bouncingboomergirlgeek: fyi & fwiw

Seeking Some Upsides

(slightly modified version of a similar post on bouncingbabyboomer.com)

My delayed return to posting here has been less about the holidays and more about my mood. I have been too depressed by the financial mess to say very much upbeat. So to drop kick myself out of the doldrums, I am going to think out loud about some things that prick a few rays of light in my clouds.

Let me free associate to see which top dozen things come to mind..
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My Top Dozen Rays of Hope for 2009

12. That Obama will take office on 1/20/09 (to feel even more encouraged about his readiness, read this candid Time profile if you haven't seen it).
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11. That we are seeing so many well-tempered minds in high places again and it is no longer un-PC to admire an extra-strong intellect
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10. That when I want to just escape and forget for a bit, there will soon be new episodes of old faves on TV (House, Lost, 24, Galactica,  and [eventually] Mad Men)
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9. That there seems to be an emerging return of mutual respect on the international stage, both towards us and from us. I do get the sense that many countries are now sincerely cheering us on (except where not).
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8. That there is more and more accessible science content in print and on TV (e.g. SciQ and Brink on the Science Channel [check your listings for the Discovery family]). Whatever the challenge, from economy to environment, we all will need a stronger grasp of how complex systems tend to operate. Meanwhile the nation is also gaining a clue about how big a difference healthy eating can make (a la Michael Pollan and Matt Goulding) and this awareness will pay back from our waistlines to our pocketbooks and help us make headway in health care too.
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7. I see increasing traffic on intelligent web sites (Salon, Slate, NYT, Wired, Seed) where good minds can cross-pollinate good ideas with a hope they will compound into wider understanding. That goes double for the Science blogs (too many to list, but nudge me if you want a list).
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6. Encouraging headlines in health and medicine remind us almost daily of how much we have already achieved and how much more is coming soon (watch for another Top12 list this week)
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5. That already we are remembering how it feels when less turns out to be more.
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4. At my own desk, I am grateful every day that Windows XP is still alive, cloud computing is getting so good, that so much of the Net is still entirely free and that there is often something on You Tube to make me grin (e.g. RoombaCat)
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3. On the serious side of the street again, I am also grateful we are gaining perspective on how we got into this financial mess (such as this Mea Culpa from a meeting of economists and this lookback from Stein, and these comments from Kristof on the upside in the down) even if we sure still dont know what to do with it.
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2. I also appreciate that so many people in positions of power are becoming more comfortable saying, "I don't know, but together we will figure it out." Global warming might be helped quite a bit just from the resulting reduction in political hot air.
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1. Did I mention that Obama takes office in just a few days?

New & Neat, No.2

My "New & Neat" Nominee this week is Clip2Net, a (free) little Windows utility I seem to be using constantly.

Clip2Net does one simple thing: screenshots. But it does it with such quick, fluid ease, I find myself getting much more visual in everything I write because what used to take a half dozen steps to snip, save and share now takes only two or three moves from me. It's a dream date for visual thinkers who like to show as much as tell.

Clip2Net does two things: (a) it turns your cursor into a temporary marquee to grab any part of what you see on screen and (b) saves that image to clipboard or disk or to a private online bin with its own URL that you can share anywhere. If you register your copy you also get control panel management of all your uploads, including a download counter and a generous hunk of storage space. You can also tag your uploads for how long you wish to keep them.

Consider the effect of simply putting the C2N logo at the head of this post. You instantly see if you already know what I'm talking about, and if so, you keep surfing. Or you have your interest piqued and decide to keep reading. So you, the viewer, can maximize the ROI on your time, while I, the author, can add visual impact, and the developers of C2N can reap more eyeballs if you decide to use it too.

That's the kind of thing I am talking about when I mention the "Win-Win Web" which is what all of Web 2.0 is rapidly coming to mean to me. But more about that in the next post and back to this handy little utility. Read on to find out more about what Clip2Net.can do.

1.2 Yahoo Buried My Arrows

from the cranky girlgeek dept./ theme: useability

Some brains, like mine, are especially sensitive to the perception of extra effort around small things such as pointing and clicking. In a hyperspeedy world, we even hate wasting nanos of time. When we sit at our screens creating things, the difference in one extra click, or one extra glance, is not insignificant.

So here's my latest beef in the ease of use department: Yahoo Mail  recently changed the menus in the toolbar of the online composing editor to make one pivotal move more cumbersome. It used to be the html editor had a 1-push button for indents; now it has a drop-down menu in which indent is stacked above outdent. (Follow the story jump to see more screen shots.)

This may sound less than trivial, but it's not if your eye-to-hand auto-routines work like mine.

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