hey mr. tambourine man…

If there is darkness in your heart, buy a tambourine and make yourself a promise that you will sing unto God, and you will.

— Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis

gettin’ paid

Oh, children, do not be mistaken! The life of the writer is not the glamourous one they trot out in front of you at school assemblies and job fairs. Contrary to what “they” would have you believe, it is not a life of loafers on the desk while you puff away on cigarettes in your tweed jacket with the elbow patches. You will not be the office “wit”. You will not have a regularly meeting group of friends and compatriots at the local hotel bar where you shuffle around manuscripts. You will not run across town, hair waving in the wind of your own currents in the big city, just to meet a deadline. Michael J. Fox will not play you in the movie.

The wrtier’s life is one of isolation, mostly. And being a corporate writer, even more so. In the absence of real human contact regarding your job, you will turn to that most loathesome of formats to find out if your salary meets your work: the survey poll. And you will find that it does not. You think a Michael J. Fox character could survive on that? Come on! He’ll spend that much just on Ray-Bans.

Writers UA publishes articles and surveys like the one mentioned above for corporate writers in the user assistance field.  We particularly liked this article on errors and how to reduce them which heavily cites one of our gurus, Don Norman.

thumb(driving) our way

Over the weekend, we got one of those portable USB Flash Drives that the cool kids have. And sure, we love the idea of quick portable media, but we got to wondering what else could one do with it?

The big dream of the thumbdrive world is booting from it. Of the installs we’ve driven by, Damn Small Linux looks the most promising. (On a sidenote, a few weeks ago, we tried downloading Knoppix on the promise that one could boot from CD, but it took up so much media — at least 3 CDs — that we feared our ability to boot easily from the disc.) Granted, we don’t know much about Linux, so we would rather screw up a tiny portable drive than our home drive.

2 “must have” apps are portable OpenOffice and portable Firefox. We once had OO exclusively on our home machine, but we admit we installed MSOffice once when a Word doc absolutely had to look a specific way when we translated it to PDF. That was with an earlier version of OO, and if they have gotten better at exporting, then we would be more than happy to return to the fold. As for FF, we might be one of the few people who like being able to differentiate between our home and work browsing.

There are some other apps we are looking forward to using: ReNamer — we seem to always need to do mass renaming of files at some point. We remember having some app at some work computer once that did this very cleanly and neatly…. But it would be nice to be able to carry this app around, to have it when we need it. WinMerge — another thing we need to do a lot of is comparing files, to see what is different in them across versions. Sure, we know Unix has some great tool we saw someone use once that made us green with envy, but we are not Unix wonks. So a small app like this we can easily use is key. Rainmeter — We mentioned before how we once tried Norton Systemworks. One of the nice things about it was its little meters reporting on how things are going. Rainmeter does all that and more without the Symantec overhead. NeoMem — this looked to be the best of the information management systems (and believe us, there are a lot, even for thumbdrives). It claims to be a cross between a word processor and a database, which sounds promising for storing lists, book titles, and phone numbers.

Then there are a few “nice to try” apps we are not sure we need, but they might be nice. DM2 — this one promises nice Windows enhancements, including floating icons and WinRoll’s great feature, roll up to titlebar. Imagenomic says it will clean up noise on pictures. And WhyReboot tells you what will happen when you reboot a system.

There are plenty more apps out there for thumbdrives. AskMetafilter has a great list of them and where to get them. And, as always, Lifehacker has a great collection of anythng you need to find.

year of the fire dog

Well folks, it’s Chinese New Year time (although the kindly woman at the local Chinese restaurant assures us it’s New Year for Asian countries in general), and that means the changing of the animal. 2005, the year of the Wood Rooster, was not great to us, but it was a building year. Now, let’s set that cock on fire. I mean, well….

We love that not only do the years have animals, but that they have elements as well. For instance, 2006 is the year of the Fire Dog, which means its a mix of fire (duh) burning on top of the earth (the “dog” part of it).

The last time we had a Fire and Earth Dog year was 1946 at the end of World War Two, the first year of peace and recovery. The United Nations General Assembly had its first meeting in London in 1946 and elected its Secretary General. The verdicts of the Nuremberg Trials were first handed down and many Nazi war criminals condemned to death. Leaders of many world governments stepped down as the war ended and new leaders took their place – France, Argentina, Italy, Albania, Hungary, Japan, Sarawak and Czechoslovakia all experienced changes in leadership and status.

’46 was a good year. And we hope it’s a good one for all of us, as well as each of us:

• Aries
• Taurus
• Gemini
• Cancer
• Leo
• Virgo
• Libra
• Scorpio
• Sagitarius
• Capricorn
• Aquarius
• Pisces
  

Or go by the month with Master Rao:

The stars will help you to multiply contacts, to meet people who’re likely to be interested in your ideas or projects.

Marvelous understanding with the one whom you love or whom you’re going to meet this time

You’ll be inclined to indulge in food excesses, and your stomach is well likely to have to pay for it

It’ll be the moment to start making a strict saving program and to manage your budget strictly; otherwise, you’ll let yourself go to crazy spending and will soon find yourself in a blind alley.

We love the colors

We admit it: it’s not always the shape of coporate logos that get our attention. It’s the colors. We love the colors. Oh sure, recognize the shapes when they are plasterd across a Corprate States of America flag, but we always return to the colors.

So boy howdy were we please to find someone had gone through dozens and dozens corprate identies to pick apart the colors of their icons.

Presentation Zen (who we could’ve sworn we had linked before with their “how to find pictures and images“…) has a nice page on where to find quotes for presentations. Or websites. Becuase quotes are the colors of language. (Okay, that was a stretch.)

php-nuke, building the theme

For our most beloved and endering site, we are moving from a static system to a more interactive system. This is the site we lovingly brought up from horrific, structureless HTML a few years back, to some templated PHP a few years back. Now it is time to grow some more.

And we’ve chosen (for now, at least) to go with PHP-Nuke. We’ve been told by our friend ‘neka that Nuke is the shit for a while. So we are going for it.

First thing out the box (so to speak), is that we need to customize the theme, so that it looks all nice and purdy. Turns out that it is no small task in Nuke. (thanks, neka…). So here we go. You can download themes at NukeThemes, and then, I guess, customize as you go. That is certainly something we have considered. We also thought about reading through the standard PHP-Nuke docs on managing themes. We are certain we shall be trollign those soon enough. But we also found a nice freebie “auto-generator” that we are more than willing to try, called AutoTheme. Spidean, the comapny that makes AutoTheme, also has some downloadable themes and other nice stuff for free.

Another task we will soon have to conquor is futzing the with the modules of nuke. So we were pleased to find Lenon.com’s Module Maker. They also have a fair set of other nuke tools we might be using in the future.

what is wisdom?

a child answered the
question, “who is wise” by say-
ing, “the candy jar.”

Roll your own Windows

No, it’s probably not what you are thinking. We love WindowBlinds for a lot of things. Chief amongst them is that you can change around the metaphor (slightly) of your desktop. But second to the ability to roll up your windows.

Behold, where there’s a will, there is a freeware. WinRoll does an awesome job of rolling up your windows so that you just have the title bar floating in space. This is way better than minimizing them all the time. And you get the added bonus of people coming over and saying “How did you do that?” Just right-click on a title bar and voila! Smack your mama and call her Sally! Cuz that’s just how we roll.
Oh yes. One of the features we always liked in the otherwise destable Nortan SystemWorks is the ability to recall stuff that you might have accidentally lost or thrown out or otherwise cleared out of your recycle bin.

Behold (again): Restoration will scan your files and then make sure you don’t lose them. Plus, it won’t tell you have 250 errors on your machine when in fact your compy is just fine. W00t!

necessary software: the life hacker pack

We are big fans of The Open CD, which is a great collection of open source software for Windows machines. We found plenty of great software thourgh it, and consider much of it required software.

And, in response to the recent release of the Google Pack, our friends at Lifehacker have released their own collection of software they consider necessary, the lifehacker pack. And wouldn’t ya know it, much of it mirrors the Open CD. But we have to hand it to them, that VLC is one bad piece of — shut yo mouth — I’m talkin’ bout VLC, baby. We can dig it.

Audacity is new to us, though we see it pimped in both. We have been traveling with Total Recorder for a few years and have loved the heck out of it. And its 10 dollar price range was none too bad, either! But we will give Audacity a try.

Faststone looks interesting to us, as well. But we wonder if we will love it more than Picasa.

Perhaps the most interesting software there is 7-zip, which would be a good WinZip  replacement. We don’t think we’ve ever bought a WinZip license and have been using their “evaluation versions” for years. It would be nice to go “legal” with someone who doesn’t care if we’re not laying our money down.

gmail: are you deleting how we’re deleting?

2 weeks ago, we wrote about a great Greasemonkey hack for gmail: the delete button. Well, it turns out that Google really does listen and that you can move a sailing ship by a million people blowing on the sails. Today we saw in our own gmail account, gmail’s own delete button.

The sad part of it was that the Greasemonkey script no longer works, so it had to be uninstalled. (On our system it is the darker of the 2 buttons.) The delete button is gone! Long live the delete button.

We got pimped in lifehacker! =D