Magazine Notes

Want to know where to go to buy the cheapest milk in your neighborhood? Or who is running specials on CD-R media? Go to cairo.com, enter your zip code, tell it what you are looking for and how far you are willing to go, and it will come back with stores that are featuring your items in their ads. Pretty neat.

According to PC Magazine, iPod has a 68% market share in the digital music player space.

Add "Copy To Folder" and "Move To Folder" as a right-click option to any file.

Solutions by PC Magazine: Context Menu Options to Move or Copy Files

If you don't have a fixed IP address but you want to provide access to your machine by name, what do you do? Use a dynamic DNS (DDNS) service. "The major DDNS providers include DynDNS.org (www.dyndns.org), Tzolkin Corporation (www.tzo.com), and No-IP.com (www.no-ip.com). Pricing for DDNS services for custom domains (your own domain name) is the same at all three providers, at $24.95 per year. But DynDNS.org offers free service if you're willing to use a subdomain on one of their domains (such as "craigswebcam .dyndns.org"). Similarly, No-IP.com offers free service on one of their subdomains, supported by banner ads, or you can pay a one-time charge of $12.95 for a subdomain on one of their domains."

Solutions from PC Magazine: Dealing with Dynamic IP Addresses

Nagios is an open source program that monitors systems and send out notices when problems occur.
Nagios web page

Here is a nice article on what Nagios is and how it works. It contains some sample definition files to get you going.
Network monitoring with Nagios, by Bernard Golden, 13 Apr 2005

My original reference to Nagios found on the BLKBRD-L mailing list.

Why do (and don't) people change? This is a great article on this question. Here are some quotes.

"Joy is a more powerful motivator than fear," he [Dr. Dean Ornish] says.

The big challenge in trying to change how people think is that their minds rely on frames, not facts.

"When one is addressing a diverse or heterogeneous audience," he [Howard Gardner] says, "the story must be simple, easy to identify with, emotionally resonant, and evocative of positive experiences."

Radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes are often easier for people than small, incremental ones.

Xerox now holds "alignment workshops" that ask middle managers -- the people who make processes work -- to outline the ways its systems could inhibit its agendas for change.

"Everyone needs a new project instead of always being in a bin," Merzenich says. "A fifth-day strategy doesn't sacrifice your core ability but keeps you rejuvenated. In a company, you have to worry about rejuvenation at every level. So ideally you deliberately construct new challenges. For every individual, you need complex new learning. Innovation comes about when people are enabled to use their full brains and intelligence instead of being put in boxes and controlled."

Fast Company, May 2005, p. 53+: Change or Die

An article on screen resolutions and font sizes has this wonderful table. The Macintosh originally used 72 dpi as the standard. Windows went to about 100 dpi, but anything more than that is TOO SMALL. The table shows DPI for various size displays and resolutions. Take a look before buying a monitor.

PC Magazine, December 14, 2004, p. 88: DPI: Crispness vs. Readability

There are three columns: name, group, and score. You want the people ranked within groups. This describes the solution. The original problem was posed by a band director that had tryouts for the various instruments and needs to rank the people within instruments. It could also be used by a teacher with scores for the members of a group of students, and other things.

The key is the formula =B2&" "&SUM(IF(B2=Inst,IF(C2 <=Score,1,0),0)) which is fully explained in the article.

PC Magazine, December 14, 2005, p. 96: Solution from PC Magazine: Advanced Ranking in Excel

Great "How To" on how to make custom formats for money. I want the $ sign to go with the number, not way off on the left. A format that will do that seems to be: _($ #,##0_);[Red]_($ (#,##0);_($ "0"_);_(@_) with no decimal places and parens around negatives, or _($ #,##0.00_);[Red]_($ (#,##0.00);_($ "0.00"_);_(@_) for dollars and cents.

PC Magazine, Dec. 14, 2004, p. 95: Solution from PC Magazine: Excel's Custom Formats

I am always on the lookout for time and life management systems. I read Getting Things Done a while back and it helped me a great deal. But I have not been able to deal with my To Do list very well. I have too many things that I want to keep track of, some of which are important, some of which are urgent, and some that I may never get around to. Having a single task list in Outlook is unacceptable. I just read about MyLifeOrganized and it looks nice. It is supposed to have a PPC version coming out next week, too.

http://www.mylifeorganized.net/

There is also a Google Group with information about this product, including interaction with the programmers.
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/myLifeOrganized?hl=en

I came across this in a GTD_PPC mailing list message today.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GTD_PPC/

This is a boook that I need to read. I found it referenced in a blog, not a magazine. The blog is Creating Passionate users and the reference is in the Difference between Japan and US entry. Great reading. Highly recommended.

Amazon.com: Books: Universal Principles of Design