinks on your blank computer screen, and with every second that goes by, your deadline inches a little closer. Your piece is getting nowhere fast—perhaps it’s that your mind feels as blank as the monitor screen; or perhaps it’s the swarm of thoughts in your mind, so muddled you don’t know how to begin to sort through them. In any case, you haven’t the time to figure out the exact cause. You need to get writing—and fast. But where to begin? Here, several journalists, PR professionals and writing coaches share secrets to getting the words on the page when deadline panic starts to set in.

1. The computer is your friend. When stuck staring at a blank computer screen, Wendy Beckman, public information officer at the University of Cincinnati, suggests pretending your computer is a friend who has asked “What do you have to write about?” and then typing the answer onto the screen. This approach may lessen the pressure-induced panic that keeps writers from moving forward. “Just put it down exactly as you would say it to someone in person,” says Beckman, author of the book Communication Tools Made Easy. “At least it gives you something on the screen,” she says. “You can edit it later.”
2. Clustering. If your mind seems pulled in a thousand directions, organization may be your problem, and clustering is one approach that may help, according to Beckman. After writing your topic in the centre of a blank page, circle it and record every related thought that enters your mind as branches or bubbles off the main thought. Do not worry about using complete sentences, stresses Beckman. Once finished, use these thought bubbles to outline and thus organize your paragraphs. “Clustering works whether you know nothing about the subject or whether you know too much and need to organize it,” says Beckman. “It shows you the gaps in your knowledge and what you need to do next to fill in those gaps. It helps you prioritize and organize the flow of your writing. It can be circular and help you touch back on something you mentioned at the beginning.”
3. Sources on reserve. Having a list of dependable sources you can rely on long before your topic is even devised is a tactic that Jayne Iafrate, senior associate director of communications at Wheaton College, swears by. “It is a process that takes years,” she says. “You really need to work with people and understand how they work, to make them understand how you work.” Iafrate’s department meets with professors at the college regularly to prepare for upcoming communications opportunities. “We run our communications office as if it were a daily news operation, identifying sources all over campus, understanding what kind of sources they can offer, should we need to pitch them for national news,” she says. “There’s no substitute for making sure that you develop those relationships in advance.”
4. Get more sources than needed. To prevent a last-minute race for quotes should your key sources end up unreachable or back out, seek out more than you’ll need, suggests Cathy Areu, contributing editor for the Washington Post Magazine. “I never rely on two or three people. I double the amount of sources I need,” says Areu, who usually shoots for 10 sources, no matter the length of the piece she is working on. “If five come through, I’m okay. If all come through, it turns out some are savvier.” Doing so also may illuminate positions that you may not have considered, she notes, adding, “If you’ve only got one angle, how can you write a detailed press release or story?”
5. Clip inspiration. The old adage says that every great writer is also a reader. Areu clips articles she admires for times when her inspiration runs dry. This practice also helps her to keep her writing audience-centered. “When I’m stuck, I step away from everything, and I read over those pieces. You get in that mind-set and become the reader again,” she says. When under pressure, she scans these clips and asks herself, “What excited me the first time I read that?” and often recognizes a tone or angle she can incorporate into her own writing. Areu doesn’t limit her clips to writing similar to her own. She includes, as she describes, “anything that I like—for action verbs, flow, great transitions . . . I constantly teach myself to be an inspired writer.”
6. Remember the reader. One way PR professionals get off track when writing under deadline is by forgetting their key audience, stresses Bill Lampton, Ph.D., president of Championship Communication. Actively focusing on your ideal response from your target audience can help, especially in discarding worry about your time constraints. “The time that an assignment is written in is irrelevant,” he says. “Readers don’t care how long it took to write it. They just care that the information is there. All that counts is the finished product.” Remember that your audience will only see the polished piece, not the panic behind the scenes. “To the reading public, time is not a controlling factor,” says Lampton.
7. Support system starting points. Amanda McKeen Simpson, in her former position as public information officer for the Dallas County Health Department, sometimes relied on a support system of others in similar positions in nearby counties during flu outbreaks in 2003 and 2004. “I asked them to send me their press releases, and I sent them mine,” she says. When crunched for time and under high stress, McKeen Simpson used others’ work—as well as her own past work—as a starting point. “I pulled up an old release and started substituting,” she says. “I had a standard text for certain things.”
8. Just get it out there. “Recognize that you’re not going to be perfect, that you’re going to look back at some things you write and cringe,” urges McKeen Simpson, who found that once in a while it was important to just complete a given piece and move on. “Sometimes getting the t’s and i’s out there was more important than crossing and dotting them,” she says. Her work for the Dallas County Health Department during two flu outbreaks was done under tight time constraints, forcing her to rush through writing she would’ve spent more time on under normal circumstances. “Sometimes you have no choice but to do it. Sometimes you just have to get the facts out there and organize them later,” she says. At times she sent reporters a fact sheet and promised a formal press release later, just to communicate information even though it wasn’t polished.
9. Train and trust. Lampton thinks that panic under pressure can be alleviated if writers trust their abilities more. “There’s a phrase in athletics, to ‘train and trust.’ When the time comes for the competition, you’re confident in what you do, and you trust it. The same takes place in writing. All of us have a period of apprenticeship. We continue to train. Likewise, when we get a topic we want to write on, we research it.” Lampton continues, “So when we sit down and write under a tight deadline, why would we have the shakes about what we’ve been trained to do?”

© Public Relations Society of America. Used with permission. For more information, visit www.prsa.org Author Bio: Sarah L Knowles is a production/editorial assistant for “PR Tactics” at Public Relations Society of America (PRSA).

Lsass.exe System Error

I got an error message box on my PC's start-up, just after the Windows XP logo appeared, but before the splash screen. The message box said "lsass.exe system error, An invalid HANDLE was specified".

Windows then rebooted. The same message box appeared. Windows then rebooted. And again. And again.

So on the next reboot cycle, I keyed F8 until I got the DOS list and selected "Roll back to last known clean restart". Windows started normally.

However, the next day, I got the same message. So I F8ed, and selected the same item from the DOS list, but this time the roll-back didn't work. Hmm. So on the next reboot I F8ed and selected Safe Mode, logged in and then restarted. My PC then started up in Windows normally.

However, the next day, I got the same error message. So I F8ed into safe mode and then started up in Windows normally again. Every day I had to do the same.

What is really interesting is that to the best of my knowledge, I had made no changes to existing software, no new installs & no uninstalls before I started getting this error.

I did some digging on the net, and found that an lsass.exe error could be a result of the Sasser worm. However, as I had done two full system scans using up-to-date Norton AV and had the PC show as completely clean, I didn't think that was likely. I also run SpySweeper, Zone Alarm, Ad-Aware & PC-Pitstop so not much is likely to get through. I searched Microsoft's website and drew a blank.

So I turned to Woody's Lounge (http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/wwwthreads.pl), a volunteer-run IT help desk for almost every software you can imagine. I had three very helpful fellows come up with a range of suggestions, which I worked through. The fixer was to use the System File Checker, as follows:

1. Go to the Start menu
2. Select Run, then key "SFC /SCANNOW" into the Open field (NB: Make sure you enter the space before the forward slash)
3. A Windows File Protection box will appear, with a bar giving an indication of how long the process is taking.
4. You may get another Windows File Protection box asking you to "Files that are required for Windows to run properly must be copied to the DLL cache. Insert your Windows XP Professional CD-ROM now." Insert your CD, then key Retry.
   This Windows File Protection box may come up several times. Keep keying Retry (you will note that the indicator bar on the first Windows File Protection box will be a little further across each time. Just persevere.
5. Once done, reboot and your problems should be over :-)

However, if you have problems with the System File Checker beyond that mentioned in item 4, just whip along to http://www.updatexp.com/scannow-sfc.html and you should find a solution there.

Removing Old Outlook Addresses

Windows Secrets Newsletter had a great tip this month on how to clean out all those old email addresses that have arisen because Outlook remembers EVERY email address you have ever replied to, whether you have added the person to your Contacts list or not.

If you aren't sure what I am talking about, it is those addresses that auto-fill when you start typing an address in the "To" message field in a new email.

To remove those addresses that you don't want to show up again, all you have to do is:

1. Start a new mail message
2. Click in the To box and start keying anything. Whenever you see an address you don't want showing up again, use your keyboard's arrow keys to move the selection highlight to that address.
3. Press the Delete key.

You can also turn off Outlook's memory for addresses in both Outlook 2002 and 2003, as follows:

• On the menu bar, select Tools | Options
• Click the E-mail Options button, then the Advanced E-mail Options button
• Uncheck the option labelled "Suggest names while completing To, Cc, and Bcc fields".
• Select OK as you back out & return to Outlook.

Just remember, if you do this, Outlook won't help you autofill. You will have to key all your addresses in their entirety, unless they have been entered into your Contacts list.

Thanks to Woody's Secrets for this tip - join up at http://www.windowssecrets.com/

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:

• RDF, Resource Description Framework. A general framework for how to describe any Internet resource such as a Web site and its content
• GIGO, Garbage in, garbage out. Chat room/txt language

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In the last newsletter & this one, we look at some web browser shortcuts:

• (IE) Going to the Search bar - Ctrl+E
• (IE 7) Seeing thumbnails of all your tabbed web pages - Ctrl+Q (or click the Quick Tabs icon to the left of the tabs). And then you can click on the thumbnail of the page you want, and the correct tab opens
• (IE & Firefox) Key the middle part of a URL eg, microsoft, then, to add 'http://www.' to the front, a '.com' to the end & go directly to the site - Ctrl+Enter
• (Firefox) Key the middle part of a URL eg, clear, then, to add 'http://www.' to the front, a '.net' to the end & go directly to the site - Shift+Enter
• (Firefox) Key the middle part of a URL eg, cawthron, then, to add 'http://www.' to the front, a '.org' to the end & go directly to the site - Ctrl+Shift+Enter
• (IE 7) Key the middle part of a URL eg, cawthron, then, to add 'http://www.' to the front and allow you to enter the end yourself -  Ctrl+Shift+Enter.

Hot Linx

For Pratchett fans keen on attending the February Nullus Anxietas Discworld conference in Melbourne, Australia next year, details are now available at http://www.ausdwcon.org/

If you are a Green Wing fan, you can read up on both series at wikipedia, as some dedicated soul has recorded all the gen at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Wing

Those of you with a passion for blogs might like this site, which provides a guide to the best new blog sites (as there are apparently 75,000 new ones per day) at http://www.technorati.com/

And ooo, this is a great site. Have you ever been stuck with an English word that you have only read? Key the word, enter & run your mouse over it to hear it spoken at http://www.howjsay.com/. Yay!

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 124, December 2006"

Newsletter Issue 123, December 2006

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 123, December 2006

Hi guys,

To help your people grow and deal with change, read on about Building Employee Confidence.

How real are those 'rules' like The Butter-side Down Rule below? 

Spam, spam, spam, spam   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Building Employee Confidence

To get the low-down on building employee confidence, we have another kindly loaned article from Dr Carol Goman, executive coach and strategist from the US. Carol states:

"What is the number one personality trait of individuals who deal effectively with change? It’s confidence. Confident people are self-motivated, have high self-esteem and are willing to take risks. But even the most confident employee may suffer a crisis of self-doubt in times of radical change. That’s when leadership becomes a critical factor.

"Here are seven ways that managers/leaders can help build employee confidence:

1. Acknowledge weaknesses, but play to people's strengths. Todd Mansfield, the executive vice president of Disney Development Company, found that his company had been spending too much time dwelling on employee weaknesses. He said, "When we'd sit down to evaluate associates, we'd spend 20% of our time talking about the things they did well and 80% on what needed to be improved. That is just not effective. We ought to spend and energy helping people determine what they are gifted at doing and then align their responsibilities with those capabilities."
2. Don't assume people know how good they are. I gave a speech for the top management team of a software company in Northern California that was relocating out of state. A few days later the president of the company telephoned me to say, "I have an administrative assistant who is probably the brightest, most creative person I've worked with. The problem is, she's married and can't move her family out of the Bay Area. I was wondering if you would see her for a private counselling session, so that when she applies for a new job, she will come across just as terrific as she really is. I'll even pay for the session." Of course, I agreed, and looked forward to meeting this talented woman. When she came into my office I said, "This is a real pleasure. I've heard so many nice things about you. Tell me about yourself. What is it that you do exceptionally well? What would you most want a prospective employer to know about you?" The woman was silent for several seconds. Finally she sighed and said, "I really don't know. I do a lot of things well, but when I do them, I don't notice."
3. When people do something very well, acknowledge it immediately. Timing is everything when it comes to building confidence. Get in the habit of commenting on outstanding employee behaviour as soon as you notice it. When managers at El Torito Restaurants in Irvine, California, catch a worker doing something exceptional, they immediately give the employee a "Star Buck." Each restaurant has a monthly drawing from the pool of "stars" for prizes (cash, TVs, etc.) and each region then has a drawing for $1,000 cash.
4. Encourage people to “go public” about their achievements. One manager I know came up with a creative solution to her employees' lament that, although she did a pretty good job overall, there were many times when she was too preoccupied to notice her people’s accomplishments. She put a hand-painted sign in her office and jokingly encouraged employees to display it whenever they had a significant achievement. What started out as an office gag is now a favourite employee ritual. The sign reads, "I just did something wonderful. Ask me about it!"
5. Help people identify their strengths and then find ways to capitalize on them. Everyone has unique talents and abilities that are not always used in their present jobs. Paula Banks, a former Human Resources director at Sears, once had a secretary who was doing an adequate but mediocre job. Paula talked to the woman and found out that, in her spare time, she was a top salesperson for Mary Kay Cosmetics. In Paula's words: "I found out she had great sales skills, so I changed her duties to include more of what she was really good at—organizing, follow-through and closing deals. She had this tremendous ability. My job was to figure out how to use it."
6. Create small victories. Managers need to design "small wins" to encourage people along the way to achieving goals of exceptional performance. One manager put it this way: "A stretch goal can scare people to death. I always begin with a mini-goal that I know my staff can achieve, and then I use that victory as a confidence-builder for reaching the larger objective."
7. Plan for the future. An oil company was at the beginning of a reengineering effort, and during a meeting I was facilitating, members of the change task force began to discuss the drop in confidence the work force was experiencing. One of the managers shook her head. "Not my staff," she said. "Everyone in my department is doing just fine." When we asked her why they were doing so well, the manager said that every week she brought her team together and spent an hour or more going over strategy for various organizational contingencies. "We look at the current changes going on in the business and the changes we anticipate in the future, and then we plan how best to position ourselves for all outcomes," she said. "We plan our personal financial and career strategies, we share information and leads about open positions throughout the company, we've even planned a response if our entire function is eliminated. My staff feels that there isn't anything that we can't handle." Now that's confidence!"

Author Bio: Carol Kinsey Goman, coaches executives, helps teams develop strategies and delivers keynote speeches and seminars to business audiences around the world. She is the author of nine books, including Ghost Story: A Modern Business Fable. Contact her at CGoman@CKG.com or through her Website at www.CKG.com

The Butter-side Down Rule

We have all heard the butter-side down rule, I am sure; that if you drop toast on the floor, it invariably lands butter-side down. Some call it a variation of Sods Law - "Anything that can go wrong, will" - some call it a corollary of Murphy's Law - "Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong" (for more, go to http://en.wikipedia.org or http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/hills/3678/nature.htm).

Well, recently scientists have discovered why toast falls butter side down. And interestingly, by 'scientists', I mean researchers from TV show Mythbusters, which is a bit of a laugh. However, what is more interesting, Mythbusters have apparently discovered how to STOP your toast landing butter-side down.

The BBC interviewed Mythbusters presenters Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who say we can prevent our toast doing the butter-down dive by spreading it correctly - if you press firmly and quickly with the knife as you spread, the surface of the bread changes. A dip is created on the toast which then affects the way it falls. In tests, the Mythbusters buttering method meant the toast landed butter-side up 29 times out of 50.

Savage and Hyneman concluded "Just like when a leaf falls from a tree, it will always have a tendency to land with the curved sides up."

We learn something new every day :-)

Spam, spam, spam, spam...

Woody's Watch, the creators of the excellent Office Watch recently posted this article online (at http://news.office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=42).

The producer of the canned pork product Spam has lost a bid to stop companies using the word ‘Spam’ as a nickname for unwanted email.

The name ‘Spam’ originally meant ‘Spiced Ham’ back in 1937 when Hormel Foods Corp. started the product. In the 70’s Spam became part of pop culture with the help of the Monty Python comedy team and their famous ‘Spam’ routine, complete with Vikings singing ‘Spam, Spam, Spam’ throughout.

Hormel, makers of Spam (the food) have embraced the Monty Python connection in recent times. If you see the musical ‘Spamalot’ (in New York or London) among the extras on sale are specially labelled cans of Spam.

When unwanted email started arriving it was nicknamed ‘Spam’ by the then small Internet community, who were mostly also Monty Python fans.

Hormel’s problem is when email related companies use their trademark which is why they ended up in front of the European Union trademark tribunal. Sadly the officials decided that ‘spam’ is now used more to mean unwanted email and not the food product. We loved the quote from a company official who said "Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk e-mail?”

With Spam-a-lot (the musical version of Holy Grail by Eric Idle) just being released in London for its first season, yet another complicating matter is that a number of firms have used 'Spam' in their product names or in their company name: take Spamhaus, for example. A UK-based company with a team of 25 investigators who block between eight billion and ten billion email messages per day, with its database being used by several major security vendors, including Microsoft.

Once a word moves into common usage, the Trademark right disappears. I suspect that Spam is no longer Hormel's intellectual property. I hope it is not still listed on their balance sheet!

 

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:

• HIPS, Host-based Intrusion Prevention System. Anything that contributes to preventing intrusion (ie antivirus, antispyware, file-integrity checkers, and firewalls), though usually products which deploy (1) protocol validation, (2) virtualization or sandboxing, and (3) code execution prevention.

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In this newsletter & the next, we are going to look at some web browser shortcuts:

• (Firefox) Re-opening the tab you just closed - Ctrl+Shift+T
• (Firefox) Going to the Search bar - Ctrl+K
• (IE and Firefox) Opening a new tab, and moving the cursor up into the address bar, ready for you to type a URL - Ctrl+T
• (IE and Firefox) Closing the current tab - Ctrl+W
• (IE and Firefox) opening a hyperlink destination in a new tab - click on the link while holding down the Ctrl key OR clicking the "middle" mouse button (that's the scroll wheel)
• (IE and Firefox) closing an open tab - click the "middle" mouse button on the tab title closes the tab
• (IE and Firefox) opening a hyperlink destination in a new browser window - click on the link while holding down the Shift key
• (IE and Firefox) Opening a web page in a new tab after keying in the URL in the address bar - Alt+Enter
• (IE and Firefox) Opening a search in a new tab after typing in the Search bar - Alt+Enter
• (IE and Firefox) Zoom in & out of the page - hold down the Ctrl key and scroll the mouse wheel up or down.
• (IE and Firefox) Finding menu - Ctrl+F
• (IE and Firefox) Viewing history - Ctrl+H

Hot Linx

For those of you using the most secure web browser (Mozilla Firefox), there are a vast range of things you can customise. Go to http://kb.mozillazine.org/Category:Preferences to get the full list. And to download the latest version of Firefox, go to http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

If you don't like Zone Alarm, try eEye's 'Blink' - a HIPS software beta, free for personal use. Download from http://www.eeye.com/html/products/blink/personal/index.html 

And for those of you who can remember lots of album covers from the last third of last century, go & take a look at this bad taste animation at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6bUD9PJ6i8&eurl=

And check out this online video jigsaw puzzle where you drag & drop the pieces with your mouse to assemble it at http://www.brl.ntt.co.jp/people/hara/fly.swf

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 123, December 2006"

Newsletter Issue 122, November 2006

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 122, November 2006

Hi guys,

We hear so much about our power or lack of it - but should we be dreaming Electric Dreams?

Read how universities may have one of their IT problems solved in Uni-que IT. 

Random Numbers in Excel   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Electric Dreams

New Zealand's electricity consumption has been increasing faster than our population growth for a long time. Our usage over the past thirty years is as follows (from Consumer Magazine):

• 1974 - 5300kWh/person
• 1984 - 7100kWh/person
• 1994 - 8100kWh/person
• 2004 - 8800kWh/person
• 2006 (estimated by usage to June being 2004 x 1.5%) - 8932kWh/person
• 2014 (Projected using simple trendline) - 10000kWh/person

To me, this sparks two questions: why is our demand increasing so much; and is the Government being realistic in suggesting that we can save electricity and not have to invest heavily in new generation?

Firstly, I would like to deal with the question of our increasing demand, from a personal and observational perspective. I have seen a growing trend whereby nearly everything we use relies on electricity. If it is not run from the mains while you are using it, it has a battery that is recharged using mains supply.

The new technology is invasive and rather exhausting, when you consider what didn't exist for the hoi polloi in 1974. Our toothbrushes, the power-assisted head for the vacuum cleaner, our DVD players, our digital cameras, our landlines, our mobile phones, our lawn mowers, our heat pumps, our room deodorisers and our automatic garage doors. The hot glue gun, the can opener, the garbage disposal, the dehumidifier, the range hood, the espresso machine. The walkman, the iPod, the PC, the PDA, the printer, the video machine (if you still have one), the microwave, the spa pool, the air conditioning and the dinky little halogen lights that come on when we open the cupboard doors. And of course there is the stand-by mode, using electricity 24/7, that nearly all our equipment operates on, sneakily using more power.

In addition, we buy so much more STUFF in 2006. There is so much demand on our wallets that we have invented a new hobby; shopping. Take any rainy day & once upon a time we would have all been at home reading or playing board games. Now we are all out shopping, increasing our already blown-out personal debt situation.

And someone, somewhere along the way has to make all that stuff. And ship it to us. And in some shape or form, all the transactions along the way chew up more electricity.

That wouldn't be a problem, except we haven't invested in enough new generation to keep up with our increasing demand. Instead we have ridden high on the foresight of electrical engineers from the 1950s and 60s who built so much additional capacity into our national electricity grid and infrastructure that it has done us proud for fifty years.

So what will our legacy be for our descendent consumers, fifty years down the track? Will we have built extra fat into the large new generation projects that the country is investing in?

Pretty unlikely given our incredibly selfish attitudes (NIMBY and NOTE). The wind turbines furore in the Makara Valley in Wellington spring to mind... or the RMA roadblocks for the Dobson scheme on the West Coast.

Secondly, there's our ability to 'save' electricity. Most of the new equipment we buy is already very energy efficient. Sure we can all learn better habits - turn off machinery on standby for example - but as New Zealand domestic use is 13% of the total energy consumption, there is not a lot of energy savings to be made there. A saving of perhaps 5% on the 13% is not really going to reduce overall demand by that much.

Then there is the other issue of manufacturers are constantly creating new products to tease our cash and credit from our wallets. I don't think that this is a trend which is suddenly going to reverse. There appear to be no new or emerging technologies which are going to make the need for additional electricity generation redundant in the next five minutes.

So where does that leave us? I think this leaves us in a hole where we need more power at a commercial and domestic level. We do not have sufficient generation capacity or infrastructure to meet our needs now, let alone next year.

Apparently there is a ten year lead time to get new generation online - so there is no time to waste. We must start planning new projects, at a national level, today.

Uni-que IT

Just imagine being the IT Manager for a University. About the same IT job as for a large company, you might think?

Well, no. Universities aren't able to impose a security policies common to commercial organisations. And why? Because increasingly students own and administer their own laptops and broadband or wireless connections, and the Universities can’t dictate what hardware and software students should use on their own equipment.

So this creates a fairly large headache. How do you contain the threat of x to the x power of combinations of leaky software, downloads & email traffic; all charging through the Uni network at broadband rates? Threats can only be detected as and when they appear, then the University network has to contain them somehow.

To meet this issue, Alcatel has developed an “on-the-fly” software solution to address this problem which has already been used successfully in the United States. Alcatel implements the OmniVista "Quarantine Manager" software on its Omnistation backbone switch. It then works in each instance by locating an attacking device and applying a quarantine policy to it on the fly.

Typically, this will prevent the device from accessing any server on the network apart from a single, quarantined machine that can then interact with the infected device, and its owner, so as to clean-up the infection. To read more about it, go to Alcatel's article on Gordon College at http://www.alcatel.com/com/en/apphtml/atrarticle/2006q1delivering21stcenturyeducationatgordoncollege05enhtmltcm172659981635.jhtml

The IT gurus at our institutions of learning can heave a sigh of relief!

Random Numbers in Excel

Those of you who have used the straight random number generator function in Excel, '=rand()', might be a bit peeved because of the format limitations. Entering '=rand()' will return you a random number LESS than 1 and greater than or equal to 0. While you can have up to 9 decimal places (ie 0.999999999), it really isn't suitable for drawing the weekly office raffle.

However, if you want whole numbers (integers, or 'int' in Excel-speak), you can combine the rand() function with the int() function to return a whole random number. So keying in =int(rand()*100) would generate a random integer between 0 and 99 inclusive; =int(rand()*51) between 0 and 50, inclusive.

However, you probably won't have a zero in your office raffle draw, so to get whole numbers between 1 and 100 inclusive, then simply shift the range by adding 1: =int(rand()*100) + 1. To get dice rolls, use =int(rand()*6) + 1.

As usual, to update the random number, just hit F9, and a new random number will be generated (F9 re-calculates formulas on all open worksheets).

If you want to check that your formula is working correctly, fill-handle it into a string of cells, hit F9 a few times, and check that the random numbers generated are within the range you want.

 

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLAs for you:

• LOBi, Line of Business Interoperability. A new feature in Microsoft Vista's Sharepoint 2007. There are a whole lot of acronyms and no doubt we will all hear lots about LOBi.
• NIMBY, Not In My Back Yard. You build/change/install things where you like, but not near me because I don't want to look at it/be reminded of mans' ability to generate electricity/have to look at mussel buoys/have the speedway that I moved next to actually operating.
• NOTE, Not Over There Either. Actually we don't want you to build/change/install things at all. Anywhere. We are Luddites and would rather the lights went out, the mussels weren't available, the speedway didn't provide a safe outlet for boys who wanted to race. Until they do go out, there are no mussels or the boys hoon on the streets, and then these people scream blue murder.

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In this newsletter, we look at only one handy little shortcut:

• Excel "Alternate between displaying cell values and displaying cell formulas" - Ctrl & grave (`)

This is a toggle function which shows all formulas on a spreadsheet, which is especially useful when you have a link to another workbook that you want to get rid of. Toggle Show Formulas on, look for a stray "C:/" in a formula and reroute it. Very, very handy!

Hot Linx

At a loss as to what to get people for Christmas? Or need to guide someone on what you want for Christmas (ah... a season of grasping!). Check out gift ideas at http://www.iwantthat.co.nz/

If you are stuck with a tech problem and can't find the answer, then this new website might be the place for you to find the answer. Check out http://qunu.com/

And for a laugh, check out the http://www.likebetter.com/ website. Click on the images you like better (hence the name) and 'the brain' will decide if you are male or female, went to varsity etc, etc.

The new UK Honda ad - reportedly made for £3m & over 3 months - can be seen on the internet at http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/honda.php

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 122, November 2006"

Newsletter Issue 121, October 2006

Sam Young Newsletter

Issue 121, October 2006

Hi guys,

If you have seen our Kiwi apples slagvertised in Europe dripping with oil, check out the Food Miles Debate below.

Where does all that climate change information come from? Check out Earth Two to find out. 

Selecting Chunks of Text in Word   TLAs for SMEs        Tips, Short & Hot Keys        Hot Linx

Don't forget, if you want to be taken off my mailing list, click here to send me a reply e-mail and I will remove your name.

Food Miles Debate

The Northern Hemisphere concept of "food miles'" argues that buyers should choose food that has travelled the shortest distance to get to their table to reduce their environmental consumption costs. The question of how far their food has travelled now has a growing influence on many European consumers' purchasing decisions. "Buy Local" is a growing rallying cry in Europe, supported by environmentalists, farmers and consumer groups.

European ad campaigns have already knocked Kiwi products over food miles. New Zealand apples have been shown dripping oil, and Anchor butter has been shown comparing a rusty container ship slogging 11,000 miles with a story-book illustration of an English farm. This approach has serious implications for New Zealand, as in 2003, 10% of our workforce were employed in food and beverage; 70,000 in manufacturing and 125,000 in farming.

But how real is the "food miles" debate? Is this an environmental cause, or have inefficient European farmers developed this as a marketing ploy to protect themselves?

The strongest advocates for food miles are - surprise, surprise - British farmers. The Farmer's Weekly magazine runs "The Food Miles Campaign", promoting the cause into schools, to celebrities and to the media. Their campaign website is thick with rhetoric, thin with facts, stating "Food miles harm the environment. Transporting food large distances uses a lot of fuel, whether it travels by lorry or plane. That means more carbon dioxide emissions and more global warming" and "More food miles means more transport cost. Aviation fuel and lorry diesel aren't cheap, so the further food travels the more cost it incurs. Who pays those costs in the end? Consumers, of course."

Reducing emissions is a great idea, but British farmers don't mention their own inefficient farming practices, which are often so inefficient it is more sustainable to produce goods outside the UK and import them. The total resource and environmental cost of production and transport can be significantly less than the cost of local production; for example, the UK gas heated glasshouses used to grow tomatoes in comparison to imported, naturally grown Spanish tomatoes.

In 2003, Which? magazine in the UK (Britain's equivalent of Consumer), ran an article on food miles which concluded that while there can be good reasons to buy some local foods, it also found there was greater resource wasteage and a higher environmental cost to grow crops unsuited to the UK climate in a bid to avoid imports.

Professor Caroline Saunders, and colleagues Andrew Barber and Greg Taylor for the agribusiness and economics research unit of Lincoln University, claim that New Zealand is much more efficient in total energy used to produce, store and transport food items, mostly by ship, notwithstanding its substantial distance from EU markets. Their report states that the Food Miles "debate which only includes the distance food travels is spurious as it does not consider total energy use especially in production." When all the energy inputs are calculated, this country is four times as efficient as European countries in producing lamb and more than twice as efficient in dairy. New Zealand apples are also more energy-efficiently produced, as are onions, when the necessity for out-of-season storage of the local crop is included.

There are several reasons why. The climate here is good. Farming is a major industry and benefits from efficiencies of scale. We have some of the best agricultural scientists in the world leading constant efforts to improve production. And most of our production is transported by ships, which are a very energy-efficient way to move food round compared with trucks, rail or airfreight.

However, if we look at ourselves, purchasing in New Zealand, how do we know whether the food we buy is energy efficient? How do we find out if, when NZ tomatoes are out of season, fresh imports from Queensland are more energy-efficient than NZ glasshouse tomatoes? Or canned? Tropical and semi-tropical fruits and vegetables from other countries may have a lower environmental impact than growing them here - depending on how they're transported.

The distance food has travelled is not, on its own, a good measure of resource efficiency or total environmental impact. But until we have some real baseline to compare things to when we purchase, we have no real way of knowing what is efficient. Except our own Kiwi-grown produce, of course!

Earth Two

In 2002, the Earth Simulator, the then fastest super computer in the world, became operational just outside Tokyo. Now sliding down to only 10th place on the Top 500 computers on the planet, the Earth Simulator still does very valuable work, mirroring the Earth using holistic simulations of global climate, in both the atmosphere and the oceans, down to a precision of 10km.

The Earth Simulator uses information from satellites and other observation points to track rainfall, sea temperatures and movements in the Earth’s crust. This helps scientists predict natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as global changes in climate, including, for example, global warming.

Tetsuya Sato, director of the Earth Simulator Centre, relates “The predictions we can make are more and more scientifically sound. The Earth Simulator has changed the concept of simulation. It has made it possible to deal with the whole [global] system at once because of its memory and speed [capacities].” Previously it was possible to simulate only parts of the system, and this did not provide enough information to predict how the whole global system would evolve. “Now human beings can make predictions of the future evolution of the whole system — the whole globe,” he says. “That makes the Earth Simulator a useful tool for humankind.”

Composed of 62 super-computers, The Earth Simulator has 35.86 Tflops (tera floating point operations per second) of capability with a peak performance of 40 Tflops. The main memory is huge at 10TB and it has 2.5PB (petabytes) of storage. I have very little idea of what all that means, but it certainly sounds very impressive!

The Earth Simulator will continue to grow, with Sato’s goal being to combine two simulators — a microscopic computer and a macroscopic one — that can exchange information and so come up with even more accurate predictions.

Check it out online at http://www.es.jamstec.go.jp/esc/eng/

 

Selecting Chunks of Text in Word

Have you noticed how the text selection genie in Word tries to predict what text it thinks you want to select? And how often it is wrong?

As you are selecting text, and start selecting text in the middle of a word and stop in the middle of another word, Word will guess that you also wish to include the beginning few letters of the first word and the end few letters of the last word, even though you haven't actually selected them. While mostly useful, there are times when you need something else.

And, of course, there is something else, known as the "text selection function". To bypass Word's automatic word selection feature and select text to the nearest character:

1. Key Ctrl & Shift
2. Then select your text

To select a large amount of text between the two points across a number of pages:

1. Position the cursor to your selection beginning
2. Scroll down to your selection end
3. Hold down the Shift key & click the selection end
4. If you accidentally select too much text, just Shift again and click the correct end

The Ctrl key in Word has lots of lovely add-ons. Simply holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on a word will highlight the entire sentence that the word is in. Hold down the Ctrl key and make any number of additional text selections, even if they are not adjacent to your original selection.

To select columns of characters, just hold down the Alt key and start dragging open a selection rectangle until you have covered the number of columns and lines you wish to select.

Thanks to Woody's Office Watch For Mere Mortals for these tips. View others at http://office-watch.com/wowmm/index.asp

 

TLAs for SMEs

Here are this newsletter's TLA for you:

• eSATA, External Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. The official name that American National Standards Institute group X3T10 uses for what the computer industry calls Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE). However, SATA is based on serial signaling technology, unlike IDE hard drives (which use parallel signaling). It's been around for internal drives for a while but now eSATA is the hot new way to connect external drives, competing directly against USB and Firewire

Please feel free to email me with any TLAs that you want to get the bottom (meaning!) of.

Tips, Short+Hot Keys

In this newsletter, we look at a special tip in Word using Shift F5.

Have you ever forgotten where you were up to when editing a large Word doc?

You needn't waste time re-reading the document to find where you had got to. Word can tell you instead, using an invisible function.

• Open the doc
• Key Shift & F5

This will move the cursor to the position it was in when the document was last saved and closed. It is a good practice to make a habit of.

Hot Linx

You can download a free Presentation Planning Guide from Effective Speaking's website at http://www.effectivespeaking.co.nz/presentation-planning-guide-purchase.html

For a spot of retro 80s video viewing, slope off to http://www.1500videos.com/ and click on your favourites. If you are on a dial-up connection tho, it is probably not going to cut it

Share ideas with others - share the 'how to' of what tech-tinkering advances you make with the planet at http://www.instructables.com/

If you would like to know how wealthy you are in comparison with the rest of the world, go and have a look at http://www.globalrichlist.com/

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                                Catch you again soon!! E-mail your suggestions to me here

read more "Newsletter Issue 121, October 2006"