Low Tech Hottie

We use them every day . . . and we hate them. Desktop staplers just don't reliably do the job. And it's no wonder . . . their fundamental design hasn't changed for the past 50 years.

Until now.

The desktop stapler has been created by (who else?) Staples.

The Staples One-Touch Stapler with Staple Gun Power is nothing short of amazing. Tapping the thing with one finger will cleanly drive a standard staple through 20 sheets of paper. That's what the ads claim, but my guess is that it will handle 25-30 sheets.

No cord. No batteries. No teflon-coated titanium staples. No pounding. Just an ergonomic design that does magical things with leverage.

Trust me. You'll never spend $14.99 more wisely. Check out the demo at the Web site.

Rein In Those MS Word RTF Files with Embedded Images

It's always perplexed me how huge Word documents can become when images are embedded in them. It doesn't seem to happen when files are saved in the default .DOC format--only when they're saved in the .RTF format.

An item on p. 79 of the 11/20/04 PC Magazine gave me the answer. Two copies of each image are saved within an .RTF file, including one in the bloated Windows Metafile (WMF) format.

There's a simple registry tweak to prevent Word from creating the WMF copy. If you don't have access to the issue (which doesn't appear to be online yet), check out Microsoft's Knowledgebase Article 224663.

The tweak works. I had a user manual with a lot of screenshots which was over 300 MB and took forever to load. After applying the registry tweak, I opened the file, made a tiny edit to it, and saved it . . . as an 8 MB file.

Hacking Google Desktop Search to Index Drives Besides C:

My initial enthusiasm for the recently released Google Desktop Search product was somewhat dampened when I realized that the product would only index files on the C: drive. That restriction limits the value of GDS on my home system (on which virtually all user files are stored on the E: drive) and on my work PC (where I store all my user files on a network share mapped as G:).

It turns out that there's a workaround. Scott Kingery's excellent GDS TIPS page has all sorts of useful information about GDS, including how to hack the registry to tell GDS to index additional drives besides C:.

(Thanks to Chris Sherman from Search Engine Watch for pointing out the Kingery site.)

The Meaning of Sports

I've been reading an interesting book. Michael Mandelbaum's The Meaning of Sports. The author theorizes that baseball is a reflection of America's pre-industrial existence. Football reflects both the Industrial Revolution and the military, and basketball embodies the post-industrial era. (Most of the country won't notice that he overlooks hockey, but this is Hockeytown.)

It's a fun read. Mandelbaum is definitely aiming at a popular rather than a scholarly audience, and he provides a lot of really interesting background on the history of the sports.

And I was pleased to rediscover one of my favorite quotations--one that I hadn't thought about in years.

"Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings."
--George F. Will

Cool Posters

Thanks to NPR's All Things Considered for tonight's story highlighting the American Institute of Graphic Artists' effort to get out the vote. A couple of hundred of the best posters can be seen at the AIGA's Web site.

There's some really cool stuff. Each of the posters can be viewed with Acrobat Reader and printed out on ledger-size paper (11" x 17").

Site to Check Out: Google Guide

I've made no secret of the fact that Google is my search engine of choice. Even though I preach and teach (during search workshops) the importance of not relying on a single search engine, I invariably first turn to Google whenever I'm looking for something.

And I'm not alone. I don't think I know of a single librarian who doesn't start out with Google. (Okay, one librarian . . . but I don't think JD uses any search engines. For him, computers only exist to get to OPACs and bibliographic databases.)

And the amazing thing is how versatile the tools are that the Googlers have provided. I learned a lot from Tara Calashain's and Rachel Dornfest's Google Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools when it came out a couple of years ago, and a slew of other titles have followed that title onto the market.

Today, I found a great Web site which should allow me to further refine develop my Google skills. It's the Google Guide site operated by Nancy Blachman. She provides an incredible amount of information which is beautifully organized into separate tracks targeted at novices and experienced users.

And for retro users, Nancy even provides printable versions of the site.

Tiger Season

After fading badly in September, the Tigers finished with a 72-90 record. 73 wins would have been nice--a full 30 better than the 43-119 record they compiled a year ago. (On the other hand, had the Tigers won the season finale they would have denied the Devil Rays their opportunity to notch the first 70 win season in their seven year history.)

(The team might have approached 80 wins had they had the services of stopper Ugueth Urbina during the final drive. He left the team on September 1st to return to Venezuela after his mother was kidnapped.)

Despite tailing off badly at the end, there was a lot to be impressed by in the 2004 team.

• When Marcus Thames hit 2 homers in the 161st game, this became the first team in ML history to have 11 players with 10 HR
• Ivan Rodriguez' .334 was the 7th best BA in the ML
• As a team, the Tigers batted .272--#8 in the ML and in their division (Cleveland batted .276)
• Their slugging average of .449 was also #8 in the majors and #2 in the division (Chicago hit for .457
• Their OBP was mediocre--.337 for #14
• The pitching was poor. The 4.93 ERA was #30
• Despite having Pudge and Inge combine to throw out 41 felons (#6), the opponents stole 71 bases

(not yet done with this one.)

Debate #1

I didn't watch much of the 9/30 debate between Bush and Kerry, but I listened to much of it (in an on-and-off fashion) while trying to troubleshoot a computer problem. (Problem was with me. I didn't read the instructions closely enough to notice that the new printer I was trying to access via my new wireless print server wasn't compatible with the damned print server.)

I was encouraged by the overall tone of the dialog. Both parties were civil and, for the most part, rational. I'd been worried that Kerry would be too stiff, but he seemed much more at ease than W was. It wasn't a knockout punch by any means, but I'd say Kerry scored some points. Look for Bush to be more prepared for the next one.

I heard an interesting interview on NPR with a debate specialist who published a book about the first 40 years of Presidential debates. He noted that neither participant seemed prepared to shift his focus among the moderator (Jim Lehrer), the studio audience, and the multiple cameras. He also pointed out that each network (I think there were nine broadcasting the event) got to choose which camera shot to go with from moment to moment. The consensus seems to be that Bush didn't appear to be as attentive as Kerry did--that is, that Kerry came across better when he wasn't speaking.

The author mentioned that Clinton used to practice his reactions so that he wouldn't get caught in ungraceful moment while his opponent was speaking. Every little edge counts.

Blogless Day

Well, the suspense is over as to how long it would take me to go a full day w/o blogging.

Four days.

Site to Check Out: Great Bargains for Early Birds

Woot is unlike any other site I've ever seen. Each day, it offers great closeout deals on a single item of merchandise. The visitor doesn't know whether the operators have 20 of the gizmos, or 2,000 of them. Once available quantities are exhausted, the Sold Out sign goes up.

A new item is posted at 12:01 EST M-F.

Frankly, I've yet to visit the site when the day's item wasn't sold out.

Tech Tip: Clean Up Quoted Text in E-Mails

If you're like me, you get a lot of e-mails which cite other messages, which cite still other messages. And with the convention of
>preceding quoted text lines with greater-than symbols
>>and preceding their predecessors with double greater-than symbols
>>>things can get ugly pretty quickly.

E-Mail Stripper is a simple tool for cleaning up this kind of crap. Just download the 171 KB executable file (there's no installation routine) onto your desktop or someplace else where you'll be able to find it easily. When you've got some quoted text to clean up, simply:

1. Launch the EXE
2. Copy the messy text to the Windows Clipboard
3. Click on the application's Paste button to paste the text into the program's dialog box
4. Click on the Strip It! button to strip out all the >'s and added line breaks
5. Click on the Copy button to copy the sanitized text back to the Windows Clipbioard

Pretty cool, and totally free. I've been using it for years.

Filtering Run Amok

The librarian in me cringes at the thought of filtering information, but the practical person realizes that there's an argument for blocking some information on the Internet from minors. There's a lot of offensive content out there. Let's not even get into the topic of who should be making the judgment as to what's offensive, but a case can be made for (and against) filtering.

But let's not get carried away.

I routinely buy a couple of pizzas every Sunday evening. Not only does that cover dinner, it provides me with lunch to pack for a few days. I've been doing this for years, and the manager of my local Pizza Hut knows me (and knows my regular order). "Dick, right? A stuffed crust pepperoni and a stuffed crust onion? Twenty minutes."

She told me a couple of weeks ago that she didn't understand why the store's phone system (which is tied into a database of customers) couldn't remember my name. "Each time, I key in your name, Dick, and save it. But when you call again and I key in your phone number, the name doesn't come up."

"Try keying in Richard," I suggested.

When I returned the following week, she was grinning. "You were right. Richard worked."

Geez, don't the Pizza Hut programmers have something better to do with their time than implement strategies to keep potentially off-color content out of their customer database?

He Must Not Have Been Talking to Yogi

"If you don't think too good, then don't think too much."

--Ted Williams (according to the Car Talk guys)

Thought for the Day from the Sage of Baltimore

"Only the mediocre are always at their best."
--H. L. Mencken

Tech Tip: Make Acrobat Load Faster

While Adobe Acrobat Reader has become kind of a lingua franca for placing non-HTML and non-XML documents on the Web for access by the public, it's always bothered me how long it takes for the Acrobat Reader module to load, even on a reasonably fast machine.

I finally installed a nifty utility which signficantly speeds up the loading process. It comes from a British company named TNK-Bootblock (http://www.tnk-bootblock.co.uk/), and it's called Adobe Reader Speedup. I've installed it on a number of machines, and it's significantly improved loading performance on all of them (though the improvement was particularly noticeable on the slower systems).

Downloads of the freeware product are available from the usual places, but I got mine from Major Geeks (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4139.html).

It's pretty nifty. The program only needs to be run once. After that, Acrobat Reader loads much faster whenever you click on a link to a PDF document.

It appears to be clean, too. No post-installation problems were reported by NAV, Ad-Aware, or Spybot Search and Destroy.

The GOP Was Right in 2000

Political consultant James Carville has reluctantly admitted that he foolishly disregarded a friend's warning before the 2000 election. "Back in 2000 a Republican friend warned me that if I voted for Al Gore and he won, the stock market would tank, we'd lose millions of jobs, and our military would be totally overstretched. You know what? I did vote for Gore, he did win, and I'll be damned if all those things didn't come true!"

Bush and the Middle East

When I voted for Al Gore in 2000, it wasn't because I was particularly enamored of him. He simply seemed like a better prospect than George W. Bush. (So did Ralph Nader, for that matter.)

Despite the election results, though, Bush won. (I still understand neither the concept underlying the Electoral College nor the lack of an uproar to abolish it following the incredible comedy of errors which followed the 2000 election.)

Actually, Bush hasn't done as poorly in most areas as I would have expected him to. I think he's probably a decent guy who I wouldn't feel terribly uncomfortable around. I think he's done his best to implement Compassionate Conservatism as he sees it, and I know he's nowhere near as knee-jerk conservative as a lot of the GOP would like him to be.

I also feel that he was sandbagged by the 9/11 attacks. Any president would have had his hands full under such an assault, let alone one elected by less than an overwhelming margin.

But in invading Iraq, he put the nation in harm's way for the flimsiest of reasons . . . and that's something which the electorate cannot afford to tolerate.

When I finished reading James Fallows's "Bush's Lost Year," ( http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200410/fallows) in the most recent Atlantic Monthly, my blood really boiled. (Okay, you're only going to see the first couple of hundred words of the piece unless you've got a subscription. But that's what libraries are for, folks. See--there is still a place for us!)

First Post

Okay, the last thing I need right now is something else to distract me from the stuff I need to do.

Frankly, though, the concept of blogging fascinates me. On the one hand, it's the epitome of vanity press--an individual having the temerity to presume that the rest of the world is eagerly awaiting snippets of his wisdom. On the other hand, though, it's an opportunity for that individual to get his thoughts down on paper (okay, pixels) and to kind of toss them out into cyberspace. Between Google and all the other search engines, it's even possible that those thoughts might actually be found by someone who might appreciate them (or ridicule them).

Hell, let's go for it.