I made a new friend in the office this week (via email, since I’m not actually there). His name is Jim and, as I’ve been told, he’s the go-to guy for grammar questions. Now, usually I’ve got a pretty good handle on how you’re supposed to write things [*whether I use it all the time or not*] but here are a few helpful words Jim passed on to me, to help keep News From the Edge looking good. They’ll probably also be useful for other people, like me who need to be writing regularly about stuff that they’re not 100% sure of:
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I’ve definitely got to figure out what all these internet slang terms mean! Otherwise, there’s no way to moderate this blog!
Okay, so this part is probably only going to be new to me… but here it goes, anyway.
I was told before I came back home (I’m living in North Carolina right now, telecommuting between here and Ann Arbor via the wonder of the internet) that if I had any problem hooking up my Virtual Private Network, that I could call the home office and they could “remote access” my PC and help me out. So why it was a surprise to me to see my cursor moving without any persuasion on my part, I don’t know… but it was.
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Up until about two weeks ago, I’d been using Mac stuff for the past… well, lets estimate ten years. I’ve been using PCs occasionally, like when I needed to find a certain book at the public library… and to log in at the DMV. So that said, I’ve got a few things to pick up on with regard to PC computing.
Here’s one example: In the past, I’ve only used screen shots to save a picture of my desktop if my fickle Apple told me that a fatal error had occurred, and that the program I was using needed to be shut down. This almost always happened when I reached the 2/3 mark in a great article I was writing (with a killer lead that took half a day to nail down…) The screen shot allowed me to take a picture of those prized words, so that I wouldn’t have to conjure up another 700 words or so. It was kismet! Screenshots saved my life more than once.
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I thought this part might be nice to mention, for all you people (like me) who are still WAY outside your comfort zone when it comes to a lot of this stuff. Here are some things that I love about DE that make my life – and yours – a little easier.
To start, I just found out that if any of our clients has a minor problem with a system we’ve set up [*we’re not talking about a crash or file recovery issue here, though people!] they can call one of our consultants and ask for help. Well, you probably already knew that part, but this is where it gets good: if your problem is something that we can talk you through in 12 minutes or less, guess what? You don’t pay for it. I didn’t think ANYBODY did that!
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Per company tradition, I’m going to do a “Pass the Shell” of my own. Here’s the short list of remarkably handy tricks I picked up this week.
1. Google searching within a website – in the google.com searchbar, you type in the website address and then a keyword you want to search for in the site. For example: to search for vinyl siding at the Home Depot, you would type “www.homedepot.com:siding” in the search bar. That will give you a list of results within the Home Depot websites.
