And for fun because we’re allowed…
It may be this blog’s birthday, but the presents will go to readers like you. All the birthday details here. Here are the games up for winning!
Wow! Meryl is overwhelmed at the generosity of donated prizes and guest blog posts in celebration of this blog’s 8th birthday on June 1, 2008. Thank you for helping me (the blog) give her a little break. If only she would take a vacation OUTSIDE of Texas. That’s another battle.
There’s still time to contribute a prize (Help us get Meryl to jump out of a plane! Keep reading.) or to an article. Here are the upcoming guest bloggers and prizes.
If we get We received $5000 worth of prizes by June 1 (birthday), so Meryl has to jump out of a plane at Skydive Dallas. This is no easy task for Meryl as she’s afraid of doing such a thing (she’d do the tandem jump complete with a video). Looking at a later June date.
Now $5000 sounds impossible, but we have two sponsors that are coming who should help things along.
Prizes added June 26, 2008
It’s never too late to add a prize… well, maybe 2009 would be ridiculous.
Prizes added June 16, 2008
Prizes added June 4, 2008
Prizes added June 2, 2008
Prizes added May 29, 2008
Prizes added May 23, 2008
Prizes added May 22, 2008
Original Prizes
How You Can Win
The contest has three (ouch, not “two” as I put in the first entry — Boy, I was not off to a good start with my notes about this. I also messed up the email I sent to friends and colleagues about this.) parts: Readers, prize sponsors, and authors.
Participation rules coming soon. Meryl needs to take care of her clients. Here are the entry guidelines. If you want to contribute a prize or an article, we’d appreciate hearing from you by June 1.
Here are the guidelines for articles — and yes, it’s OK to have a longer article, but we’re trying to respect your time.
Guest Blogging Guidelines
* 400-800 words
* Self-promotion / bio goes in last paragraph (About the Author).
* Material must be original (it’s OK to re-use material with modifications) and first published on this site. 30 days after publication, you can re-use the article anywhere you please.
* I reserve the right to edit or reject the article for any reason (rare as most of you are great writers.)
* Due June 1 (willing to negotiate if needed).
The list will be updated as more offers come in. Thank you to everyone who stepped up.
Build-a-lot 2: Town of the Year already available at a discount! The following games will be discounted this week on Game du Jour, the ‘one-deal-a-day’ website dedicated to indie and casual games:
Mon. May 5th: 60% off on The Butler Did It!
Tue. May 6th: 40% off on Build-a-lot 2: Town of the Year
Wed. May 7th: 60% off on SnakeTris
Thu. May 8th: 60% off on Frutti Freak
Fri. May 9th: 50% off on 5 Star Mahjongg
Sat. May 10th: 50% off on First Star Software’s Greatest Hits
Sun. May 11th: 50% off on Towers
Every new release of an application adds more features, but not always for the better. Get ten tips for getting feature frenzy under control. In writing an article about social network sites, I looked at over two dozen sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Sermo, TravBuddy, MyCreativeCommunity. Wikipedia provides a list of many social networking sites.
I noticed most specialty social network sites do one thing well — they provided the appropriate features that fit their site’s purpose and target market. They didn’t try to capture the features everyone else has.
The following is a shorthand version of Frank Spiller’s excellent post:
1. Get task-focused.
2. Map business requirements to user tasks.
3. Talk about user tasks not features.
4. Design for probability not possibility.
5. Validate features with user tasks.
6. Map features to tasks.
7. Create a feature-task matrix.
8. Think scenarios first, use cases next.
9. Use tasks to test features, and features to test tasks.
10. Use diary studies to evaluate feature adoption over time.
Remember that users won’t necessary use every feature in an application. It costs to add a feature — so make sure it’s worth the cost.
The Microsoft Office Team reports that Microsoft has added 58,000 words to the US English dictionary including the following:
* Possessives, i.e. the possessive form of words that already were in the lexicon
* The most frequent male, female and last names from the 2000 Census data and other sources. Examples: Brianne, Britta, Carissa, Carolyn, Carmela
* Company names, such as Verizon, WorldCom
* Names of autonomous Native American governmental units
* Names of the official UN countries, as well as most languages in our market areas, e.g. Indic language names
* Place names, such as all world capitals and other major cities, e.g. Wuppertal
* Miscellaneous words that were missing from the lexicon: e.g. Camus, Wyeth, Woolf
Office 2007 also comes with a new feature Microsoft refers to as contextual spelling. It watches for correctly spelled words that aren’t the right word based on the sentence. We all do this. I know the difference between your and you’re; too, to, and two; and their and there — it I’ve caught myself typing the wrong word many times. Why does this happen? I guess we get a word in our heads and our fingers spew out the wrong word.
If you write, “You’re shoe is untied,” Office 2007 will mark “you’re” as an error. Nice feature to have! Even us grammar geeks make mistakes and sometimes we don’t see it when proofing.
The Reviewing toolbar is one of the most valuable features for writers and editors as well as for teams who create and edit documentation so they can see what changes have been made and include comments. I’ve always had it included in my default toolbars, so it appears every time I use Microsoft Word.
Lately, it hasn’t appeared every time and it was driving me insane especially since there is a gaping spot where the toolbar usually lives. I tried the usual stuff to make it stick, but darn thing kept taking off without my permission. Word simply isn’t keeping my personalized settings.
So time for Microsoft’s Knowledgebase, my first destination for Microsoft-related problems. I could do a search on the web to find the same solution elsewhere, but I prefer to start with the official source as Microsoft’s KB has helped me resolve many problems.

I found the Your toolbars are missing… entry and it resolved the problem. What worked is Step 2: Rename the Global Template, and then going back to Turn On the Default Toolbars early in the document.
If you have any customized buttons in the toolbar, it will disappear. However, when renaming the normal.dot file, make sure you give it a new name per the instructions. I called mine normal2.dot. I was able to import the macros from there into the new normal.dot.
To import the macros, click Tools, Macros, Organizer, and Close File (on the left). Click Open File and select the renamed normal.dot (normal2.dot in my case) and click Copy.
Update on 08-03-2006: Danged steps didn’t work. It’s broken again. Will report a solution, if I find one.
Once I got out of automated mode, I woke up and realized that I often use Paste Special with unformatted text when working in MS Word. It became a habit like CTRL+V, CTRL+X, and CTRL+C. To do Paste Special without formatting, I clicked CTRL+V to paste, selected the Paste Special icon (smart tag) and selected Keep Text Only. Another way to do a Paste Special is to click Edit, Paste Special and select your preference.
Why do all that when I can create a macro and put a button on the toolbar? That’s exactly what I did. It took a few days to get the hang of using the button instead of going the old-fashioned route. I can’t remember where I found the tip and searching for it didn’t jog my memory.
A Microsoft article shows part of the way. The difference is that it changes CTRL+V to paste unformatted text. There are occasions when I do want it to paste formatted text, so I don’t want to change CTRL+V. The button works great. I had thought about making another keyboard shortcut, but I didn’t want to risk erasing another shortcut in the process.
If you prefer to create a keyboard shortcut, here are the Windows keyboard shortcuts. However, these don’t consider the shortcuts that come with specific programs like SnagIt. I use CTRL+SHIRT+P to snag an image.
Here are the steps from the Microsoft article with some minor changes:
1. Start Word.
2. Click ALT+F8.
3. In the Macro name box, type PasteUnformattedText.
4. Make sure that All active templates and documents is displayed in the Macros in list, and then click Create. The Microsoft Visual Basic Editor appears.
5. Directly above the End Sub statement in the Sub PasteUnformattedText() section, type (or copy and paste) the following line of code:
Selection.PasteSpecial DataType:=wdPasteText
6. Click ALT+Q to return to Word.
The next steps add a button to the toolbar.
1. Right-click the toolbar and select Customize.
2. Ensure the Commands tab is selected.
3. Select Macros and locate Normal.NewMacros.PasteUnformated.Text (part of it might be cut off).
4. Click and hold Normal.NewMacros.PasteUnformatedText and drag it to where you want it in the toolbar.
5. Right-click Normal.NewMacros.PasteUnformatedText (if nothing happens, click the Customize window and right-click again — keep the Customize window open).
6. Change Name to whatever you want, so you can shorten it.
You can use an image instead, if you prefer. In this case, while the Customize window is still open:
1. Right-click the new button you created, select Change Button Image, and pick an icon.
2. Right-click the button again and select Default Style. Only an image appears. You can leave it as image and text, if you prefer.
You might want to do a Save All after finishing this. See this post for an explanation and how to do it.
When I had to re-install everything on my computer, I opted not to install a few programs including the one I used to manage spam. It wasn’t bad, but I felt it wasn’t as effective as it could be. I rarely hear about a 100 percent effective spam solution, but I had enough of the tool.
I’ve been using Thunderbird for email and am happy with it. I also use Outlook for one of my clients and it drives me insane. It has its good and bad points. Anyway, Thunderbird’s spam and scam manager doesn’t work worth spit. I was spending too much time going through my inbox to weed the junk.
Went to Thunderbird’s forums to see if anyone found a solution. Came across open source POPFile. Figured I’d look into it. Where has this baby been??? Being an organized freak, it’s a great fit.
Buckets o’ mail
It took me a little time to figure out this buckets business. But now I rarely have anything coming to my Inbox. Everything goes into a bucket or “folder” as most of us call ‘em. Before using this app, I had all newsletters and general emails go to a folder, junk going into another folder and everything else (if the email did its job, it’d be personal emails) in the inbox.
Now, I have four folders: personal, occasional, newsletters, and junk. The only emails that land in the inbox are unclassified emails. I get about one every few days.
You can set up POPFile to modify the subject header or leave it alone. Some of you probably get junk email that gets [spam] added into the header. It’s trouble rather than helpful. Sometimes, without thinking, I hit “reply” and the recipient person would see [spam] in the header. That’s why I have such suspected emails going into a junk folder. Why clutter the inbox with [spam]?
Control Center
Any time I see an email appear in the wrong folder, I go into POPFile’s browser-based (which looks great in Firefox, by the way) Control Center and reclassify the bucket.
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The control center also shows a dashboard. You can see how much you email you get for each bucket. The data also shows the number of false positives and false negatives. Currently, the application has a 92% accuracy (it was 76% on March 30). The accuracy continues to climb. You can reset the data anytime to get fresh numbers. According to the help docs, it takes about 1000 emails to get the accuracy rate up to the 90s.
View larger image in a pop-up window.
Magnets, Configuration, Security, and Advanced Features
Magnets resemble message filters except you use them in POPFile instead of your email client. You can have POPFile look at the To, From, CC, or Subject for a value that you enter. If the value matches, then it goes into the selected bucket.
View larger image in a pop-up window.
In Configuration, change skins, language, History page view, and POP3 preferences.
View larger image in a pop-up window.
Security contains options for server operation, remote servers, automatic update checking, and reporting statistics to POPFile. Here you can set up an interface password.
View larger image in a pop-up window.
Advanced tab lists words that POPFile ignores. You can add and remove words from the list. You can also adjust the parameters here. For ultra-geeks, this app has command-line options.
View larger image in a pop-up window.
Requirements:
* The latest POPFile release.
* An e-mail account that uses the POP3 protocol (most accounts do, although you can’t use POPFile with web-based services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail without extra software)
* Around 10 MB free disk space
Final Notes
After using it for two weeks, I’m happy with the app. Email also downloads faster than it did with the previous app (both used the local host). POPFile is a Sourceforge project, therefore it’s free. Its Web site is available in the following languages: Norsk, Deutsch, Portugues do Brasil, Francais, Dansk, Espanol, Arabic, Japanese, Taiwanese, Chinese, and Korean.
It comes in two versions: “an easy-to-install Windows version, and a cross-platform version for technically-minded users.”
With all the price comparison sites available, I’m posting them all in one post because it’s just tough to keep up and remember them all. The first three places I go whenever I shop are Froogle, Pricegrabber, and ISBN.nu.
I don’t just buy from the place offernig the best price. It also depends on the business’ reputation. If no ratings are available for the business, then I search elsewhere like the Better Business Bureau and BizRate. Offertrax lets you store, compare and receive price alerts.
Pronto is a Firefox shopping comparison plugin.
Another thing to consider is the best time of the year to shop for certain items. MSN Money lists the best times of the year for the following:
Air conditioners best time: winter
Airline tickets best time: Depends
Big appliances best time: September and October
Bicycles and outdoor gear Best time: January
Boats best time: January, February and March
Cars best time: September
Cell phones best time: any time
Computers best time: July and August
Cookware best times: April and May; October and November
Furniture best times: January and July
Gas grills best time: winter
Jewelry best time: Avoid the holidays, Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day
Linens and bedding best time: January
Mattresses best time: always
Real estate best time: spring
Recreational vehicles best time: fall and winter
Toys best time: October and November
TVs and home theaters best time: winter holiday sales and January
Vacuum cleaners best time: April and May
Wedding best time: winter
Most Often Used
Froogle results look like typical search engine results. It also explores sites that often don’t appear in the comparison shopping site lists. I’ve found some great deals here.
Pricegrabber is the one I go to the most outside of Froogle. I think its comparison chart is the easiest to read and scan.
PriceScan is similar to Pricegrabber and easier to read than the ones listed further down.
Books
AddAll does books, music, movie, and magazine.
Best Book Buys also compares book prices as well as music, videos, electronics, and bikes.
BooksPrice searches for lowest price on new and used books, CDs and DVDs. Also includes a feature for finding the best price when buying more than one book since shipping costs could be lower due to the combined order.
ISBN.nu does only price comparisons for books. While I find better deals through Amazon Marketplace or elsewhere, this is a great starting point.
Local Stores
General Price Comparison Sites
The following sites are similar in how they produce their results and they don’t have a neat chart like Pricegrabber or MySimon. Their results are similar to Froogle, but I think Froogle provides better results. I recommend using a few sites when looking for a specific item as every site links to different stores.
CostHelper reports what people are paying.
MySimon is one of the first price comparison sites I’ve used. Its site doesn’t look good in Firefox.
SearchAllDeals searches all deals and coupon sites in one shot.
Coupons and Discounts
Most of these sites are junky or have a ton of popups, but I’ve found coupons here.
CoolSavings requires free registration.
SmartSource – grocery coupons
Online Deals
These sites list bargains and big sale items. The best place is Woot, but it only shows one item per day. Once in a while, it’ll post a new item as soon as one sells out for a certain amount of time (usually 24-hours).
ugenie provides discounts on bundled items.
Discounted Shopping Stores
American Science & Surplus – science bargains
Cheap Tickets – travel
Dawdle: Buy and sell new and used games
Deep Discount DVD for DVDs.
Expedia Travel – travel
Farecompare – travel
Farecast – travel
Kayak – travel
Lowestfare.com – Travel
Priceline – travel
Updated: September 29, 2009