“Could Care Less”

For the record: the phrase “[I] could care less” implies that you care somewhat, meaning that you could actually indeed care less. So it means you do care a little bit.

So please, if you really don’t care, say “couldn’t care less” from now on. It just doesn’t make any sense the other way. I always get confused when people say “Well I could care less!” …. so please think about that. Thanks!

Posted March 29th, 2009 | No Comments »

Creating a Survey Using Google Docs

Google Docs rocks, right? I mean, it’s so incredibly convenient.

Okay, so I hate taking surveys online. Mainly because they’re long, ugly, boring, and complicated. Especially ugly. And hard to use. And did I say that they’re usually ugly and hard to use?

Google Docs has an answer. You can make surveys or actually anything you want people to fill out and then Google Docs can aggregate the results into a spreadsheet — live — for you, and even chart the results.

View my sample survey to see the result.

So let’s see how this works:

1. Go to Google Docs, login, and click New -> Spreadsheet. In the spreadsheet, click Form -> Create Form.
2. From here, you can start filling out the question and answer sets you’d like to have (click to enlarge screenshot):

   

3. When you’re done with that, you can customize it a little more. Click More Actions – > Edit Confirmation. You can change the message displayed when the form is submitted. You can also “Embed” it to your site or blog under the same menu. If you want, you can email the form directly as an HTML email to any recipient.

   

4. Google supplies a link to the live form at the bottom of the Edit window, or you can click Form -> “Go to live form” in the spreadsheet window.
5. Once you link people to the survey or email it to recipients, they can fill it out and the results will be displayed on your spreadsheet. To view a result summary with charts, you just go to Form -> Show Summary.
6. Tada! Isn’t it pretty? You can try the sample survey I made if you want.

Posted January 28th, 2009 | No Comments »

Windows 7 Screenshots

I still haven’t had much time to play with the Windows 7 beta yet, but it runs pretty terribly in VirtualBox. (Grrrrr.) In fact, VirtualBox just runs pretty terribly.

I don’t have much time. I’m just taking a break from my math homework right now… anyway, here’s my take. (Remember, VirtualBox doesn’t want to emulate my nVidia card, so the Aero effects aren’t going to display. What you get here in these screenshots is the basic visual theme.)

Click on any of the screenshots to enlarge them. Press “Back” to come back to this post.

The Windows 7 boot sequence is a little more elegant than the standard progress bar indefinitely moving on the bottom of the screen. Now these colored orbs fly in on the screen, meld together and glow the Windows flag:

The flag glows in and out for several seconds and then the login screen appears. It’s actually quite a nice display. Windows Vista’s is a little sketchy.

Okay then, after that I just installed Firefox and doddled around a bit, aimlessly taking screenshots of things people might find interesting…

Yes, for those of you that complained about UAC (even though you can just turn it OFF … derr), there’s an improved control panel for power over the notifications it gives you.

I’ll probably just keep it off anyway.

Hey look – Windows 7’s WordPad has a ribbon, just like Office 2007! Isn’t it cute!?

That’s right — for the first time since… 1996 … Microsoft has updated Windows Paint. Now sporting a new ribbon, Paint for Windows 7 also has a new selection of colors in the toolbar! Hurray! (If you’ve never seen FreeLoveForum’s parody on MS Paint, now’s the time to go watch it.) They must have spent years instead of months this time, in their facility in California, to decide which were the best 20 colors to add to the toolbar. Okay, honestly, it’s a lot better than the choices since Windows 95.

Unfortunately, Windows’ standard color chooser box is the same and still unchanged since Windows 95:

The Start menu hasn’t changed a lot… but the glow effect on the button is pretty:

The taskbar is more iconic. Also, the roll-overs on menu items is more of a pale blue effect than a translucent glass (even on Aero from what I understand) — Windows 7 does seem more “cartoonish” and less “glossy” to me. Which is perfectly fine. It still looks okay.

Windows Explorer is a bit different. I’ll let you judge for yourself. Notice the new icons, the way the folders are organized, and how there’s even more abstraction from the disk level. Microsoft anticipates most of its users to utilize features such as “favorites” and “libraries” or even their “Homegroup” (part of a Network) than managing files in the file system directly by going to the drive letter – which you can see is down near the bottom.

Large thumbnail view in Explorer is nice though.

And finally, the shut down is actually pretty quick.

That’s all I have for now. If there’s a specific feature you want screenshots for or a tour of, and can’t find it online already, or want something *really* specific, let me know and I’ll do what I can to post the screenshots of that.

Anyway, that’s Windows 7 so far… which do you like better… XP or Vista? And are you anxiously awaiting Windows 7?

Posted January 21st, 2009 | No Comments »

A Peek at the Windows 7 Beta

I downloaded the latest Windows 7 public beta the other day. I installed it to a virtual machine (for lack of spare hardware) using VirtualBox. Admittedly, I am not a fan of Sun’s products. But, alas, the Windows 7 beta was installed and is now running in my VM.

I’ll update this post with details later but I so far I think it’s “okay.” Nothing more, nothing less at this point. Since VirtualBox can’t exactly emulate my nVidia card, Windows thinks it doesn’t have the resources for Aero. Oh well.  From the screenshots I’ve seen, the Aero interface looks clean and hasn’t been changed a whole lot.

I’ll post screenshots myself soon (give or take a week).

My first thoughts actually involve the perception of Windows 7 among the generally misinformed public. I will probably argue my case of Windows XP vs. Windows Vista and Windows 7 in another post at a later date, but I think one would be surprised at the results of a quick analysis of the public’s bias against Windows Vista.

Tune in soon for… Windows 7 screenshots, a quick rundown, and perhaps a separate post including my thoughts on the various versions of Windows.

Posted January 13th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Hide the annoying outline around links

So, when I’m in Windows or Linux (at least any Linux distro I’ve ever used), and I click a link on a website, there is an annoying, ugly, dotted-gray  border that shows up around the link for no apparent reason. Ever since… gosh… 2004… I think I wanted to figure out how to remove those.

Silly me. A very easy CSS attribute can hide all those annoying borders from your entire website. Just put this in your stylesheet:

:focus { outline-style: none; }

The site I’m working on redesigning now looks a lot more professional and fluent without those annoying borders.

Posted January 10th, 2009 | No Comments »