Keith O Hudson

I’ve been using an external monitor with my laptop for a couple of years and would have a hard time living without the extra screen real estate. The multiple monitor feature built into Windows XP is great, but not well documented within Windows. I struggled for a long time to try and figure out how to control where my start bar and desktop items would display. Windows displays them on your “Primary Monitor”.  However, sometimes my laptop screen was the primary monitor and sometimes my external monitor was primary, and there did not appear to be any logic to it.

I accidentally discovered the secret to mastering multiple monitors while helping a new co-worker.  Here’s the secret: make sure only one display is active. Then, move that display to the monitor you want as your primary monitor, using the function keys on your laptop keyboard. Then attach the second monitor in your windows monitor settings dialogue box.

If you send emails that contain proprietary information, its wise to mark them confidential. In some business settings, failing to mark proprietary information as confidential could jeopardize the business’s right to enforce its exclusive rights to the information.

Save time by creating a signature in Outlook that contains only your confidentiality notice. You can then insert it into the body of an email with two mouse clicks.  The notice I’ve seen a co-worker use reads: CONFIDENTIAL and PROPRIETARY – DO NOT SHARE.

You could do the same thing for any other block of text you need to insert often into an email.

At this time of thanksgiving, we are often reminded to count our blessings – to remember the good things with which we have been blessed. For many of us, we list among those blessings a comfortable home, food, clothing, a job that allows us to provide for our temporal needs, and family, friends and loved ones. Read the rest of this entry »

(How to get rid of formatting changes in Track Changes)

Here’s a tip for those who use Microsoft Word 2003 for editing documents, and want to quickly see the differences between two documents. Open the first document, then select “Compare and Merge Documents” from the Tools menu. In the dialog box that opens up, select the second document, then use the drop down arrow on the Merge button in the bottom right hand corner to select “Merge into new document.”

 To hide the formatting differences, choose “Show” on the Reviewing toolbar, and uncheck formatting.

 To remove the formatting differences all at once, choose “Show” on the Reviewing toolbar, then uncheck everything BUT the formatting changes.  Then use the drop down beside the Accept All icon in the Reviewing toolbar to “Accept All Changes Shown”.

Here’s a list of some useful Twitter resources.

prettytweet              cotweet              socialoomph              twitterrific              twitterkarma              twhirl              twitterfeed              trendistic              twellow              tweetbeep              twittercounter              tweetdeck              twitThis              twitpwr              twollow              friendorfollow              twitterholic              twiping

Juvenile Diabetes is a disease that ravages young lives.  We have a family friend who was diagnosed with Juvenile Diabetes (also known as Type I diabetes) about 4 years ago at age 9. She has to use insulin every day.  Controlling her blood sugar is difficult.  If she does not successfully control her blood sugar, she faces the possibility of blindness, loss of limbs, and early death.

Some years ago, we had another friend with diabetes. I don’t know if it was Type I or Type II, but at age 25 or so, she was in a wheelchair having lost her legs to the disease.  She was married, and had two young children.  We were greatly saddened when she died while her children were still very young, leaving her husband to raise their young children by himself.

Type I diabetes is a malfunction of the pancreas. The Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation raises funds for research to find a cure for juvenile diabetes. There have been promising advances in this area just in the last few years.  JDRF research has made huge strides in treatment options, and there is real hope of a cure in the near future.

On October 31, 2009, I will be participating in the Phoenix, Arizona Walk for a Cure in support of the JDRF.  If you feel a desire to support this wonderful cause, please go to my walk page, here (a new window will open), and make a donation.  Or, donate to a friend or family member who is walking in their city.  Better yet, walk yourself, and ask your friends and neighbors to donate.

Together, we can make a difference.

As a society, we pride ourselves on the great accomplishments of humankind –unparalleled economic growth and prosperity; technological inventions; the rapid expansion of scientific knowledge; and wonderful medical advances, among others.

The natural disasters that have affected several areas of the world just within the past few weeks – typhoons in the Philippines, the tsunami that struck Samoa, New Zealand and Australia – are a stark reminder of how helpless we are to control mother nature despite the marvelous advances the world has made in the past few decades.

At the same time, many individuals struggle with personal disasters – loss of a job and income, loss of a loved one, loss of a home, or health issues that can change someone’s life overnight.

Have we ever had a greater need to come together as a human family and to help each other out?

How inspiring then, to hear the he story of Jack McConnell. Read the rest of this entry »

I ran across a blog article this morning here that answers this question with a resounding NO! I highly recommend you read it if you are asking yourself this question, and heed its advice. The advice in that column does not apply to everyone, but it applies to a lot more people than might realize it.

I worked for a bankruptcy trustee in Canada during the 1980s, when the Canadian economy was going through an upheaval.  Mortgage interest rates were at 18% and higher, and I personally spoke with many people whose mortgage payments doubled overnight.  (The longest mortgage term in Canada at that time was 5 years, so every few years, your mortgage “renewed” at current interest rates.) I distinctly remember one man who was used to working a lot of overtime, essentially doubling his base salary.  His mortgage payment doubled at the same time as his employer  eliminated all overtime due to financial constraints.

No one I know can predict their own future with certainty. Err on the side of caution – plan for the worst, and hope and work for the best.

As brutal as is the advice in the blog article I referred you to above, in these difficult economic times, financial decisions must be made based on reality, not fantasy.  Some pain now is much better than a lot of pain later.

Here are two more ways to unfollow people on Twitter who are not following you.

1. The website friendorfollow.com lets you enter your twitter name, and checks your account for those following you and those you are following.  There are three tabs showing on the page:

Following: which shows you a list of all those not following you that you are following. Actually, you see their avatars. Hover over one of the avatars and you can see when that person’s account was created and some other stats about them. If you are signed in to twitter on the account you have searched using FriendOrFollow, you can click on any avatar to go to that person’s twitter profile and unfollow them. HINT: if you are using a tabbed browser, open the avatar’s profile in a new tab. That way, after unfollowing them, you can simply close the tab and you’re back to the list of avatars at FriendOrFollow.  If you leave the FriendOrFollow page rather than just leaving it open in one browser tab while you go to another tab , you lose the list and it must regenerate again when you regenerate the page.

Fans: shows you people who are following you, but you are not following them. Again, you see a list of avatars.

Friends: people you are following and who are following you.

In each case, you have the option to export the list as a “csv” — a “comma separated values” file, which you can then use for additional things.

I’ll show you tomorrow how I use the “Following” csv.

2. Twitter karma lets you enter your twitter account name and password (it passes these to twitter without recording them) and brings back a list of all your followers and those you are following, then lets you do things like bulk unfollow those not following you.  Very cool, but like FriendOrFollow it depends on the twitter api, so can take a long time to populate, especially if twitter is overloaded, and sometimes doesn’t work at all.

Tomorrow, a semi-automated way to unfollow.

Yesterday, we talked about how to unfollow on Twitter manually.  Today, I’ll show you how to use Twiping, a free program, for unfollowing people.

You can get Twiping for free at twiping.com.  Once it is installed, you sign in to your twitter account, and it will retrieve a list of your followers and your friends from the twitter servers (provided you don’t have more than 15,000 combined friends and followers).

Click on the Friends and Followers menu item on the top line, then choose “Friends not following me” in the dropdown menu.  All those twitter names will now be loaded in the main window.

Right click on the name of one of them, and choose “Select All.”  Now right click again, and choose “Stop Following Selected”.

The To Do list will be populated, and the program will start unfollowing those people, at a rate of about 1 every 10 seconds.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about some other ways of unfollowing people who are not following you.

How to Unfollow on Twitter, Chapter 1