Win a free Dropbox account for Life!

AppSumo is running a contest through October 13th - the winner gets a free 50gig Dropbox account for life.

If you've never heard of Dropbox, it is a well-done way of storing files online. You can access them through a webpage, or if you install the software on your machine you can also access them on a local folder (which is kept synced up). Folders can be shared as well.

CLICK HERE to try to win this from AppSumo.

Fall 2011 Update

As I will not be teaching CSC125 at Mercer this fall, this blog will not be updated.

If you are still getting updates from this blog and would like to keep your inbox from getting clogged up with reminders of your past college [mis]adventures, you should see an unsubscribe link below.

If you'd like to keep up with that crazy ol' CS guy who really was an odd duck, here are a few avenues:

• http://www.MacMusicGuy.com - music 
• http://www.MaconMacGuy.com - the occasional computer 7 tech article
• http://TomRule.blogspot.com - watch for news about a new album I'm working on, including lo-budget vids and pix.
• http://www.last.fm/music/Tom+Rule - more music!
• http://www.GovAccessMusic.com - good if your are REALLY bored, or are running a government access or public access cable TV station.

Stay Sane!

Who says Math can't be pretty?

Something to take a break with as Finals wind down!

These articles have several shots of art generated using Fractals.

Factal Art from the Xaos Zoomer

Chaoscope Factals

Flame Factals continue to dazzle

Flame Fractals take you through the wormhole

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10 Cool Office Add-ins

Ran across an article about 10 very cool add-ins you can throw into your Office install that add interesting capabilities to Office. The article has the complete links.
The Gallery Version - screenshots
The Blog article version

1: Everything - You type in a search string, and Everything displays a list of matching files and folders. The response is almost instantaneous for normal systems.

2. E-mail Follow-up  - lets you set a response time when you create the email; if the recipient hasn’t responded by the allotted response time, this nifty little add-in reminds you that you’re still waiting on a response.

3.  More Add-in lets you quickly and easily hide Word text by creating collapsible sections. Anyone who creates long documents comprising the same blocks of text will find this add-in useful.

4.  FreeFileViewer lets you view a number of formats so you need only one viewer. Using FreeFileViewer, you can read a PDF, a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, and more. You can even play music files.

5. ASAP Utilities - solutions are easier to find and implement. If you ever find yourself thinking, I know Excel can do this, but how?, turn to ASAP Utilities.

6. Proposal Pack Wizard - Try this Word add-in if you manage large business documents, such as proposals, contracts, quotes, grants, and bids. Using merge technology, Proposal Pack Wizard lets you quickly assemble documents.

7.  VisualBee - lets you enhance an existing presentation. When you run VisualBee, it analyses the presentation’s text and structure and tries to improve what you’ve done on your own

8. iSpring Pro converts a PowerPoint presentation into an online Flash presentation

9. Pop-up Excel Calendar lets you insert and configure a datepicker control without writing code. 

10. Fuzzy Duplicate Finder - helps you find all those fuzzy duplicates — those mistakes that don’t always show up as mistakes.  It’ll also find typos and misspelled words in your Excel workbooks and help you handle what it finds.

No Privacy on Amazon's Cloud - Care or Not?

Who couldn’t love the idea of the new Amazon Cloud Drive? You get at least 5GBs of free cloud-based storage, and its trivial to get 20GBs of free storage on Amazon Cloud Drive. Used in concert with the Amazon Cloud Player you get a fine cloud-based music player that can be used either from a Web browser or on Android tablets with the Amazon MP3 App. The new Amazon consumer cloud service also works well. It’s just too bad that you have to give up all privacy to use it.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/networking/no-privacy-on-amazon-8217s-cloud-drive/882

Do you care about this?

SHOULD you?

News from the Missed April 5 class

Apologies for not giving you advance notice about class today. I live on a deadend street - and the end of the street was blocked with downed powerlines and a 75 foot downed tree. The tree was cleared out just after noon - power was not restored until after 4 pm.

It has obviously been an "interesting" day! I hope yours has been more routine than mine!

The syllabus says this:
April 7 DEADLINE: Capstone DB 2,3, myITlab Ch 3&4

April 12 Cover: WP Intro, WP1, WP2

Because we need to go over the concepts of the capstones in class together (especially the report designer and calculated fields), I'm going to change the deadline FOR THE CAPSTONES ONLY to next Tuesday night (April 12). That is going to collide a bit with the Word Processing stuff, but I don't see that as a major issue.

So the myITlab Access tests (chapters 3 & 4) are still due by Thursday night, 11:59 pm.
The last 2 Capstones are now due by next Tuesday, April 12, 11:59 pm.

Facebook Firing upheld in Court

Original article here

This ties in with what I mentioned the other day about nothing online being private. 2 workers at a Mazda dealership lost their jobs - even though they had an exemplary work record -because of several comments posted on Facebook.

"Postings that employer staffed by "crooks” and “hosed customers” justified terminations   
In what some are calling a first in Canada, the British Columbia Labour Relations Board has upheld the dismissal of two employees for Facebook posts about their employer."

Be careful!