It's difficult to tell what weather is happening next. I just finished writing another blog post while sitting in my basement waiting for the tornado sirens to stop. Ordinarily, we Midwesterners take tornadoes rather lightly. However, having had several towns in Missouri and Oklahoma crushed by this brief, but vicious, force of nature in the last couple of days, I'm not taking any chances. So that put me in the basement. Alongside me was my ancient chihuahua, annoyed by the abrupt halt in his latest attempts to stare me into feeding him. Again. With us was also my neurotic rat terrier, more than happy to go to the basement and bury herself as far under a pile of dirty clothes as she could get. It would be a shorter list to create of the things Molly isn't afraid of than what she is afraid of. I didn't have the fortune of meeting her until she was an abandoned one year old, so I have to assume she did not have a happy puppyhood. That buys her a lot of leniency.

So in this brief wait for the violent weather to pass, I thought I would catch up on some writing. It's been awhile, and a lot has happened. I changed jobs and now spend an inordinate amount of time commuting. What was a ten minute walk is now an hour drive. I have to be there at 8 in the morning, where I used to arrive at 10…when I was running early. I guess I'm trying to say that it has been an adjustment. But, the pay is good and I love the work. Maybe my next gig will be in bicycling distance. I can hope!

Ok, enough rambling!

I've noticed over the years that I can spend a lot of my day just handling email. Not just reading it and organizing it, but acting on it, too. My guess is that you or someone near and dear to you does, too.

How to deal with it? Give email it's original definition of asynchronous communication! That is two big words meaning you don't have to answer it immediately! Download an alarm/timer, like Toggl, and commit a specific amount of time to getting through the inbox.

Make a quick deletion of anything in your list that looks like spam. Dont even open it, just hit delete. Next, a brief perusal of the list to see if there is anything very important. This would be emails from people, not listservs, that might be waiting for an answer. Read and answer those. If the answer will take some work, mark the email as an action item to be dealt with after email. When you are done with an email, file it or delete it but don't leave it in your inbox, UNLESS it is an action item and those will be marked as such.

Check your informational listserv emails next. See something that looks interesting? Bookmark it and read it after you are done with email. Bookmarks can be organized into folders, so create a folder called "Action," and put the day's reading in it. Once you've cleared through these, delete them, you've already recorded the links in them.

The alarm goes off and you are done! By finishing up the active emails first, anything can wait if you run out of time. Close up shop and get on with your day. Believe me, they will be there tomorrow. If you have a high level of email, you can set aside an AM and a PM time, but don't go over! There aren't many rewards for spending your life reading email.

Back when I was a wee pup on a computer (umm, 1986), there were only three shortcuts that we used to get through the day at work: copy, cut, and paste; or, Control-C, Control-X, and Control-V. Those of you who remember this will immediately recognize me as a Mac user because Windows was still in DOS and didn't use visual shortcuts.

Fast forward a few years and Windows has at least caught up to a visual operating system and is beginning to use shortcuts such as the ones listed above. These were so popular with the lazy, or impatient, that shortcuts exploded and, in some cases, became so complex that most of us couldn't possibly hold all that in our already overworked brains. If you have to hold down so many keys that it is more difficult than a guitar chord, it isn't really much of a shortcut, is it?

The latest Windows operating system has been very exciting to me. Easy to use. Easy to install (at last!). But it has brought along its own set of new shortcuts. This morning TechRepublic sent out an email about a list of Windows 7 shortcuts that you can even download in PDF format and keep on your desktop for handy reference. For instance, did a program stop responding, but beeps at you every time you try to use it? You probably have a communication window open, inevitably buried under the application and all the other windows you have open on your desktop. Control-Spacebar allows you to see a transparent outline of all the windows that are open. Mouseover the application in the taskbar on the desktop to see all the windows and select the communication window to process it and move on! Pretty cool, huh!

Want to try it out? This link: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/window-on-windows/?p=3567&tag=nl.e064 will take you to the TechRepublic page and while you are there, try a few out. It can't hurt and you might find something that you want to use often.

This is definitely one of those times and I think you will love it. The Google Chrome team put together this easy to read ebook (guide) to explanation many of the things we use daily online (well, I do, but I think you do too) and if we aren't using them daily, we should. Please take a few minutes to peruse this book and be proud of the fact that you now know what cloud computing is and your spouse doesn't! 

http://www.20thingsilearned.com/home

Internet browsers come in many flavors: Internet Explorer (the only built-in software unless you live in EU), Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, to name the most popular browsers. There are others but those are the ones usually seen in web statistics. If you type any of these into your search text box, you will turn up an address to download and install the software. With the exception of Chrome, these browsers have been around for years and each has different strengths and weaknesses.

My personal favorite internet browser is Chrome. It is quick to load, has most of the same extensions that Firefox has and generally doesn’t have a lot of bugs in its usage. Bugs are annoying glitches in software that don’t behave the way you want them to. I’m pretty sure they don’t behave the way the programmers wanted them to either. I could be wrong.
My suggestion to most people new to the world of internet browsing is to download several of these browsers and try them out. Be sure to download them from a legitimate download site (i.e., download.com or tucows.com) to protect against downloading a virus or trojan along with your browser software.

Have you downloaded an extension to your software before?

If not, do yourself a favor and try it. Add a weather extension to your browser (I like the ForecastFox extension) and try it out. In Chrome, click on the wrench icon, go to Tools and select Extensions. From there you can go to the search page for the extensions and browse for an extension that interests you. The instructions from there are pretty simple and you don’t have to restart the software. In Firefox, you need to use the Tools dropdown menu and go to Add-ons.

Need more assistance? Contact me here!

The internet introduced itself to me when my last child was two years old. He’s 19 now and out of the house. Unfortunately the internet, while having grown up along with him, permeates the house I live in. I am embarrassed to say that some rooms have more than one computer and my iPhone travels wherever I go. I spend a disproportionate amount of my time reading about trends in the industry, the latest gadgets and checking out as many of them as I can get close to. I’m not part of the industry, I’m an enduser, so that last one depends on my budget or the budget of those around me.

So, what’s this all about? It comes down to my qualifications to help those like me (AARP member) who don’t have the privilege or time or even patience to wade through a lot of the information needed to safely navigate the daily web existence. Perhaps I can help untangle some of this for you so it becomes a more enjoyable experience for you, too.