Archive | Tech RSS feed for this section

A simple fix for the “smiley J”

29 Jun

Does this look familiar?

Have a great weekend J


Chances are if you use a PC, you’ve sent and received emails to someone from Outlook and each emoticon smiles (AKA a “smiley”) has come through as a lonely, solitary capital letter J?

Well Chris Pirillo has a simple fix.

He instructs how to modify Word/Outlook’s autocorrect database to use the built-in Unicode version of the smiley as a substitute for a key combination like “:)” It’s more or less the same as Word’s wingding version of the smiley, but a bit smaller.

The added benefit is that because it’s unicode it will be cross-platform (Unix, Mac, BlackBerry and others).

So simple, it’s genius.

  • Share/Bookmark

IPDI alumni making news and doing great things

25 Mar

Some of my former IPDI colleagues have been doing some great things lately in Washington and outside the beltway, and I wanted to take a moment to share their good news.

  • Former Director Julie Germany recently hosted a panel at SXSW on why techies should get involved in elected politics. Here’s a clip of her describing it and speaking about online politics.
  • Matthew Zablud, a very talented former colleague who went on to work for Adfero after graduation for a number of years, recently started his own advocacy/public affairs firm. It’s called Beekeeper Group (still waiting on a reason why it’s called that, Matthew – were you sneaking out on weekends to tend a bee hive all those years?). If your organization needs a grassroots campaign in the states, I am sure these guys will be great.
  • As mentioned on this blog before Chris Brooks (who shared the nickname ‘workstudy’ while I was there … shows how long ago that was!) came up with (and actually implemented) a great idea for decentralized mobile video reporting system for use in disaster zones. They entered and became finalists in the We Media contest. As an updated – while they didn’t win – it was still the best idea!

    • IPDI is a research institute affiliated with The George Washington University’s GSPM school. It specializes in researching where the Internet meets Politics and/or governance. IPDI runs the fantastic Politics Online Conference (POLC) every year which is just getting better and cooler all the time. This year’s POLC looks wonderful – kudos to the organizers so far.

    • Share/Bookmark

    Having some fun at Apple’s expense

    23 Mar

    Opera makes a very fast mobile web browsers for a variety of platforms. I can’t live without Opera Mini 5.18 on my Blackberry (mobile link here), and am enjoying using the 10.5 browser for Windows on my desktop at home.

    Apple’s iPhone Store, as we know, loves to reject applications on a variety of reasons. This goes double for browsers, which they see as duplicating the service offered by the mobile version of Safari. Opera has submitted their newest (very fast) browser to the Apple Store for review, and quickly posted a website to count how long it takes Apple to reject (or approve it).

    Clever, and will make for some good PR whether they win or lose their bid to have their application approved. The contest to win an iPhone is a nice touch, too.

    • Share/Bookmark

    Excel 2007 – Data menu grayed out

    25 Feb

    Imagine my surprise when my entire data toolbar was greyed out this morning in the middle of working on a spreadsheet.
    A quick web search found the reason. The good folks at PixelComma explained that it’s because Excel’s group mode was enabled. It was surprisingly easy to do that by accident, and equally easy to turn it off (right click on the sheet tab and unenable it). If you’ve arrived at this page because of a similar error, I hope this helps you.

    • Share/Bookmark
    ← Previous Entries