Job Bids

Bidding on jobs is my latest challenge.  I’m not really sure how to do it, or how to do it for different types of job. For example, bidding on a programming project is obviously going to be different than querying an editor about a technology article.

Then there is venue.  Each one has it’s own style rules.  There’s a lot of reading and researching happening in my world right now.

Another challenge is time estimate.  A lot of projects I see offered up for bids are not explained very clearly, which makes giving an accurate estimate difficult.  I don’t know how others feel about it.  But to me, when I’m looking at paying for something, an hourly rate is not all that useful unless I know approximately how many hours it is going to take.  Add into that, I have to estimate how many hours I am going to have available for the work.

Tags and Categories

Tags and categories are important in posting.  Not only is good content necessary for search engines to find your blog.  But tags are used to identify and reflect the content. Continue Reading >>

Windows Azure

Microsoft is nothing if not competitive.  And Windows Azure targets the market that Google is currently dominating. Continue Reading >>

Gravatar - Take Your Identity Along

A Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. Continue Reading >>

Information Technology Has Value

Information technology is not new.  It has been around since the 1950s.  It has always been a part of my life, and was the way my father made a living.  I am baffled by a number of things:

• How many people under 40 I encounter who don’t know how to use a computer.
• Businesses that classify the IT department, or large segments of it as administrative.
• Accounting departments that don’t quantify intellectual property as an asset.
• Managers who don’t know that a database and a spreadsheet are not the same thing.

Larry Downes says,

A Trillion Here, A Trillion There | Stanford Center for Internet and Society

The problem with SOX was that its authors didn’t understand what actually caused the 2001 crash. SOX tightened up reporting requirements for the kinds of transactions Enron used to hide its true earnings, but the real problem, then and now, is that assets and liabilities have moved increasingly from tangible (factories, inventory, cash) to intangible (data, intellectual property, derivatives).

Which brings me back to my point, people don’t know or don’t perceive information technology to be valuable, because they don’t even see their own data and intellectual property as valuable.  It isn’t quantified.  And for the most part it isn’t legislated.  The information department produces something of value: information.

Blog Tip: More and Excerpt

When writing a post, you may wish for the excerpt, or description to break your text in a particular location. If you are using a magazine layout like the one on this blog, the only part of your post that is going to show initially, is the excerpt. Continue Reading >>

Review: Scribefire Blog Editor

Scribefire Blog Editor is an add on for Firefox. I happen to like it and have been using it for months. This is not a paid review.
Continue Reading >>

Senior Computer Skills – Teaching Grandma

Humorous How To

Why Should I Spend Saturday Teaching Grandma to Use a Cell Phone?

You may need more patience than technical knowledge to train your favorite senior citizen to use a cell phone or navigate to your blog. But knowing that your grandparent can call you for a ride home, or dial 911 from the grocery store can make it worth your while. These things also might convince your favorite senior that it is worth her time to remember to charge her cell phone, or to invent an email password. If she remains unconvinced, talk of instant access to photographs of the great-grandchildren might be motivating.

How Am I Going to Accomplish This Task?

The library, your children, and Christmas or any other family togetherness holiday are all excellent places to start. The library is an ideal place to begin your campaign of The Internet Is Useful because the whole family can sit together and log in. You can supervise. Younger children like to show themselves off on a blog. And their enthusiasm might melt the iceberg around Grandmas technological perceptions.

If you must take a teenager with you, remind him that Grandma did not have a computer in her bedroom when she was twelve. When she was twelve the Nazis were marching into Paris. And if he is anything less than discouraging you could be marching into his bedroom, in your robe, when he has friends over.

Go to the library prepared with bookmarks to your children’s blogs, and sites that cater to the needs of seniors, something like prescription drug price comparisons, or the new Medicare explained.

If Grandma hesitates to place herself in front of the computer, park your smallest child there so that she can see him move about without being harmed by dangerous nuclear fallout or something really toxic, like microwaves.

And use the concept of holiday togetherness, or guilt. You want to buy grandma a cell phone for Christmas. Her gift to you can be the piece of mind that comes with knowing she can reach you immediately if she needs assistance.

Now What?

Now that you have Grandma’s attention directed toward an electronic device, begin your tutorial at the beginning. Assuming your public library has a Windows interface, show Grandma the Start button in the lower left corner of the screen. Explain the mouse. When you think you are going to lose your patience, remind yourself that Grandma did not have a computer in her bedroom when she was twelve.

Safety Precautions

Briefly explain phishing and computer virii. Do not go too far. Just make certain that you have an understanding that credit card and social security numbers are valuable to thieves, and that attachments that come from strangers have a life of their own.

Warn her about the addictive nature of QVC.

When All Else Fails

If you try all of those things and are still unable to convince Grandma that she needs a cell phone and an elementary understanding of how to use the library computer as much as she needs her medical alert bracelet, try peer pressure. Volunteer to teach a computer course at her senior center or the church she attends.

Or tell her that her ex-husband, who is 90, sent you an email last week. She’s old. And it was almost 50 years ago. But she did leave her country for that man only to see him run off with the nanny. He can’t possibly be outpacing her on the internet.

Google Earth Surveillance

Googles use of satellite imagery is causing quite a stir in Australia. I find the concept of privacy most amusing. Do you think that you actually have privacy? Had it before satellite imagery became publicly available?

Councils spy with Google eye - BizTech - Technology - smh.com.au

“Google Earth allows for all sorts of surveillance of citizens and is being used without any regard for privacy. It’s time we set strict limits on government bodies and private organisations,” Ms O’Rourke said.

“There are people who walk around in their underpants or sunbake in the nude and they should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their own backyards.”

This statement from GeoEye exec Mark Brender also makes me wonder what people think. We all know that computers originated from defense right?

Google’s Super Satellite Captures First Image | Wired Science from Wired.com

“We’re commercializing a technology that was once only in the hands of the governments,” Brender said. “Just like the internet, just like GPS, just like telecom — all invented by the government. And now we are on the front end of the spear that is commercializing this technology.”

Blog Software - A Series

I use a lot of different tools to keep my blogs running, most are time saving. Some just make better use of analytics, publishing, or browsers.

I will do a review series here, of items potentially useful to bloggers.

I will include:

• Scribefire, a Firefox add on
• Good Keywords v3, analytical for seo
• Grunion, a Wordpress plugin
• Simple Tags, a Wordpress plugin
• Akismet, a Wordpress plugin
• Statcounter, analytical for site traffic
• Gravatar, social networking - so you can take your identity around the web
• OpenID, for comments - so you can take your identity around the web without making new accounts all over the place.
• Delicious, social networking
• Technorati, social networking and OpenID
• Picassa, photoediting for those of us who are limited in graphics knowledge
• Portable Firefox, so you can take all of your stuff with you on a usb drive

If there is something else you want to know about and I’ve mentioned it, or you think I might know about it, please comment. I’ll do my best to check it out. I’m running Wordpress on Apache, MySQL and PHP. (You geeky ones knew that. I acknowledge you.) So I may or may not be able to post a review that is applicable to your environment.

I also have a very simple blogger site that I dearly love. It is so low maintenance.

I should mention that all of the tools listed above are free to the user. Many of them can be upgraded to a professional version for a fee if you desire.