March 2007

If you are tired of paying for Microsoft Office for Mac, you have had an alternative for some time, that of OpenOffice. The “problem” with OpenOffice is that you have to have X11 (a windowing environment) installed on your Mac. And it looks like a “port” from Windows. Enter NeoOffice.

NeoOffice was updated to 2.1 on March 26th, 2007.

NeoOffice is based on OpenOffice, but takes the next step. The most apparent feature is that it utilizes Mac’s Aqua interface, that makes it look like mac application in menus, file open and save dialogs, print dialogs, buttons, scrollbars and other user interfaces. Here is an example:

OpenOffice – Writer (like Word)

OpenOffice - Writer

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A friend showed me this YouTube video and I must say that it is one of the more clever MadTV pieces I have ever seen! Fun with Apple, Steve Jobs and I won’t give out the spoiler…

Enjoy!

[For some reason, the YouTube image might not appear above. The direct link is here.]


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Power add-on for Excel

by Michael Sheehan on March 20, 2007

in General, Microsoft, Software

If you are like me, Microsoft Excel is one of the primary applications that you use (probably mainly for tracking lists of things). As with most applications, most of us only use a fraction of the functionality. We can apply the 80/20 rule here where 80 percent use only a fraction and 20 percent might be considered “power users.” And probably within the 80 percent, we use the inverse of the 80/20 rule and use only 20 percent of the application’s functionality and features.

Well, here is a great Add-in to Excel to make you a “power user” or at least appear as one (grin). The name of the Add-in is “ASAP Utilities” (which is located here) and is proclaimed as “the essential add-in for Excel users.” It has over 300 functions (and growing so that count could be off) that is the end product of years of experience and development and requests from end-users.

ASAP Utilities was updated to version 4.1.0 on March 19, 2007

The program is broken up into several categories (Vision Control, Favorites, Select, Sheets, Range, Columns/Rows, Numbers, Text, Formula, Fill, Format, Objects/Comments, Web, System, Information, Import, Export, Launch, ASAP, and Info). Here is a hierarchical list of all of the ASAP Utilities menu items. There are also some worksheet functions that are included with the installation (which are a bit long to list..better to look here). Some interesting ones include “Strip Numbers” (removes numbers from items like “1234 ABC” and gives the result of “ABC”), “Extract Numbers” (which would, in the same case, give the result “1234″) and Count By Cell Color (so if you turn 5 cells red, the result would be “5″). There is also a nice Search function that let’s you quickly find the item you need.

As always, here are some screenshots…

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Paying stay-at-home moms & dads for their work

by Michael Sheehan on March 15, 2007

in Family, General

I must admit, I was looking for financial information related to my own job when I came across this “stay-at-home mom” salary calculator. And it got me thinking, why is it that we don’t reward those parents who decide to stay at home to raise their kids and forgo their professional aspirations in the process? If you think your job is hard, you should try being a stay-at-home parent for a day (that’s pretty easy, right?) or a week! I don’t think that people realize the true challenges that couples face when making this big decision of staying at home or putting their child/children in daycare or extended care and going to work.

I know that there are advantages to both sides: financial & professional for those electing to go back to work and developmental & emotional for those deciding to rear their children full-time. It is truly hard to generalize the advantages, I realize. And this is an age-old debate that has never been solved (nor will it ever, I don’t think). It is truly a personal choice. And, I would think, that most people are biased towards whichever decision they ended up making, with the justifications being numerous and subjective. The disadvantages are huge as well, and one needs to weigh them out before making this life-changing decision.

For my wife and I, it was a difficult decision, and remains so to this day. With our first daughter, we elected to put her in daycare so that we could both continue working (1 hour commutes to and from work). We were the first to drop off our 3 month old and the last ones to pick her up. It was heartbreaking every morning. Throughout the day, we wondered if she was getting the care that a child needs, the attention, the interaction, etc. We did know that she was definitely getting more than her share of the germs that pervade a daycare environment. (Can you see that we were biased already?) So after a few months of this, we made the difficult decision, and dropped the second salary and my wife’s professional career.

So, we are now at three kids (8 years old, 5.5 years and 3 years) and have been living on one salary now for about 7.5 years. Financially, we are way behind most of our peers. But, the result of my wife’s full-time care is obvious. Illnesses with the kids are lower (but not eliminated because all are in school, even for a couple of hours a few days a week). They seem happy and fairly well adjusted (but who is truly to judge that we are biased as are the grandparents). The teachers all seem to have good comments about each of them (but, again, are they pulling their punches a bit?). However, I personally know that my children are getting the attention they deserve, solid balanced meals, clean clothes, and a regular schedule of playdates with their friends as well as countless other things that a child would not get if they were in daycare all day. This leads me back to the subject of this post…

…why can’t stay-at-home parents receive more recognition for what they do and what they have sacrificed? They have been forced to put their professional and personal aspirations and goals on hold (even eliminating any possibility of getting back on their original career as my wife has). Once the kids are all in full-time schools, how do the parents get back into the workforce? They can’t start where they left off, it seems. So, it was nice to see on Salary.com a “Mom’s Wizard“. Since so many things in this country are measured purely financially (what salary do you make, what is your house worth, how many stock options do you have, what investments do you have, what is your credit score, etc.), this wizard gives those stay-at-home parents a way to measure their value.

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Save precious hard drive space on your Mac

March 14, 2007

If you are like me, disk space is a precious commodity. I tend to download gobs and gobs of software and never clean it up. Pictures and MP3′s can suck up a lot of space on your computer as well. How do you manage your disk space? Well, I found a great little (free) application [...]

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Quick way to test if you need DST patch

March 9, 2007

Ok, you are running out of time!!! Literally! Thanks, Kris, for the comment on my previous post. Here is a site that you can just point your browser to in order to find out if you need to apply a patch for DST or not. It’s really easy to do, trust me. Click here to [...]

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Check your server DST settings using PERL

March 9, 2007

The new Daylight Saving Time is almost upon us. My company is losing money now on all of the IT updates that we have to do (but that is another story, in fact, I read today that some Economic Analysts now think that the change will not save energy/money because while people won’t be using [...]

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Tivo Product Management – Are you listening? Kidzone suggestion

March 5, 2007

Sometimes I wish that I could become a temporary Product Manager at a variety of different companies…only so that I can get features into products that I use. I have many years of various types of Product Management positions, but wouldn’t it be great to be able to materialize in a company, spec out a [...]

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