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The engineers and interaction designers at Microsoft must be seriously pissed at marketing today. Behold, the latest user interface design from Microsoft.

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, marketing, design, humor

Wired is running an article discussing how the effects of the BlackBerrys, cellphones, thumb drives and Gmail are affecting our memory.

This summer, neuroscientist Ian Robertson polled 3,000 people and found that the younger ones were less able than their elders to recall standard personal info. When Robertson asked his subjects to tell them a relative’s birth date, 87 percent of respondents over age 50 could recite it, while less than 40 percent of those under 30 could do so. And when he asked them their own phone number, fully one-third of the youngsters drew a blank. They had to whip out their handsets to look it up.

Technorati Tags: Productivity, memory

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In the stone age of PCs (circa. 2001), files were organized by filename and a hierarchy of file folders. If you wanted to retrieve a file, you needed to remember the filename and where you placed it. If you’ve ever tried to find something over a month old you quickly came to realize what an inefficient method of storage this is. In this post, I’ll discuss tagging, a fairly new method of organizing your data, and explore how to use your tags in an effective manner.
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Wordpress has the ability to embed images into postings. You should give your site a little pizazz by adding images to your posts. However, the default behavior of these images is to just sit out there on their own. Not particularly appealing.

By adding a simple CSS attribute to your tag you can improve the placement of the images by having your blog text wrap around your images.

Here are two examples. The first example places an image in line with your post, between paragraphs.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Quisque in metus. Mauris odio ante, lacinia in, feugiat ut, fringilla ac, sem. Quisque consequat. Mauris ultrices pede ac nunc. Nunc ut nisi. Curabitur urna odio, iaculis at, tincidunt at, eleifend nec, est. Praesent feugiat eros non ante. Nunc a libero. Curabitur sagittis, velit ac sodales mollis, lacus mi bibendum neque, id sagittis risus ligula nec metus. Duis nec purus vitae magna scelerisque mattis.

Donec eget leo. In tincidunt interdum arcu. Maecenas viverra, metus ut iaculis tempus, erat risus rhoncus est, ultrices porttitor elit est a magna. Cras interdum pede suscipit urna. Ut tortor nulla, tempus a, malesuada eu, tempus non, augue. Aenean sollicitudin dignissim urna. Aenean in nisi. Morbi mollis. Nullam sagittis, libero vel venenatis condimentum, nisi eros facilisis arcu, id vehicula tellus orci ac diam. Mauris condimentum, ligula in tempus scelerisque, sem erat luctus lectus, nec posuere lectus libero id massa. Morbi a orci pharetra nulla congue blandit. Nam eget leo. Etiam aliquam, odio malesuada laoreet accumsan, nisl erat ornare eros, id blandit dui tortor sed justo. Donec nibh. In non lorem vitae sapien convallis vulputate.

This second example, places the image in the same location but I add an attribute to the image anchor.

Integer a erat. Sed sed ante. Nam eros justo, consectetuer id, fringilla vel, mollis in, lacus. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Donec vel lorem. Pellentesque vitae quam. Phasellus tellus. Vestibulum ut nunc. Phasellus quam. Curabitur felis velit, suscipit lacinia, posuere ut, nonummy vitae, odio. Ut rhoncus lacus sed eros. Fusce lacinia velit eu nulla semper aliquet. Proin molestie quam eget justo. Ut egestas volutpat nisl. Suspendisse eu diam non libero varius tempus. Nulla condimentum enim et eros. Vivamus ac tortor ac ipsum gravida fermentum. Suspendisse potenti. Quisque diam.

Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Morbi a massa ut sem dignissim imperdiet. Vivamus viverra tempus eros. Aliquam mattis porttitor justo. Aliquam ligula neque, sagittis a, pretium at, dictum ac, libero. Quisque tempor mauris at risus facilisis lobortis. Etiam tempus, leo eget vulputate convallis, mauris nisl condimentum nibh, in facilisis nisl risus scelerisque quam. Nunc nec augue et risus tristique feugiat. Vestibulum ut metus. Sed nibh.



In the second example, my image tag looks like this.

< img src="sampleimage.jpg"
alt="20070704-IMG_2038"
width="160"
height="240"
border="0"
class="alignleft" />

Note that I have class="alignleft" The alignleft class is defined in the default Wordpress template. When you apply this to an image, it will push the image to the left side and run the text around it to the right. The Wordpress style sheet also defines an alignright and aligncenter class which does the obvious.

This should give you enough information to add the finishing touches on your blog entry. Don’t let your images stand alone anymore.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress, Tutorial, CSS

Has you PC been turned into a zombie? One way to find out is to log your internet connections to see what activity has occurred.

There are a number of tools available to do this, however, Windows comes with a free command line utility which is described here. The program, netstat, displays active network connections into and out of your box. To turn it into a network logger, follow the steps below.

Make sure, if you are running this that you close any known network applications like Firefox or your favorite web browser. Otherwise your log could fill with unwanted information.

1. Open a command prompt, click Start->Run and type

   cmd.exe

2. type netstat -b 2 > netlog.txt
3. Let this run overnight then open the log file in notepad.

The command line option -b tells netstat to display the name of the programs initiating the network connection. The number tells netstat to dump to the log every 2 seconds.

What you will see in the netlog.txt is a list of all network connections with the name of the program making those connections in brackets []. If you see something you don’t recognize, you can use a website like File.net to identify it and see if it is a virus or malware program.

Technorati Tags: windows, productivity, tips