Comments Over News

I've created a new site I'm extremely excited about because it's got a lot of great possibilitises. It's a news discussion site with comment ratings, threaded comments, and news that updates every 15 minutes from AP and Reuters feeds. That's cool but my key innovation here is to add a points system so people can see how they rank in making quality comments and moderating each other.

I'm looking forward to building the site up into the best place to discuss news on the net. Ready?

Let's get started: http://www.CommentsOverNews.com

Word and Excel Tricks

I often help people do things in Word and Excel. I really love Excel...must be my desire to turn everything into a number so I can graph it and discover trends. In any case here are a few tips that you might be able to use to speed up your Word and Excel usage:

* Excel: Probably my favorite trick of all time with Excel is to use the $ in formulas. No, not because it creates money out of thin air. It doesn't. What it does do however is make it possible to write a formula once and then drag that formula(autofill) without the reference changing. This is great if you have a list of people's names and balances and want to subtract one number
from each person's balance the number in one cell. Just make sure the reference to that number looks like $B$12.

* Word: Show the paragraph symbol. So many times when you're wrestling with some particular layout in a word document, it's so hard because you can't actually see that that whitespace is a combination of tabs, spaces, and indents. With the paragraph symbol(it's the backwards P-looking-thing in the standard toolbar) you'll be able to see just how your layout was "composed" before.

* Both: If you're working on a document or file of any importance, you may need to make changes but still want to be able to return to before you made those changes. In the programming world, we'd use something like CVS or Subversion but for simplicity I just number my files with the version number. It's not elegant in an architecture astronaut kind of way but it works and non-programmers can use it! An example: Dave's File.doc is the current version. My previous 2 versions are named Dave's File.1.doc and Dave's File.2.doc.

* Excel: Resizing all the rows or columns. This is easy to do once you know...just click on the little empty block above A and to the left of 1 in the column and row headings of any sheet. Voila, the whole sheet is selected. With this selection done, it's easy to resize by dragging the boundary between for example 1 and 2 or A and B. Just look for an icon like this "<-|->" before you start dragging.

* Excel: Cutting and Pasting. Lots of times you need to cut and paste a set of rows and if you don't select the whole row, it can turn into a mess. To make this simpler, just click on a row heading like 3 on the left side of the sheet and drag it down to another heading(like 10). All the cells in all the rows from 3 to 10 should then be selected. Right click in the selected area and choose cut. Then click on a cell right below where you want to paste those rows. Right click and choose Insert Cut Cells. Voila! This works for columns too.

I could go on for days with these but I'm trying to keep this blog interesting. I know I've probably failed at that long ago but if I can offer any concession, it's that you can email me if you have a specific question.

cl1p.net - The Internet Clipboard

A site that just showed up on the Trends list today is called cl1p.net. The idea over there is to create a super-simple internet clipboard. You create an entry by adding a word or some numbers to the website address after a /. So for instance I made my own by going to cl1p.net/davidsterry and posting a comment.

There have been sites like rafb.net and pastebin.com that have allowed for a little more powerful use of this concept but cl1p.net may have broader appeal. Mainly those sites have been used by chat rooms to be able to talk about code or text that someone's creating but that would generally muck up the flow of the chatroom. If you don't go to any chatrooms, it's actually kind of hard to find a site like this or to know that they even exist. That's why I figured I'd mention it here.

Alternatives are(as cl1p.net mentions) using email or you could setup an account with Writely and just use a document there to transfer text from one computer to another. It could be a fad...it's certainly come out of nowhere as the author's blog shows March of this year was it's inception. One thing I find funny though is that you can set a password on a page that doesn't hide the info you posted....it just keeps others from changing it.

Here's an idea ... go to cl1p.net/(some random common word) to see what other people have pasted!

Treo 650

I got a Treo 650 about a month and a half ago. I meant to give you the rundown earlier but the month and a half has given me enough time to find most of the tricks and problems that I will ever know or have with it.

What I like about it:
* I love the unlimited call log which helps me keep track of customer phone numbers and also how much time on the phone to bill.
* The web browser is fairly useable. I set the text to the smallest size and the sharpness of the screen lets me view most pages without having to scroll around too much.
* I set the dialing to run through contacts and numbers at the same time. So if I hit the phone key and start typing, it goes through my contacts to see what matches after each keypress. If nothing matches, it shows me the numbers I'd be dialing. This is handy because the same keys are used for numbers and letters and it's nice not to have to hit extra keys to dial whomever I want.
* I like having one device that does everything. I've always got my schedule with me and if I feel like making a little note or email I can do it with something just a bit bigger than your average cell phone.

What could be improved:
* Since I'm seeing more on the web using AJAX and javascript, I wish the browser had better support for those technologies.
* I don't like that if I open the call log, I can't use the control pad to navigate through the call log entries. Wait...in just playing with I realized you have to hit up one time then you can navigate freely. I'm leaving that here in case you have the same gripe.
* When I send an email from the phone, it doesn't save a copy in the sent items or provide an option to default cc myself. It's nice to know what you've sent. Period.
* I wish it were easier to do a voice memo. Going to Sounds then Tones then New is annoying when I used to just hold down one key on my LGvx6000.

All in all, I'm very happy with this phone. If you're looking for a pda/phone it's hard to do better. Newer phones like the Tree700w are coming out with Windows Mobile but I'm not sure if the useability will be as high with an OS that's coming from a computing background.

Search Phrases

A while back I created Trend Sweet Trend and added a search phrase tracker to it. It tracks the most popular search phrases people type into Yahoo! Search thanks to Yahoo! Buzz which updates each weekday. The search phrases are on the left and on the right is a grid showing what rank each term was at in the past. American Idol for instance is in 1st place and has been for the last two days that Yahoo Buzz was reporting. Before that it was 2nd and before that 12th. Green means it's rank has risen or held steady after rising. Red means it fell. Purple shows you that it's the first time it's ever been on the list. Ever being not a very long time(I started tracking in late November 2005).

I am always amazed that most of what people search for are celebrities. Go here if you want to see the live page and click on links.


Since I've been following this I've noticed that entertainment is really what bonds us all together. We don't all do the same work or really spend much time worrying about the same news. But we do watch the same hit TV shows and follow the most famous celebrities. This page is really just there to try and make sense of what's most popular and was an interesting extension for me of the first Trend Sweet Trend page. If you like it or want to see something changed about it, let me know.