Wednesday, July 27th

I don't want to go to jail  - or

Bloggers and Shield Law

category: people

There is no current federal law to protect reporters if they refuse to hand over confidential information to prosecutors. Legislation is currently under consideration in both the House and the Senate to offer reporters some protection. However, the curent wording of the bill fails to offer protection to bloggers and to other online journalists. Given how bloggers and online journalists have increased their market share on big news stories, it would be important if a new law could offer them some protection. For a little more information, check out Wired News.



She said on 07.27.05 @ 01:34 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly




Tuesday, July 19th

Curing HTML headaches  - or

Convenient list of Ampersand characters

category: software

As the writer and proofreader of copy for more than one media format, I often get my symbols and shortcuts confused. HTML special characters seem particularly hard for me to remember. For those of you who are newer to HTML, many special characters in HTML are referred to as Ampersand characters. The code for the characters begins with an ampersand, & , and ends with a semi-colon. Between the ampersand and the semi-colon is either an entity name, usually some abbreviation of the character name, or an entity number. Entity numbers are allegedly easier for browsers to interpret, but it's tough for the code writer to remember scads of three digit numbers.

Dreamweaver and Frontpage contain drop-down menus of these characters. In Dreamweaver, use Insert-Special Characters to find the menu. In Frontpage, use Insert-Symbol to use the special character menu. Both Dreamweaver and Frontpage offer a limited number of characters in their drop-downs. If you need an unusual character, search the internet with the term HTML entities, and you'll find many sites with long lists of alphabetic and numeric entities.

She said on 07.19.05 @ 03:03 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly




Friday, July 15th

He is on Vacation  - or

He Will Not Post Remotely

category: people

She will take care of things. Until next month then, bye.

He said on 07.15.05 @ 05:50 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly




Thursday, July 14th

Everybody should do it  - or

Mozilla Firefox's Best Feature

category: software

I recently downloaded the latest version of Mozilla's Firefox, version 1.0.5. The feature I find most useful so far is the tab feature. Tabs allow a user to display multiple web pages within a single Firefox window. That means the task bar is less crowded with junk, and it's possible to close mulitple web pages with a single click. Best of all, Firefox is free.

She said on 07.14.05 @ 02:56 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly




Monday, July 11th

Alternative to an Edge Mask  - or

Sharpening Noisy Images in Photoshop

category: digital photography and image editing

If your Unsharp Mask settings are bringing out grain or compression artifacts, and too much Threshold is giving your image rough transitions between the sharpened and unsharpened areas, then you may need an edge mask, but try this first.

He said on 07.11.05 @ 03:49 PM CST [entry continued] on printer friendly page




Wednesday, July 6th

Book Note  - or

Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses reviewed

category: spamming, trends

Degunking Your Email, Spam, and Viruses by Jeff Duntemann

Here is another book in the seemingly endless stream of books about email, spam, and viruses. Degunking is supposed to be a cute and clever descriptive word, but it sounds more like cleaning a car engine than cleaning an email inbox. The book's twelve step program sounds like other twelve step programs. Given that the book is supposed to help email users avoid excess email and thereby save time, it's hard to believe that any reader will want to take the time to read the 300+ pages and follow all the steps and suggestions Duntemann offers. Fortunately, the book provides brief lists for degunking with time limitations. Duntemann claims that a reader can accomplish some degunking in as little as 15 minutes. My email is so gunked, however, that I think I would need 15 hours or even 15 days to make a dent.

She said on 07.06.05 @ 01:25 PM CST [entry page] is printer friendly





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