questions, answers, thoughts, theories, observations, speculations, and assorted bits of information.
Like every suburban white kid who grew up in the early 1980′s, I love and respect the Ninja. I am not sure if this affection is traced back to GI Joe’s nemesis Storm Shadow, the short lived show "The Master," readily available ninja throwing stars that you could pick up at the Upper Valley Mall, the Karate Kid, the Last Dragon, or any number of other 80′s depiction of mad martial arts skills. It is …read more
Recently I wrote a post about a simple technique for enhancing your creativity that I learned from reading the book Creativity by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In a nutshell 1. Be surprised by something every day, 2. Surprise someone everyday, 3. Write both down and chronicle them over time. I thought it might be wise to share my system for collecting this information, as it is very simple yet quite effective. I started by using google …read more
I find that some of my best email editing work happens in the nano-second following the moment I hit send. Sound familiar? Forgotten attachments, poor grammar, spelling mistakes, negative tone, left out recipients and other errors amazingly jump right off the page once it is too late to do anything about it. Good news. Gmail has added an unsend function which provides you 5 seconds to “take it back.” While this does not give the …read more
Short and sweet post. If you use GMail, check out the newly added feature that allows you to view PDF files right from your browser. If someone sends you a PDF attachment, just click on the new View option and take a quick look at it. I stumbled onto this today while retrieving a file someone sent me. This is great when you want to review a file someone sent you, but don’t necessarily want …read more
I am an unabashed lover of Gmail, the free email service offered by Google. This week the Gmail team introduced a new feature that has some real value – Canned Response. The feature allows you to “pre-write” standard email messages that you can then call up with one click and send as a response. My first gut reaction to this was “email for the lazy.” I thought to myself how impersonal to not take the …read more
Count on Google to invent yet another great product. From the Search Engine to Gmail to Google Docs to Goog-411, the folks at Google continue to make my life better. Enter Chrome – the new web browser from Google. Now those who know me, know that I am a loyal Firefox user. I love the extensions, and the ability to customize my browsing experience. That said, Chrome is amazing. It screams. The browser was designed …read more
Google always delivers something fun on April 1st. This year is no exception Check out Gmail Custom Time. Imagine being able to have a tool where you could email into the past… Now wouldn’t that be fun Here is a brief excerpt: “I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes …read more
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