How to get around the time-sucking Ribbon in MS Word

I had to upgrade to MS Word 2007 -- unwillingly and mainly because I could get a full, legal copy of Office through work for $20. It was 2007, though, not any of the decent versions. Suddenly I had to spend as much time time trying to find commands I'd used every day for years as I did writing. This article describes how to avoid Word 2007's Ribbon without spending too much or having to learn another app. They're lifesavers. Kill the ribbon.

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Password keeper falls flat

I've always avoided password-automation software for two reasons: First, storing your passwords all in one basket, so to speak, reduces your overall security by putting all your valuable access codes in one place, behind one password. Without a password keeper, someone intent on stealing all your info (after, say, finding your lost laptop in an airport) would have to guess all the banks or online services you use, find your username and THEN figure out what your password is. With a password keeper, all that info is in one place, theoretically making all your business info available in one place.

The second reason is that I always figured if you have so many accounts to log into that you can't remember your username/password combos, you need to simplify.

I finally changed my tune, after going freelance and having the wonderful opportunity to log into the CMAs of several publishers several times per week. A couple of them make me log in several times -- for each of the micro-sites I work on. Then I have my own emails, domains, blogs and various other detrita.

Having some of that logging in automated suddently looked attractive.

Since password keepers aren't particularly fun to play with, I went to Freewaregenius, AppAholic, Lifehacker and Downloads.com looking for recommendations. I eventually downloaded KeePass Password Security which, appears to actually be secure.

It encrypts your passwords in a database, avoids keyloggers that might otherwise grab your passwords as they go through, and generally works hard to keep bad guys from getting your data.

On the other hand, every time you want to log in to something, you have to either cut-and-paste password data from KeePass to your browser, or drag the information to the right field. That's actually a cool feature, in one way of looking at it. You can open the list of your logins, click on the Username field for the one you're working on, and drag it over to the Username field in your browser. Then do the same with your password, which is obscured with hashmarks.

If you drag the password to the username field, though, you're out of luck, which means you have ot pay that much more attention than you would ordinarily. And KeePass doesn't log in automatically for you.

So you're left pretty much with a relatively secure database for your passwords rather than a utility that will securely log in to your Web sites for you.

Firefox comes with a password-keeping feature, and it logs in automatically for you. But if you have Firefox set to clear all your private data when you shut down the browser, it forgets both the sites and the login data when you shut the browser down. Even when you (or at least I) tell it not to, it clears your password info as well as your surfing record.

So, even free, KeePass isn't worth the cost of installing and using it. I still don't trust Firefox's ability to keep a stored password safe, but at least it won't make me add another step to every additional login.

KeePass goes back where it came from.

User error: Romanian Man Superglues Condom to Penis

I'm all in favor of hacking your own stuff to make it fit better or work the way you want it to. I've even been known to do it wrong (more accurately, I've occasionally done it right[ish]).

And god knows I oppose reading the directions on the package, in whatever language to which they've been badly translated.

But this guy was doing things seriously wrong:

The 43-year-old father-of-five told doctors he and his wife didn’t want any more children. Their obvious solution was to start using condoms, but the condoms Nicolae Popovici’s wife bought were a bit ‘roomy’.

Sigh.

Good technology, bad judgment

In 2009 certain Volvo models will offer to massage your back and blow on your butt while you drive. Just the thing to help out toward the end of a long drive, when your back is most likely to be sore, and your eyes want to close, a nice little massage would be just the thing, right?

Rear-view cameras so you don't run over Rover? Great. Automatic parallel parking (not on the Volvo, which will be busy blowing on your nether regions)? Great. Ports to plug in your MP3 player, built-in GPS, DVD players and screens in the back seat, real-live plugs to plug in your gadgets? All great.

Things that actually help keep the car upright and on the road? Great. Not as cool as the GPS and the rear-view. But still great.

Massaging the driver while the car is in motion? No.


On the other hand, when I'm jumping lanes at twice the speed limit, wind in my hair, bugs in my teeth, tiny little helmet perched ineffectually on my head, screams of startled motorists echoing in my ears as I blow by, stretched out over the tank of an overpowered superbike, organ donor card signed and safe in my wallet, I'm not worried about an involuntary dismount. I'm thinking about the inconclusive evidence that exposure to the electromagnetic fields generated by the engine might increase my risk of prostate or colon cancer.

Thank god someone worried about the real risks of motorcycling has developed a bike seat to shield your bits from an EM field that's completely different and more dangerous than those generated by your phone, your microwave, your laptop, monitor, TV and electric lines in your house.

Maybe if it could give a little massage or nice cool breeze.

Book handles? Bad enough Amazon wants us to pay $400 for a display screen with less going for it than the laptops or iPods or phones or handheld games that could all display large amounts of text with no problem. Now we need accessories for actual paper books.

This video, on the other hand, totally rocks, or did, once I realized the legs were part of the robot, not half a homeless person. Completely pointless, as far as I can see; purposely, elegantly pointless and therefore fully justifying its own existence. Until it caught fire and exploded.

Nothing's perfect.

What's next, the all-toothpick British man 'o war?

And what music Hrothgar the Good Humor man play on his rounds to offer kids a cold treat and bloody, horrible death from a ship filled with murderous barbarian raiders?

Plus, you have to wonder what is the point. If you can make a speedboat made out of fibers of carbon or glass held in place by resin and glue, what great advance have you made doing the same thing with little wooden sticks.

DEN OEVER, The Netherlands (Reuters) - A Viking ship made from ice-cream sticks set sail for England from the Netherlands on Tuesday.

Ex-Catholics are second-largest US "denomination," what about physicists?

I don't agree with people who think science and religion are incompatible, though I don't have much patience for the specific mythology of most religious doctrines. I know plenty of people who combine the two (and some who say they are atheists, but attend religious services and participate in a religious community actively, more as a community of conscience than a doctrinal one).

It's pretty interesting to watch the migration of belief, though, as an indicator of what people are actually looking for in their lives, in the same way that U.S. immigration patterns highlight periods of economic difficulty or political instability in the source countries (or comparative changes, as in the times that the U.S. economy or social freedom increase faster than those of the rest of the world).

A recent Pew Forum study of religion (released March 3, 2008) shows that one third of those who said they were raised Roman Catholic in the U.S. are now former Catholics. That group (about 30 million) is almost twice as large as the second-largest single denomination -- 16.5 million Southern Baptists. Despite the loss, the percentage of the U.S. population and total number of Catholics in the U.S. has remained relatively stable at 66 million, presumably because of the large percentage of recent immigrants from Latin America who are Catholic.

The weird thing is that at the same time the Catholic church is losing so many of those born into it due to its doctrinal rigidity, equally rigid and unforgiving Protestant denominations are growing as well. What does that tell you about the underlying priorities of Americans? That they're pushing forward into a more objective, empirical view of the universe as something not intimately controlled by an invisible puppet master? Or that they're starting to think that way, and don't want men in dresses and funny hats to tell them what to do, but still want the fuzzy comfort of some kind of deity and religious community to take the edge off the image of a harsh, impersonal universe?

I'm guessing the latter, in most cases, based on the number of people who describe themselves as "spiritual, but not religious," which is having your cake and eating it, too. You don't acknowledge a deity or denomination who can tell you what to do, but don't want to think you're just one of a type of forest ape who's learned to build particularly secure nests.

It is a scary, big universe out there, if you put your own existence into the context of a universe with millions of galaxies compared with which our whole Solar System is just one of a trillion motes of dust.

But if we're so good at focusing on our own concerns and ignoring those that don't have any day-to-day impact on us -- Darfur? Bosnia? Tibet? Your best friend from elementary school who you haven't talked to in a couple of decades? -- why worry so much about how big the universe is compared to your own little slice of it?

I'm optimistic about humanity and it's persistent existential angst. (Not my own, of course; since I'm so close to it I can see that it's far more significant than the global concerns of an entire species.)

We're easily self-obsessed enough to narrow our field of concern to things that can fit in our own brains. Why worry about a universe so big you can't conceive its size, made up largely of dark matter you can't even perceive, when the lawn needs raking, you're worried about work and your car keeps making that weird sound that's not quite bad enough to do something about?

Think about lunch, instead; it'll have a more immediate impact. Or about why a Pope so concerned about the dignity of religion and the church in the modern age would go out in public wearing a silly had and red designer loafers? Then you can claim to be thinking spiritually and get a laugh at the same time.

Besides, there was an article out yesterday claiming that physicists (the most quantitative religion, if you consider how strongly they believe in quantum mechanics and string theory and how ridiculous both seem compared to the behavior of the super-quantum universe) found evidence of what came before the Big Bang that created not only everything in the universe, but the universe itself.

They now think that before the Big Bang, there existed -- wait for it -- a universe exactly like the one we're in now. Talk about an anticlimax. Who cares. Once you've seen one universe...

On the other hand, they may just be trying to hang onto what shreds of dignity they have left, as sub-nanoparticular points in an increasingly large universe.

When you grow up enough to shrug off the mythological comforts of your childhood, you probably still like to have something fuzzy and warm to hold onto, however weird it turns out to be.

Right tool for the right job; how to get organized

I've been testing out a ton of productivity and project management tools lately. SimplyFile, Getting Things Done, Action Project Manager, MPS Take Back Your Life, Xobni, ClearContext.

I wrote up a couple of things for various pubs on them. I'll post the links as soon as they're up.

For the most part what I've found is that the less ambitious the application is, and the less trouble to set up, the more effective it is. Clear Context is beautiful; MPS and SimplyFile look simple and elegant. GTD looks like it has a solid base of research into efficient use of time behind it (it may have just been written by an anal-retentive bore, though, it's hard to tell). None of them have actually saved me any time so far.

I was primarily looking for a way to sift through mail quickly, create, track and execute tasks effectively, and create appointments and deadlines in a calendar. I wanted all those functions to be easy to access, simple to learn, and not require that I change the way I think about or go about my scheduling and work.

I've tried to impose organizational processes on myself before, and they don't work any more than a diet would that allows you only to eat food you don't like. It requires too much of a change in process, so I'd have to spend a lot of time thinking about how to get organized rather than actually doing things.

Every time I have a job change that adds a bunch of tasks, I struggle with getting them under control – mainly because I don't have in my head the expectation of when to do them and how. Once I get that down, all I need is a reminder now and then; beforehand, no amount of task-listing is going to keep me on track.

So I just track the deadlines and do a kind of mental inventory of what I need to do on each project to get it done by that time.

What saves time during that phase – when saving time is most valuable – are things that create shortcuts to allow me to do things I would do anyway.

The best (and these will sound foolish if you're looking for a Getting Things Done-type methodology) have been Volumouse, Copernic, Outlook and Google.

Volumouse – a small shareware utility that runs in the background and lets you adjust the volume on your PC by right-clicking your mouse and rolling the scroll wheel – lets me avoid launching the Sound control panel every time I want to turn the radio down when someone's talking to me or the phone rings. That's often a dozen or two times a day, sometimes only for a second.

My Dell Vostro laptop, which I love in many ways, most of them legal, has some kind of learning disability when it comes to sound. It refused to even recognize the sound card for the longest time (and hours on the phone with three levels of phone support with Dell, only one of them useful), still won't recognize the modem (even though Dell sent a replacement), and occasionally decides the sound card isn't there at all.

Even with the nifty (theoretically) media-player buttons on the case that would let me play a music CD without even turning on the laptop (Kind of a pointless exercise. if I need the laptop, it's on; if I don't, I have an MP3 player.)

With Volumouse I don't even have to take my hand off the mouse; just scroll the sound down, and scroll it back up again.

The freeware Copernic lets me store stuff on my laptop and find it again even if I'm not completely sure where it is. I'm not in love with it, but I couldn't do without it. I've tried all the other search engines, including Msft's latest and Google Desktop, and none of them respond fast enough, find enough files correctly, or limit themselves to the areas I want to search. (Knowing the person's name I'm searching for is mentioned on hundreds of websites doesn't help, GoogleDesktop, if I'm looking for the Word file with notes from my interview with that person, though thanks for the extra ad exposures, anyway.)

A previous version of Copernic's search engine, called X1, actually worked a lot better. At least one acquisition, a marketing strategy change and a couple of technical refreshes weakened it, but it's still my least-disliked desktop search tool.

Outlook, much as it pains me to admit, has all the elements you need to manage a schedule, task list and email. They're all clunky, many are hidden, and there are incompatibilities and functional holes where there shouldn't be (WHY can't I lock the toolbars in place, Uncle Bill?). But they're present. And they don't require the maintenance, updates and additional filing that a lot of the productivity apps do.

One additional time-saver:

Filebox eXtender is a strange little shareware utility that runs in the background and puts the image of an arrow and a thumbtack in the upper right-hand corner of any Windows application. Clicking the arrow rolls up the window in a very Mac-like way, allowing you to look underneath and save screen space when you're not using that app.

I'm not used to looking for the little scroll windows, so I don't like that feature, but many people do; especially people who have to use a PC but would rather use a Mac.

The time-saving feature is the thumbtack, which keeps that window on top of all the other windows until you tell it to go away. VERY useful if you're writing about something online and are using Google to check spellings and URLs and such, or any time you're having to copy and paste from one application to another.

It lets you stick your writing window on one half the screen and make sure it doesn't go away while you use the other half screen to get the text you want to place. It starts to eat up a lot of memory and sometimes causes Windows 2007 to hang after a while, so I only launch it when I need it. But it saves a ton of time when I do.

PCMag.com used to publish an app that did almost the same thing (and had a similar memory-bleeding problem, so they may be versions of the same app), but I lost my copy when moving from one laptop to another and have been avoiding having to go back and pay the $7 or $8 they charge for it.

Power in the wrong hands

Whoever first decided to put the light switch on the outside of a bathroom lived with no children, and had no adult friends with a juvenile sense of humor.

On the other hand, trying to brush your teeth while the lights flash on and off makes the whole thing seem much more like clubbing than like simple personal hygiene.

er, "Evolution" of language

"As they say in Discworld, we are trying to unravel the Mighty Infinite using a language which was designed to tell one another where the fresh fruit was."

• Relatively Einstein episode 3, "Fantasy Physics"

Ook.

14 Ways to Say Nothing With Scientific Visualization

Al Globus, Eric Raible

Abstract: Scientific visualization can be used to produce very beautiful images. Frequently users and others not properly initiated into the mysteries of visualization research fail to appreciate the artistic qualities of these images. Scientists will frequently use our work to needlessly understand the data from which it is derived. This paper describes a number of effective techniques to confound such pernicious activity. (Update)

Dog breeding and self determination

According to the highly scientific, probably largely accurate, Animal Planet or Discovery Channel or Dog Channel or whatever special on dog breeding the other night, my golden retriever should be an athlete — compulsively chasing sticks and balls and small animals and diving into any body of water to retrieve theoretical ducks or just swim around.

My dog doesn’t identify with that dog. My dog lives in retriever drag.

Rather than judge by genetics and extrapolate to behavior, we went the other way. Assuming, as breeders apparently do, that genetics defines behavior, we mapped her level of and type activity, personality traits and depth of characteristics such as bravery in the face of the evil UPS guy, thunder and the monstrous toy chihuahua next door.

We’ve decided she’s a mix: half chicken, half carpet.

Twenty-two hours sleep a day. Twenty-one when she's on deadline. And the only time we really saw her run hard was at a parade when an honor guard fired blanks for a salute.

She dragged Mom for half a mile before stopping to hide behind a tree.She loves to ride in the car, but only sticks the tip of her nose out the window so she doesn’t have to face the wind. She was once frightened by a squirrel. She is offended when other dogs sniff her butt, when she even lets them get that close.

Her relatives were theoretically bred for retrieving. She either doesn't know this, or doesn't care. I rolled a ball to her in the kitchen last night. She watched it approach and moved out of the way.Wave a stick until she’s interested, then throw it and she’ll go get it, lie down and chew it into pieces. She’s a StickHound.If she were born human it would have been into a family of athletes and outdoors people. While they were out scaling El Cap she'd be back at the hotel trying to get room service to deliver to her layout by the pool.

Other than cuddling, panting and wagging when you come home, and keeping you company by following you around with toenails clicking until it feels like you're being stalked by a tap dancer, her greatest contribution is to warm up the floor one dog-sized chunk at a time. She works very hard at this. Mostly with her eyes closed.

Personality trumps genetics.

Another example: people directly descended from me are capable of doing math with letters in it. Unselfconsciously. I, on the other hand, count "one, two three, many, lots."

Probably the dog can, too; but it’s a lot of work, so she doesn’t.

Score: Science 0, Self-determination 1

Keys and shoes in the bin, please

Security in the Ukraine prepares for a visit by George W. Bush by frisking the honor guard it invited to show up in costume to line the red carpet.

Think that wand will pick up anything?
--from Reuters