Rasita My Family, My Animals, My Food

Check out this cute little spider that hit my desktop this morning when Jude brought it round to me. I got a couple of good photos of it but it wouldn’t sit still until i got it out onto a tree.

Anybody know what sort of spidy it is?

Time to clear the tabs in Google Chrome.

SBS2008 news is buzzing with the wrap up of the conferences stateside. Here is some important stuff.

• Susan the SBS Diva screenshots a Hyperv install of SBS2008 and follows up with some Nic settings for HyperV
• Robbie from MSFT Australia has some good technical content on SBS2008 and EBS2008.
• Australians can get their hands on training for SBS2008 and EBS2008 at discounted prices.

Robin Good’s Sharewood guide has a list of the Top 25 screen sharing tools.

Sonia Coleman has 208 free Microsoft PowerPoint templates.

I am now using Tweetdeck to manage my twitter conversations – its great!

TwitterAgency is a Virtual Advertising Agency on how to use / not use Twitter.

Brisbane mountain bike riders, check out Bushranger. They also run adventure tours in New Zealand. And if you are into horse riding the Mountain Lake Adventures crew look as if they provide a pretty decent trail riding experience just west of Brisbane.

I am so over it – and it hasn't even happened yet. Not that I care.

I'm going to predict some things.

• Obama will become president – he talks better and doesn’t want to kill everybody - (or so he says)
• He will not withdraw the troops from Iraq. Simple point in fact - he cannot.
• There will not be a decisive military victory ever in Iraq (unless they kill everybody in Iraq (McCain’s plan)
• The us economy is totally screwed – has been for 20 years – been hanging on by the eyeballs to an ever expanding inflationary money supply. I did predict this before the most recent “correction”.
• US gas prices will get to over $5 a gallon – live with it – that is still about half what we are paying.
• Racism is alive and well in the USA as is stupidity. A new president will not fix the totally screwed legal system, health system, financial system, public education system, and a whole lot of other systems that are biased against the poor, the black, the disadvantaged etc.
• Most US citizens still wont realise that there is anything outside the 48 continental states or if they are vaguely aware of that fact still won’t be able to locate anything on a map. (I learnt to draw a rough map of the world freehand when i was a teenager and fill in most of the major countries.)

My apologies to the intelligent readers of SpyJournal – but then if you had the brains to come here most of the things above don’t apply to you.

Hurry up and vote in the screwed political system that does not equal one man one vote and let life get back to normal please.

And as happens once a year I look back and forward. Back to the first year of being 40 and realising that it wasn’t the beginning of the end at all. Playing AFL again was great, the cycling and running is still happening, though not quite as hard as before and I can still show the youngsters a thing or two there, and coaching basketball and volleyball has been fantastic.

I think part of the reason I am hanging out with the young guys and girls so much at the moment is because there is virtually no one my age keen to have a go. Most of the Dads and people I know round my age are sedentary. Sad really. I am organising cycling trips, rock climbing and hiking events, playing basketball and volleyball and these guys just sit there and say things like”Where do you get your energy from?” and “I wish I could keep up with you”. Well the answer is – You can! join me – if you dare. I have a couple of mates who comes when they can and go as hard as I can push them. Dave is one of those. He hates me and loves me at the same time. Here is a video of him finishing a very punishing ride we did on Monday.

Before looking forward to the future the present is pretty cool too. We did my birthday dinner and presents last night as tonight I will be at indoor soccer. I got some cool presents – and the awesomest of cards.

Here’s a pic of the presents from my daughters.

Mercedes gave me a socket set, Erin gave me a crystal angel, Jadeen a new belt – much needed – and Miranda gave me a whistle with a compass and thermometer built in.

The cards the three younger girls made were awesome.

Mercedes drew me some mice and birds.

Erin drew me flowers and I Love My Daddy.

Jadeen drew me hearts and roses and a message of love. Miranda made me baklava! Yum. That girl knows the way to my heart. She copied her mum who made the yummiest fried chicken and cheesy mashed spuds ever (no plastic fantastic instant stuff here Doug!)

So looking forward. I was talking to a friend yesterday about planning for the future. That starts now in the present. I want to have awesome relationships with my daughters when they are 16-20 and as they mature into young adults and look for husbands. The planning for that starts now. “In fact we have been planning for that for several years now. By planning I mean we are using words and phrases, establishing family traditions, planting seeds of affirmation and love and encouragement in our daughters that we can fall back on when tough times come. We are pro-actively ensuring that the girls will want to hang out with mum and dad, ask for and listen to their advice when they go through those tough times that as young adults they will have.

As a husband I enjoy spending time with my wife and best friend Judith. Without her I would be less than the man I am. I want to grow old with her and watch her get all wrinkly and be able to laugh and enjoy watching her face crinkle with pleasure at me being with her and loving her.

In business I am working hard to ensure that what I am building can live beyond me. Numerous parts now can operate with minimal input and generate income. From 10 years ago when we had a single income to now when we have dozens of separate non related income streams I am working hard to ensure that my family will have money to live on after I die. (Not counting the big life policy!)

And last but not least spiritually. My growth the last 12 months has been very stimulating. I have definitely moved closer to God. I am actively working out strategies to be an anchorman in my families spiritual ancestry. I have had to rely more on Him in business and church life in the last 12 months than ever before. Looking forward I aim to become more like Christ everyday. Sure that’s an up and down process, but like to I think the overall direction is up. Time will tell.

I’ve been wanting to write an article for some time now about how the social (web 2.0) web works, and why there are so many different sites out there. specifically I wanted to explain the use of sites like FriendFeed, Profilactic and Ping.fm

I have built a small diagram that hopefully illustrates a small portion of this. It is not comprehensive, though it is accurate in the detail it does show.

The missing stuff includes a dotted line back from any of the sites in the 2nd or 3rd columns back to the first column.

Let me explain the circle of internet life and how Ping.fm, Profilactic and Friend Feed play a part.

You – the user – create content. This can be in the form of blog posts, comments on blog posts – yours or others, twitter microbloging, facebook status, what I’m listening to with MSN, Photos and videos that you upload to Flickr, YouTube or your blog etc. You update your work status on LinkedIn and join forums and debate or discuss things that interest you with others. You can use Ping.FM to send the same status message or microblog to all or any of the sites you are a member of.

Applications like RSS Feed Readers (Google reader, RSS Bandit etc) along with sites like Profilactic and FriendFeed consolidate this content. You can create life streams for yourself, or for others that you follow. Even if you don’t do this you need to realise that others are. Your family members maybe watching and following your internet presence, not in a creepy big brother way, but in a sharing caring way – because they want to know what you think say or do. This especially applies to friends nd families who are widespread. I find that most people’s facebook accounts are filled with friends who are

As an internet user you consume content. You read blogs, view Facebook pages, interact with your friends on MySpace and MSN, read news articles, follow the football and read political debates in forums and comments on blogs. You look at friends and family pictures in Picasa Albums and watch videos on YouTube. In short you consume a lot of content. Some of this is done easily (using RSS Readers for example) and applications like Facebook make it easy to find out what all your friends have been up to with the status notifications feature. Other stuff is found the good old fashioned way using search. See that section for more details here.

Sharing is a little more complex to explain as there are so many ways to do it. However the basic concept can be summed up with the question “Have you ever sent an email to someone with a web link in it?” This is sharing. You have effectively acted in the best interest of your friend and forwarded something you thought they may be interested in. Sharing is just that. Taking information that you think is important and relaying it. Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon are all services designed to help you make that easy to to do, and not just for your friends that you can email – but to anyone. SocialMedian is a news compilation service that can be used to pull specific news items from the web and tailor them into a feed that can be consumed by you or others. Sharing can be done by sending links in Facebook, MSN or email, or by writing a blog article. This article is just that – me sharing what I know about this to you.

We are nearly completing the circle. Part of the consume process is searching, but it is important enough to warrant its own item. Plus I needed to put 5 things into the little diagram! Searching is important because this is how your circle of knowledge and information expands. You might be sent a link to a news article or find something out, and that may open a whole new world up to you. Searching for additional information brings you to pages of information you never knew existed. You are able to  find out something new.

And this helps close the loop int he cycle, because you now have the opportunity to educate or inform your friends, acquaintances and completely random fellow net citizens by sharing the information  you just learned. Maybe by even writing a whole article about the research you just did, or maybe just sending a one line tweet about it. but by doing so you start the whole cycle again.

As a footnote – this article can be considered as a lead into the question “How do we leverage internal knowledge in an organisation?” The process described above can be managed as business process within an organisation. The difficulty is in creating a culture of sharing and openness.

So what is it? Why do you need to keep reading this? Well you probably don’t, unless you work in an organisation with internet access and more than one person there. Well that’s most if us!

Did that get your attention?

How about this?

Has Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Google videos been banned in your workplace? What about instant messaging or Skype?

I want to talk a little about why this has happened, and for the wrong reasons, and also how it will change in the very near future.

Organisations have been very jealous of their employees time (and they have a legitimate right to require their workers to be focussed on work not their social lives while in their employ. IT managers and CIO’s have seen applications like Facebook and messenger to be purely time wasting social applications with no business use. That is starting to change.

Lets start with what Web 2.0 is and work our way up to Enterprise 2.0.

The concept of Web 2.0 is very simple. According to Wikipedia, Web 2.0 is a term that “encapsulates the idea of the proliferation of interconnectivity and interactivity of web-delivered content.” What the! Ok a more normal explanation is web content that is not just informative (Web 1.0), but interactive.

So sites like Facebook are Web 2.0, because there is a multi-user, multi-application , multi-media interface that allows interaction between participants and can leverage that to create great interconnected content.

So how does knowing that change my world while I am at work, especially when Facebook is banned?

Good question. The answer lies in the knowledge inside your head. As a worker, you have information and knowledge, access to material and data that makes you useful. To the organisation as a whole, and also laterally to other workers with the same job or requirements for information as you. The concept of benchmarking is not new, but in a corporate sense usually applies to think tank brainiacs or the corporation as a whole, and is generally seen as an overseas junket for the few privileged to go on!

The internet changes everything. As businesses start to become more connected, their workers in particular also get more connected. Email address lists start to grow. Many knowledge workers spend many hours per day using email. 23% of my time on the computer is in Outlook. I have tracking software in place that tells me that. Much of this information that is being emailed is one dimensional, badly sorted and indexed and often duplicated many times. The wasted effort is huge. As organisations start to realise the untapped resource of workers email folders they will start looking for ways to leverage it.

Dion Hinchcliffe talks about Finding Web 2.0 and says this:

“Sometimes dubbed "Web 2.0", this new, more refined model for creating online software reflected an improved understanding in the way that large networks can provide their full value.  Specifically it reflected how to make use of them when a lot of users can actively contribute to them, directly or indirectly. This left the linear concept of Web traffic behind forever…”

Enter Enterprise 2.0. The entry point for most organisations is with email simply because it is such a huge and easy target. Applications like Xobni give power back to the individual but still don’t help the corporation. Sharepoint is a major step forward because it can not only allow email to be managed in a database it also has the ability to turn the one dimensional network folders containing users files into multidimensional relational databases. Search functions now actually work and suddenly the version control features start to reduce the wasted time with emailing files around. Wikis and conversations about files and projects can be tracked and managed better. As enterprises start to value data for its intrinsic value and not just for its sheer volume the path to Enterprise 2.0 awakening starts to shimmer more brightly.

Some pictures can help here. Rod Boothby’s Enterprise 2.0 Communication Continuum was modified by Dion Hinchcliffe in his article about Enterprise 2.0. The concept of leveragability of the “conversations” that are held by staff in an organisation is the whole key to Enterprise 2.0. Without a perceived benefit to an organisation there is no need to use blogs, wikis, instant messaging, search tools or even email. It is the ability for an organisation to increase productivity, retain knowledge and leverage the untapped resources that will force businesses to adopt Enterprise 2.0 in some format.

Here are some excerpts from an internal research document a local government agency produced recently about the requirement to better manage their internal knowledge:

• The existing network storage system is clumsy and does not provide metadata about files
• We need to identify and foster subject matter experts, and knowledge champions
• We need to define a taxonomy by which to tag information and files with metadata
• We need to foster a knowledge sharing culture
• IS systems need to be aligned with and measured against the KM requirements of the business
• Additional KPI type measurements such as response time to customer requests need to be captured
• Employee learning must be actively encouraged and shown to be contributing to the organisation

These “pain points” are all great starters to help an organisation to start to see the value of Enterprise 2.0 As they stat to look for ways to address these issues, all the signs point to software that is web 2.0 based or similar. Applications like SharePoint, Instant messaging, Twitter, and the sundry services that surround them.

I have helped several organisations down this path toward Enterprise 2.0

• Accepting the value of the data in their business and looking for ways to leverage it
• Accepting the usefulness of workers viral networks – both internal and external to the organisation and facilitating use of those networks.
• Recognising that social networks can contain invitations and introductions to other people or businesses that can add value to the corporate. Hiding them from workers is counter productive.
• Teaching employees to trust the organisation and allow mutual trust to develop – some form of privacy of personal data and connections while allowing interactions that can gain a benefit to the organisation.

The ongoing challenge for Australian businesses, and indeed business the world over, is to identify for themselves the place that “social software” has in their business as a tool for leveraging the powerful hidden data that resides in networks, non indexed email and IM messages, and to build and foster an environment that encourages their staff to value, add-to and share corporate knowledge.

I had a real great weekend. While Jude took herself off to art classes on Saturday morning I did some work while the kids played and cleaned. After locating a container with Chinese checkers marbles in it, I decided to make a Chinese checkers board. That’s harder than it sounds. After a bunch of maths and several false starts I finally had a board marked out with the correct number of spots. I then drilled all the holes using a countersink and then cut the board to an even square and routed the edges. Jude was home by this time so we all then played a game.

Sunday at church we sang the Michael W Smith song I’m desperate for you. The words in this are awesome. It made me think, about how we are desperate for air – so desperate we breathe all the time – try holding your breath and see how desperate you become when starved from air. the challenge for me is am I that desperate for God?

After church we headed off to Peter and Kitty’s engagement party. This was  real blast! There are some photos on my facebook account.

Sunday night we had a mini party here and then I worked again.

Joseph Chirilov writes an Excel blog for the MSDN website. He often gets Excel writers to contribute.

Today I want to highlight two recent articles from Joseph’s site.

The first written by Mark Gillis is How to Create a Perpetual Yearly Calendar in Excel. The information about dates in here is very useful even if you don’t need to create a calendar. I recommend reading this if you have ever had problems managing dates in Excel.

The second one is a great example of building a complex application. Charlie Ellis, a Program Manager on the Excel team, shares a spreadsheet he built in Excel for solving Sudoku puzzles.

Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 1/2

Building a Basic, Understandable Sudoku Solver Using Excel Iterative Calculation - Part 2/2

Enjoy.

Sort of like liquorice all-sorts – only not.

NowPublic can scan keywords, heres the Drupal scan page. This article should get linked on there.

I got nominated as a Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 expert. This might prompt me to write some articles here in the future about the difficulties in establishing Enterprise 2.0 ideas in small and large business. Watch this space! Thanks John for that!

I have located MSI files for Windows Live Beta Applications and am storing them on my SkyDrive. Feel free to download them, use them and store them for free access also.

The new Windows Live Photo Gallery is awesome. The new facial recognisiton software is great and allows tagging of people in your photos by recognising their faces and allowing you to tag with messenger contacts. Sarah Perez explains how to use the Live Photo Gallery Facial Recognition feature really well. It took a while for my 100,000 odd photos to be indexed but once they were it was fast and easy to use.

Still on Sarah’s site, here is a link to tons of free Microsoft Software.

Want to make personalised Outlook Mail Merges? The MS Office Outlook team blog has detailed instructions titled Mail Merge: How to send a personalized e-mail to many people at once.

Want Live TV on your PC or Mobile Phone? See fellow kiwi Nick MacKechnie’s blog for the details.

Naked PC’s – heres Antec’s new Skeleton Case. It looks pretty wild. Here is their blurb.

The Antec Skeleton is a truly revolutionary enclosure. With a unique design that allows for unprecedented airflow, a front 92mm fan, and a top three speed 250mm fan with multicolor LED customization, the Skeleton goes utterly unmatched in stylish cooling. Factor in the layered component trays for top-notch convenience, as well as the rackmount quality side rails, and you have a case truly without equal.

Live Mesh can be used to synch individual files. Here are some fairly detailed instructions on how to do that. Note this is not the user friendly way to use Live Mesh Amanda talked  about recently, but a hardcore geekified use of it.

This Drupal SEO checklist is pretty good. Lists all the modules you should be using for good SEO in Drupal.

Settlers of Catan has been released on MSN Games – go to Catan OnLine

And that’s all for today folks!

What place does twitter have in a corporate environment? Social networking sites such as facebook is largely banned in corporate workplaces, especially government departments. Most of these places also feel threatened by the idea of instant messaging and suspect that their workers become less productive as a result. And maybe they are right in some circumstances.

Twitter can be abused as can IM and facebook. If all workers are using these “tools” for is to share pics of their weekend parties, and organise their social lives then they are effectively “stealing” time from their employer. And their employer can rightly block that sort of behaviour.

So what is the place of these activities?

At Jethro we actively require our staff to use the Messenger, Skype and Twitter accounts. We actively encourage blogging as way of spreading information about what we do. Our blogs and twitter and messenger use is of course partly about our social lives – after all isn’t that part of life? But the critical mass I referred to in the title relates to when the pay off starts to occur.

Recently the Venturous Australia Report was released to the public. It was initially copyrighted and locked down so it couldn’t be commented on. However it has now been freed up somewhat. Fair use allows me to cut snippets and give credit to the author and then create commentary on them. However there is not yet a single place that this debate can occur in. Submissions close in 4 days for panel members – the timeframe is short – too short. But the debates need to be heard. This document has the potential to be a foundation stone paving the ay into the future for Australian business and the economy. Lets not screw it up by appointing boffins with no real world experience. (No disrespect to boffins intended.)

I had made a number of comments on twitter to Laurel Papworth, aka SilkCharm, who we profiled on the geek girl series recently about this document. Then this week I was followed by John Haining, and then Dr Kristin Alford.

They have been talking about this recommendation from Chapter 10 of the document:

Recommendation 10.2: An advisory committee of web 2.0 practitioners should be established to propose and help steer governments as they experiment with Web 2.0 technologies and ideas. At least five substantial experiments should be established in different areas within two years to be evaluated within three. The Minister for Finance and Deregulation should have carriage of the initiative.

While there are no shortage of “Web 2.0” experts out there, and particularly those I would call leading edge entrepreneurs, people like Chris Saad, Ashley Angell and Darren Rowse there are also plenty of others in the blogosphere who have valid contributions to make. People like Angus Logan and Nick Hodge from Microsoft, who are helping bring the technology that powers this stuff to us, And then there are the think tank people (like Kristin’s firm Bridge 8) who have explored the concepts of Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and the shifting sand that social networks play in the ever growing information age.

As the information age gathers momentum countries like Australia are rapidly shifting employment into the service provision industries away from manufacturing and food gathering. See the chart  above showing the expanding sector of Finance, Property and Business Services. How we will become a “Venturous” nation will depend on the environment we create for our workers – and particularly the Y generation people as they come through into the workplace. They are ideally situated to make this happen. Multitasking, widely networked and online connected. Lets make sure that government departments and corporates are encouraged through the use of grants, R&D tax concessions and even “boffin” run university and think tank studies that can explore the relationships, the diversity and the richness that is a connected interverse ( I just made that word up!) How else would I have ever have “met” these people, I met Angus and Nick in real life, Nick through the internet first and Angus from a Microsoft conference but most of the people I follow on twitter I have never met., Some of my staff I have never met! Many of my clients I have never met in real life. Many I meet online and then connect with in real life.

I am a small business. No bones about that. Under $1M turnover so far, though well into 6 figures. I am in a zone for small business that needs help from the government. I want to employ more people, but the employment rules make that hard. I want to spend more time and money on research, I already do personally – about 25% of my time is research. I actively require my staff to spend time on research and pay them to do so. Government assistance in that would be great!. I hope my little voice can be heard on a national stage, represented by the people on the panel.

These have been read since the last time I posted books.

<!--break-->

My browser is filling up with pages left right and centre.

I need to reduce the number of windows open – even though I am running Google Chrome now. I have noticed it is way more stable than Firefox and leaves Internet Explorer for dead – except for a few sites that will only open properly in IE. Qantas being one of them. Actually the Qantas site works fine, but the Infotriever software uses a plugin that extracts my flight bookings and inserts them into Outlook for me. So where am I going?

First I am flying to Sydney for the day on 18th October to attend the Australian DrupalCamp. The at Christmas time I am flying to New Zealand to attend a family reunion as the resident tech geek – set up and manage a wifi network, patch PCs, probably build a new one for my folks etc. Oh and hang out with my siblings and nieces and nephews for a couple of days :)

Twitter world. I am attending my first ever BTUB this Friday. The Director of Innovation Services Australia, John Haining, is following my twitter updates, and I reciprocated. (Maybe I do have a voice Chris Saad!) I better say something intelligent now!

I am going to have to purchase the antivirus software for the Windows Home Server soon. The trial version of F-Secure will run out shortly. I think I will try the licensed version. It is Euro 65.

Ping.fm is awesome. I will draw a chart later to explain it. Suffice to say for now that if you use more than one social network, microblogging facility or lifestream application then Ping.fm is THE tool for you. And its free.

Windows Live! Where do I start? The Live team are releasing stuff like mice breeding. Talking of which, Jadeen is upset now as she begins to realise that her baby mice, now nearly three weeks old will be euthanised this weekend for snake food. She gets to keep 1 and 2 go to the mouse’s fathers owner. Anyway back to Windows Live. The Live Betas for Photo Gallery, Writer, Messenger, Movie Maker, Mail, Office Outlook Connector (for hotmail and outlook and calendar integration) have all been released.

Photo gallery has some cool enhancements including tagging photos for people using your messenger contacts. I am writing this in the New Live Writer – much cleaner interface and seems to work better. They fixed some bugs also. Live Messenger Beta is Way Cool. It has this awesome heading background that can be customised with a photo or pic from your computer, and this is shared with your contacts when you chat with them – if they have the new version. I have put a panoramic photo created in Live Photo Gallery in my header.

Get all the new Live Tools from the http://download.live.com/ site.

Talking of Panoramic, the Live team released the Image Composite Editor today for x86 and x64. I have downloaded it but haven’t installed it yet – i only found it out a few minutes ago.

Internet Explorer is available. While I haven’t installed it yet, I will dot hat on a dev machine to test the next site we build, there are some pages I have found that may be helpful. Learn all about web slices and locate and download Internet Explorer 8 addons.

5 of the guys from our church have gone to Tanzania to do some community development work, teach at a pastors conference and generally minister to the folk there. Read all about it and interact with them if you desire on the Narangba Baptist Church – Tanzania Missions Trip blog site I set up using Ning.

Another Ning site I created some time ago is for the basketball coaching group I am working with. We are working on fitness, basketball and volleyball skills and some life skills including confidence, interpersonal relationships and spiritual growth. Tonight we had an exciting meeting with some parents and 4 of the older kids including our very own aManda about how we can use the group to reach out to disadvantaged kids and kids with needs. We are looking at connecting with a campus for drop out kids, – those who have been completely abandoned by the school system because of behavioural and societal issues. It is exciting to see the passion of the young people as they prepare to step out of the safety of their comfort zones to help kids who really need it but will be very confronting and hard to help.

That closed a few – down to 31 tabs open!.

Question – what exciting stuff are you reading about right now?

Storm season is here again with 2 storms in 2 days so far and another one forecast for tonight apparently. I managed to get a couple of shots of lightning last night. I missed most of the good spikes!. Here is the best picture I got.

More shots of the lightning storm yesterday up on flickr.

I took a bunch of photos yesterday. We went to the park in the afternoon. These photos were all taken with the HTC Touch Diamond. After the first few photos I decided to play with the settings and see what could be done.

Here is Erin and a shot of the kite flying. Erin climbed the light pole to the top and Mercedes got on the base of it.

Then Mercedes and I took some shots together.

The rest of the family went home and Miranda and I took some more shots playing with the settings.

First we tried negative exposures.

Then black and white and sepia.

I took a panoramic shot of the storm passing through a few kilometres away.

And then we worked our way through the templates.

Erin blowing out her candles on her birthday cake on her birthday the other day. My little girl is growing up fast. She is 7 now and a little livewire bundle. When you hold her she clings like a monkey, and you can feel every muscle and tendon is just wiry – she is bursting with energy and hardly ever sits still.

She loves to jump up to me to get a cuddle and she springs off the floor and into my arms and wraps her arms around my neck. Usually this is followed by her wriggling back down (all too soon) and she is off and running at the next thing. She has endless stamina, I think she will be a good long distance runner. Erin also loves to draw. She often comes in and borrows my whiteboard markers – making a little box on the whiteboard to draw pictures for daddy.

I love her!

I had an interesting question about conditional formatting posed in the comments by Stephen.

In a new sheet, I am trying to make a whole row turn red, green or amber depending on the value of one cell in that row, so I can easily see which jobs we have won, lost or are pending. Any 'IF' conditional formula I write gets thrown out by Excel. What am I doing wrong?

I promised him an answer so here it is.

For this exercise I am making some assumptions.

• You are using Excel 2007 format Excel spreadsheet (.xlsx or .xlsm). These instructions will not work in detail for Excel 2003, though the concept is similar.
• That there are 3 conditions we  are looking for. Of course Excel 2007 allows more than 3 conditions so you can add more if you need. (One of the improvements on Excel 2003 that only allowed 3 rules)
• That the entire row is needed to be coloured. If you need a smaller section than change the formulas accordingly.
• That the entire worksheet needs this formatting. If you need a smaller section than change the formulas accordingly.
• That the conditional formats are going to be based on a cell that returns a specific result based on some other rule.

The first thing I did was set up a spreadsheet using column H as my rule column. I often do something similar to this where I create a hidden column at the side of my data table and perform a IF function based calculation that returns me a value depending on the data evaluated. To use Stephens example I am assuming that jobs won have returned a 1, jobs pending returns a 0 and jobs lost a –1. These values can be anything – they are not relevant.

Now we are ready to create the conditional formatting rules.

The important thing to remember with conditional formatting when trying to work with more than just the selected cell is the absolute and relative cell selection rules. Read more about absolute and relative references if you need to.

Select the entire sheet (by clicking the gray triangle left of column A).

From the Home tab select the conditional formatting option and click Manage Rules.

This brings up the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager.

Select New Rule and then Use a formula to determine which cells to format.

Create a rule where the formula is =$H1=-1 and the format is a fill of red.

Click OK.

Now make a new rule where the formula is =$H1=1 and the format is a fill of green.

Lastly make a new rule where the formula is =AND($H1=0,$H1<>””) and the format is a fill of amber. This rule keeps the cells unfilled where there is nothing in column H.

Click Apply to view the result.

The trick here is that the cell reference $H1 allows the rule to be applied down to every row and use the value in column H for every cell in that row.

Columns could be formatted in the same manner using a rule value in a row by locking the row and allowing the column to alter. eg. H$1.

Feel free to comment if this was helpful, or if you have other questions that need solving.

Well it was stupid really. I have had enough experience with emergency departments now that I should have listened to my inner voice of reason and not bothered going.

Anyway – I didn’t. Late Saturday night my Uvula decided to get inflamed and swollen. I was a little worried when I tried sleeping that I couldn’t breath and was choking on it. After some will I? wont I? games I rang my doctor father in New Zealand (waking him at 4:45am his time) to ask his advice. He suggested going to the hospital. I don’t think my father has ever waited in a public hospital emergency waiting room. He is always on the other side of the wall. Anyway forgetting this fact I then ran the local hospital 24 hour nursing line. They advised the same thing. So now all I had to do was decided if I could drive without choking, passing out and crashing thus killing myself in the process. After some more will I? won’t I? I decided against calling an ambulance and drove myself the 20 minutes to the hospital. I parked and went in at 3am. After being seeing in about 10 minutes by a nurse who oohed and aahed and said “my yes it is swollen we will have to get a doctor to see you” I sat and waited. Fortunately I took my walkman and 2 books. I had finished the first book, and was starting on the second at 7AM. at 7:25 I was seen by a doctor who took all of 5 minutes to examine me and tell me to go home and take 2 over the counter anti inflammatory pain meds. Bah Humbug!

I went home took the meds and went to sleep.

I am recording here for evermore my intention never to go the hospital again unless an ambulance takes me! My advice for anybody is that if you can walk or drive chances are you don’t actually need to go to the hospital. Wait and it will be all ok. If not the ambulance will get you anyway.

And if I had done some Googling before I went I would have found this fantastic advice at http://swollenuvula.blogspot.com/ and these yummy pictures.

Joel Spolsky, one of the worlds leading authorities on software development, has launched a new questions and answer website called StackOverflow.

Here is his rationale behind the decision to do so.

You know what drives me crazy? Programmer Q&A websites. You know what I’m talking about. You type a very specific programming question into Google and you get back:

• A bunch of links to discussion forums where very unknowledgeable people are struggling with the same problem and getting nowhere,
• A link to a Q&A site that purports to have the answer, but when you get there, the answer is all encrypted, and you’re being asked to sign up for a paid subscription plan,
• An old Usenet post with the exact right answer—for Windows 3.1—but it just doesn’t work anymore,
• And something in Japanese.

If you’re very lucky, on the fourth page of the search results, if you have the patience, you find a seven-page discussion with hundreds of replies, of which 25% are spam advertisements posted by bots trying to get googlejuice for timeshares in St. Maarten, yet some of the replies are actually useful, and someone whose name is “Anon Y. Moose” has posted a decent answer, grammatically incorrect though it may be, and which contains a devastating security bug, but this little gem is buried amongst a lot of dreck.

And here is the About details from Stack Overflow it self:

Stack Overflow is a programming Q & A site that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions, free to read, free to index, built with plain old HTML, no fake rot13 text on the home page, no scammy google-cloaking tactics, no salespeople, no JavaScript windows dropping down in front of the answer asking for $12.95 to go away. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free. And fast. Very, very fast.

We don't run Stack Overflow. You do. Stack Overflow is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow programmers. Once the system learns to trust you, you'll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every imaginable programming question together. No matter what programming language you use, or what operating system you call home -- better programming is our goal.

I have already created an account and answered a question on, you guessed it, Excel and VBA.

If you are a programmer then Check StackOverflow out and see if it works for you. Be part of the community, ask questions and answer them.

Following the mishap of my Nokia N81 (broken screen) I needed to obtain a new phone. As I had another phone that was out of contract I was able to get the new HTC Touch Diamond. This is an awesome touch screen phone. The apple iPhone is basically a poor copy of the HTC touch phones only running substandard software including the Music crippling DRM iTunes software. In reality there is no comparison. The iPhone is an iPod with a phone application attached. It does the internet badly (no java or flash support) has no Bluetooth (OK it has bluetooth but you cannot use it to transfer files or data – isn’t that he point of bluetooth?), cannot MMS pictures, has a very bad battery life and you have to install and run iTunes before you can even use the phone application. The HTC Touch Diamond by contrast is first and foremost a Smartphone. That is, it is a PDA phone  running the Windows Mobile 6.1 software. Not only does it have the full phone functionality that every mobile phone should have, it combines this with the PDA capability of Mobile Office, Word, Excel and PowerPoint, integration with Outlook and Exchange, SMS and MMS, photos and video (using a 3.2Mega Pixel camera) has a touch screen interface including some cool scrolling applications just like the iPhone has. Data connectivity includes Bluetooth, Wifi, multi-band Phone (3G, GSM and HSDPA). GPS can be integrated easily (using an external device which is good because it doesn’t then rely on cell coverage). Possibly the only poor comparison to the iPhone is the internal storage is fixed at 4GB. The battery life is also poor, but it can be replaced unlike the iPhone!

I have had a fantastic experience with it so far. In fact the only frustration experienced so far has been with the network provider. This is actually my fault as I bought this from one provider (Telstra) and promptly put my Optus simcard in it. I needed to do a hard reset and then add the Optus internet configuration settings to it, which a simple phone call to their technical support people provided me with. They stayed on the phone and walked me through all the settings to customise it to their network and then emailed me a PDF file containing all the settings as well.

The phone itself is very sleek. It is physically smaller than the iPhone and much better fit to a shirt pocket. The screen size is 2.8 inches compared with the iPhone's 3.5 inches. However this is because the HTC includes some hard buttons as ell as the soft ones. In my experience these are good as they can find a fast way to deal with the phone. Answer and Hang up, Home and return as well as a combined secondary navigation and enter button fill the bottom section of the phone. The also allows you to hold the phone without obstructing the screen. As a PDA it also comes with a stylus so there are effectively three ways to interact with the device (or 4 if you count voice control). The USB connection is non standard which I find surprising. This maybe because it also doubles as the charger and can be plugged into the mains but I don’t see why they had to alter it. It a normal mini USB sized connection, but one side has been squared off (not diagonal) This also doubles as the headphone socket.

The only other external buttons are the volume up and down and the on off button.

The touch screen itself is not too sensitive. This means that brushing against it doesn’t change things and a firm swipe over the screen is required to scroll though things. The animation on the scroll is pretty cool also. It is orientation sensitive and will rotate images and internet etc depending on whether you hold the phone in a vertical or horizontal way. Zooming and out is an easy double tap and there are also settings in most apps to alter text size etc as required. Even my dodgy eyes found that the text was very readable at small sizes. However non mobile enabled internet pages needed to be zoomed in for me to see them.

Photos are crisp and clear as is video. Its not jerky or blurry. It is a 3.2MP auto focus camera, unlike the iPhone's 2 MP fixed focus camera which cannot make video calls and the HTC contains a second camera on the front for video calling.

Being smaller this phone is also lighter than the iPhone. I think it is a better size for using as a phone. The iPhone is clearly designed as a portable application device first and a phone second.

All the technical specs between the two can be compared, HTC Touch Diamond Specifications – Apple iPhone 3G Specifications.

For those who are tossing up between an iPhone and a regular phone, then this review should clinch it for you. Get the HTC Touch Diamond.

Here's a list of iPhone issues and missing / useless features along with some other reviews.

EBay review

cnet iPhone review - (and to be fair the cnet HTC review)

I took a bunch of photos of the unpacking and then some screen shots as well.

The box is like an inverted pyramid with the top cut off (if that makes sense)) – basically like a diamond!

Opening it you are presented with sleek shiny hard plastic black case the same shape as the outer cardboard wrapper. The top opens off and inside the lid there is the software. In the top of the main case the phone sits on a plastic tray with the headphone buds presented along side. Lifting out the phone there is a hole to stick your finger through and lift the whole tray out. Under neath there is another small plastic tray containing the charger, headphones, USB cable, spare stylus and battery. Below that are the manuals.

I have lots of things in draft format to be posted on here. I will endeavour to get them all written in the near future. Some pressing client issues are to be dealt with first however.

So in the next few days look for posts on:

• Why I was in hospital most of last night
• Live Mesh - How to set it up and use it (being written by aManda)
• Photosynth – what it is, how to use it and the ones I have created so far
• Books I have read lately (mostly so i can stop tripping over the stack beside my desk that isn’t getting put away until I write this post)
• And if I get time, the next VBA primer.

Ok back to work!