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For those of you who have known this for awhile, this really won’t be all that exciting. But I just discovered this today, and I felt like sharing.
When I’ve included links and email addresses in my emails, I’ve always just typed them out, but I just discovered the cleaner way of doing things.
You highlight the word that you want made into a link and click that little raised box (the one that says “Link” when you roll your mouse over it).
When you click it, this dialogue box shows up and you type in the website or email address.
And then when you’re done, you have the option to further edit or remove the link.
How cool is that? No more messy http://www.photographicsgallery.com/Images_Lar/fr-tulip%20field.jpg in your emails. Just clean and simple “check out these tulips“.
7:30 in the morning, I roll out of bed and dive at my alarm clock to make the ringing stop. I groggily register the time and briefly consider getting back into bed. However, (usually) my better judgment overwhelms me, and I stay awake to get an early start on the day.
At 7:45, I head over to the chapel attached to the residence building next door. In second year, a small group of us began meeting to start off the day in prayer. It’s continued all the way until our fourth year. This year, the group is quite different than it was, but it is still good.
8:00(ish) rolls around and I start breakfast. If I’m feeling leisurely, I might go all out and make eggs (scrambled, fried, omelette, eggs-in-a-basket, or if I’m feeling really creative, french toast, which, p.s. is made perfect by adding a little bit of nutmeg and cinnamon to the egg mixture just before dipping the bread in it). If I’m not, I usually just stick to tea and toast.
8:30, I bid my roommates goodbye as they head off to class and work. At 9, after checking my email and catching up on the blogs I read, I usually decide it’s time to get ready for the day. 10am sees me showered and dressed, and by 10:30, I could be doing anything from reading for class, to catching up on essays that need to be written, making another cup of tea or relaxing.
At 11:15, I am ready to go to class. Sometimes I stop by at my neighbours’ place. Two of them have class at the same time as I do, but whether I stop really depends on whether or not I’ve thought about how much snow is on the ground. When there is a lot and I’ve thought about it, I usually skip stopping in next door 
By 12:30, I’ve enjoyed an entertaining class with one of my favourite professors, and have walked home with a friend, chatting about the details and what our responses to the discussion have been. I arrive home, ready to make lunch. And then after that, I spend the afternoon much the same way I spent the morning: reading, writing, chatting with friends, surfing the net, etc.
However, today I was sick, so my day looked something more like this:
At 8:45, I managed to convince myself that it was time to get up. After a slow breakfast, I finished an essay I was working on this weekend, taking me to about 10:30, 11:00. I edited and submitted that essay, and deciding I wasn’t feeling up for class, I hibernated. Then I had a meeting at 2:15 that I felt I couldn’t cancel. Finished that by around 4:00. Then I chatted with a friend for about a half hour, came back to my apartment and chatted with my roommate (who has been gone practically since Thursday). And now I am making supper. It’s funny how being sick changes my day. Or well, waking up later than I want changes my routine, but being sick naturally lends to waking up later. Oh well. It’s good to take it easy sometimes.
I wonder, am I the only one this happens to? Occasionally, it will take awhile to connect to a website (www.google.com, mail.google.com, www.facebook.com, etc), but instead of showing an “unable to connect” page, this will pop up.
I’ve done a Google search and found what I believe to be their homepage. I clicked on the “How it Works” link, and I got this description:
OpenDNS is the world’s most intelligent DNS service. Our global network and our software work together symbiotically to offer a set of features custom-tailored to you, without requiring you to buy any hardware or install any software.
This is followed by a diagram with arrows pointing from a URL to Open DNS to an image of a website, and the text beneath the image reads:
The URLs you type are translated into computer-readable numbers that take you to websites.
Well, that’s… helpful…
It seems to be a lot of endorsement for something that, to me anyway, looks kind of superfluous. Am I completely missing the point? Anyone care to shed some light on the subject? And most importantly, how do I get it to stop hijacking my browser when it takes too long to connect?
My Mac has robbed me of basic troubleshooting skills.
Things stop working so rarely that when they do, I assume something catastrophic has happened and quickly hit the Mac Forums. That, or I bring in my dad or one of my Computer Science neighbours to take a look at my machine and see if they can get it to work. It doesn’t even occur to me anymore to try the standard Windows first step of troubleshooting: that is, restarting my computer.
I remember two years ago when I was still living in residence, my internet stopped working. I had been able to access the internet earlier that afternoon, but after returning from a class, I no longer could. My first thought was to go and beg for assistance from a friend and fellow resident, who actually held the official position in our residence of dealing with this kind of problem. He agreed to help and trekked all the way back to my dorm room. So, once there, I demonstrated the problem and the first thing he said was, “Have you tried restarting it?”
*sigh*
As soon as the computer turned back on, I was back up and connected to the internet.
And then just today, I put a DVD into my computer to have some mental R&R before class, but the DVD wasn’t being recognized. It wouldn’t show up in my Finder window or on the desktop. So I tried another movie. That one didn’t work either. So I tried another one that I had watched within the past couple of weeks, and it didn’t work either! So, I brought up the internet and searched “macbook DVD not recognized” and read through several forums. Either there was no solution to the presented problem, or the problem was different from the one I was having. I had visions of calling my dad and having to tell him that my (relatively) new computer was broken, of having to replace the DVD drive, send it away to Apple, deal with the cost and inconvenience. And then a couple of pages in, I stumbled across a post on a different forum, not presenting a problem, but rather seeing if anyone had a comparable experience to his. “Does it happen to anyone else that occasionally a DVD won’t be recognized until their computer is restarted?”
Seriously, if anyone else was in the room, I would have blushed scarlet and disappeared through the floor.
Just because you don’t need to restart it often doesn’t mean that you don’t need to restart it ever.
And to think, I was going to go into Computer Science once…
I would like to celebrate what is, for me, one of the most magnificent days of spring:
Today is my official First Opened Windows Day. There was one Opened Windows day about two weeks ago. The window in our living room was open and stayed open for a good part of the afternoon. But today is the first day of spring that I have opened the window in my bedroom, not to get fresh air, not to say hi to someone on the path, but strictly for the pleasure of enjoying the weather.
What makes it The Day is that the air is the perfect temperature, slightly cool, but comfortable, it is peaceful outside, you can smell in the air that spring is on its way, the snow has or has begun to melt, and it is the first day where all or most of these conditions meet. If the sun is shining, it is an added bonus, but as evidenced by this Day, it isn’t essential to the enjoyment of it.
So, Happy First Opened Windows Day to me and also to you whenever you celebrate it this season.
I’m trying out a new idea. Tell me what you think.
Guilt is not to get you to do something, but to keep you from doing something.
I think a lot of the time, we feel guilty when someone asks something of us and we don’t, don’t want to, or can’t answer them the way they want us to. But I honestly don’t think that this is the purpose of guilt. I think that this kind of guilt is a result of our culturally and societally influenced desire to not inconvenience or offend anyone around us. It is social guilt and I think that it has no bearing on our morality.
I think that sinning, doing something wrong, is something that deserves to result in guilt, and I think the feeling of guilt is something we need to let go when we have sought and accepted forgiveness from God and any others we have hurt by our actions.
Hmm… I now deny the absolute nature of my statement. I think there may be some situations where it is good we feel guilty when we don’t do something, but I think those situations are when it violates the commandment to love each other and to love God. Loving God means following his commands, so if, through our inaction we are disobeying him, then we should feel guilty. However, I think it gets touchy when it comes to loving one another…
Shoot, I no longer agree with my initial statement.
The only thing that I will say is that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to feel guilted into doing every single thing another person asks us to. If that is how we act, it is safe to say there is very little love in the case. If our actions are motivated by guilt, it is difficult to feel love towards the person who is guilting us and difficult to be loved by that person. If they were acting out of love, they would not impose guilt upon you, and if you were acting out of love, you would be honest with any reservations you had about responding in the way they desired.
Dear readers, I have talked myself in a circle. If you follow and have further thoughts, disagreements, continuation of reasoning, clarity to add, or anything else, I welcome the comments.
One thing I do think that we need to be willing to do is to let go of our guilt. Feeling guilty can become a comfortable situation. It compels us to act, and allows us to stop making decisions based on our own thoughts and feelings and leadings by God. The decision actually becomes quite simple when we are ruled by guilt, for we do whatever it takes to alleviate or at least dull that guilt. However, when we act in this way, we are being ruled by guilt, which is not how we should be living. When we are children of God, He is who we should be ruled by. Any other factor that rules in His stead becomes an idol. If guilt is the driving factor behind our decisions, then guilt is the ruler in our life. But it shouldn’t be guilt that rules us. It should be God.
When God is the ruling factor in our lives, Love, not guilt, becomes the foundation for our decisions.
To continue my discussion of this device, I have to say, it is in possession of one of the most intuitive interfaces that I’ve encountered. The phrase “intuitive interface” has become a little clichéd, so let me expand on it. When I say intuitive, I mean that when I use it, I feel like it knows what I’m trying to do. Its screen is very sensitive, but accurately so. It doesn’t register every touch to the point of frustration. It recognizes different gestures, for example, sweeping your finger to scroll versus tapping an option to select.
It is also very cool because of the additional programs it has. You can store pictures, you can enter contact information, you can watch movies. I didn’t explore all of the features, but the ones that I did I found to be skillfully made. The iPod is sensitive to how you are holding it. It switches the screen from landscape to portrait based on which way you are holding it. When entering contact information, a keyboard appears on your screen. When I first looked at the keyboard, I almost scoffed at the size of it. I imagined it was going to be a frustrating experience, but they’ve managed to deal with sensitivity issues. It registers your typing properly, and the keyboard adjusts slightly based on what kind of information you’re entering. When entering an email address, it puts the “@” symbol on a special key. That key changes to a “.com” key for when you’re entering in a website. When entering an address, you can switch to a numbers-and-symbols keyboard, and when you hit the space bar after a string of numbers (ie, the street number of your house), it switches back to the letter keyboard automatically so that you can enter the street name.
I wish that I had been able to explore more of the features, but from what I have seen, I am impressed. Apple, as it always seems to do, has thought beyond the basic function of its products; it has worked on the “minor” details that set their products apart as being products that are a joy to use. Coming from a Windows platform, I have finally stopped being surprised when an Apple device just works. My delighted surprise is now saved for when it seems to work in concert with my thought patterns. When a device is created so expertly that it seems to predict my intentions, that is when I am surprised.
Apple has set the new standard for consumer electronics and, unsurprisingly, has already reached it.
I finished my presentation today. Which means I have 3 essays and 3 exams to go. I was talking with a friend and he said it sounded like a lot of work, but truly, this is the “easiest” term that I’ve had to contend with. Well, at least the term with the least amount of work. My exams are all at the end of the exam period, meaning I have two or three weeks to review my notes and catch up on any reading I’ve fallen behind on. The essays are all clustered, too, but they are, as far as I can tell, topics that I am interested in, so they should be fun to write.
I’ve realized that I actually don’t mind making presentations. In fact, I kind of like it. Strange.
On the topic of presentations, the dean of students at the residence where I used to live asked me to speak at a weekly supper the community has. There is always a speaker (or someone playing music or something along those lines) and there is always a good meal, and at the end of each year, the dean asks two or three of the graduating students to be the speaker for the last supper.
I guess what helps in the liking of presentations is that I don’t really get nervous. I don’t get nervous hardly at all leading up to the presentation. However, almost as soon as I get up there, I get nervous. My hands start shaking such that I am grateful of a podium on which to put whatever papers I may have. Or if I don’t get nervous, half-way through I start evaluating my own presentation: “oh, you said that too quickly”, “you put the emphasis on the wrong syllable”, “oh man, I wonder if people are finding this boring”, etc. The “boring” question almost always comes up. By the time I present, I’ve gone through the material so many times that I’ve forgotten why it captivated me. The good thing to remember is that, for the people listening, this is new material, so whatever wonder I may have lost in the topic due to familiarity hasn’t necessarily been lost in the audience. Hopefully it goes well.
iLike
iWant
iMbroke…
oh well 
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