As it turns out my credit union, the Knoxville TVA Employees Credit Union awards points for using the debit/credit card. I checked the Bonus Check Card site last week and found out I qualified for a $250 Best Buy gift card (or a free Apple TV).
I figure that if my credit union offers these points, your credit union/bank might as well. So I encourage you to ask or visit your bank’s website to find out if they offer any incentives for using the debit/credit card.
I think I just figured out why I got Leopard for my mac. You can preview multiple documents by simply tapping the spacebar. That’s right, simply highlight the documents you’re want to preview in the Finder and then tap space bar. Viola!
Thanks Lifehacker!
NYT today provided a master opt list to get your name away from all those pesky solicitors. Here are the highlights:
PHONE SOLICITATIONS To stop them, go to donotcall.gov. Or call toll free, (888)382-1222, from the number you are going to restrict. (home and cell phones; you need to register every five years).
JUNK MAIL Host by the DMA (Direct Marketing Association). Not a guarantee but maybe a help. Online form – www.the-dma.org/consumers/offmailinglist.html or mailing address – Mail Preference Service at P.O. Box 643, Carmel, N.Y. 10512. There is an online form at If you want to get more mail, there is also a place to sign up to get on the lists.
E-MAIL. No real good solution. You can try to make it harder for spammers to get your address in the first place by never posting your address in public forums. Spammers employ software to scrape the sites of anything with that @ symbol. Instead spell it out in a unique way like “the nameofthiscolumn at nytimes.com.”
CREDIT CARD OFFERS. Call (888) 567-8688, but be ready to give out some personal information like your Social Security number. Als0 www.optoutprescreen.com. You can do it for a period of five years or permanently.
OTHER OPT-OUTS Your personal information is accessible in less obvious ways. For instance, your computer tracks where you have visited online. DoubleClick, a company that collects data for online advertisers, offers a way to prevent your computer from giving it information at http://www.doubleclick.com/us/about-doubleclick/privacy/dart-adserving.asp.
But again, it is only a piecemeal solution. Other online advertising companies will still put “cookies” on your computer to collect the same data. So the next-best solution is to frequently run software that cleans out cookies. You can get Spyware Blaster, Spybot, or Ad-Aware at www.download.com free.
Your personal information, including parts of your Social security number, are available in publicly available data bases that you may never see. The most common ones offer a way to opt out of a listing. Nexis, one of the biggest, says you can opt out of its people-finding lists by going to www.lexisnexis.com/terms/privacy/data/remove.asp. Nexis does not make it easy because it requires that you prove you are a victim of identity theft before it will consider your application.
The Center for Democracy and Technology provides addresses and forms for other companies, like ChoicePoint, that do not let you opt out online (http://opt-out.cdt.org).
My wife sent me an interesting suggestion from Quint Studer about communicating with senior leaders. He suggests that when leader ask for updates, they are usually juggling multiple projects at once and are primarily interested in results and outcomes rather than process. If you overload them with process details at first, you may actually lost their attention before you deliver the key points. Here are three tips he gives,
- Open with results and outcomes. Make sure you can quantify what you achieved. Good effort is no excuse for lack of results.
- Be prepared to explain more. Once a listener has been provided the results, be ready to outline “the how” if asked. This helps the listener know the key steps for success. Great organizations always look for ways to replicate strong results in other departments or take them system wide.
- Show calculations if requested. For example, by lowering the left without being treated from 3% to 1%, 554 patients received care that otherwise would not. With an average collection of $276 (554 x $276 = $152,904) an additional revenue of $152, 904 is generated. (Be careful not to overstate results, however, as you risk your credibility.)
She probably sent this to me because I tend to be interested in “why” questions rather than “what” questions. So for example, when I first pushed social computing ideas at JTV, I approached it from why this trend is important and why people long for community while continuing to live in isolation. Needless to say, by the third or fourth sentence, my boss’s lost interest.
Last week all my flash applications suddenly quit working. I tried several times to update flash, but with no success. I would download the player, click install, and upon completing installation it would send me back to a page requesting that I update. A mad circle. Felt like I was stuck in some twisted online merry go round. Unfortunately, I’ve been working on so many side projects (like antiquing a nativity set) that I didn’t have time to track down a solution.
Last night while I was sitting up in the middle of the night, I thought hey this would be a good chance to solve this. After a fe searches, I landed on Versiontracker with better troubleshooting advice than the Adobe troubleshooting section. If you have this problem with an Intel-based mac, here’s the advice I picked uu from Jim Kessler:
I’ve been working on a client’s machine where “you don’t have the Flash plug-in installed” appeared after installation and redirection to:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flash/about/index.html
Uninstalling and reinstalling had no effect. The solution? Repairing permissions with Disk Utlility. Then I ran the uninstaller (look on the Flash Player Support Center), and reran the installer, and everything worked.
BTW, check out versiontracker either way. It provides daily updates on software/freeware suff with comments (and troubleshooting tips).
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