Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

This mind map from Robin Good has to be the best this week  listing free or minimal cost online collaboration tools. Feel free to add missing tools (or contact Robin directly).

This week I have a few selected items from Amit over at Digital Inspiration.

• How to Make a Twitter Background Image with PowerPoint or Keynote
• How to Carry Your Google Reader Offline with Scoop, Supports Synchronization
• Scandoo allows you to check your website for potential misuse in comments etc by spammers. Simply type in your domain name using the site: identifier – e.g. site:spyjournal.biz.

Mostly Lisa has a photography contest – vote for your favourite photo on this page

Dana Coffey has a very good netiquette article – I fully agree with the Facebook application thing!

Xobni (an Outlook plug in I couldn’t live without now) has upgraded and has some cool new features. Their blog post is titled Xobni brings the internet into Outlook…4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. Includes integration with Facebook, LinkedIn, Hoovers and Yahoo Mail.

The Windows Live Photo and Video Blog has a nice easy all in one place list of plugins for the betas of Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker including Facebook, YouTube, SmugMug, Flickr, Picasa and Drupal.

I installed Expression Blend and am going to use it to try and produce some Silverlight content if I can. I found this site to be a good source of video training for Expression Blend, and the other Expression web products. Microsoft also has a Learning Snacks page with helpful videos about Silverlight.

This week we are looking at a very simple but a very powerful function.

The VALUE function is very easy to use, just type =VALUE(text) in a cell where text is a cell reference is a valid cell address e.g. A1 or T45 or a cell name – e.g. my_cell or just some text. It must represent a number.

The uses of this function are wide. I use it regularly in the following scenarios:

• converting values imported from a CSV file or TEXT file that are actually formatted as text or general. This allows you to use the numbers as actual values and sum them etc. Use =VALUE(A1).
• converting a number string that has been extracted from a text string. E.g. you have a cell A1 with text in it like 1245NAME and you need to get the 1245 out. Use =VALUE(LEFT(A1,4)) to extract the first 4 characters as a text string and then convert it to a number.
• converting a number constructed using CONCATENATE or joins to make. This is very useful for dates. Eg =DAY(TODAY())&"/"&MONTH(TODAY())&"/2020" gies us todays date in the year 2020. However it is not a value, but a text string. Adding VALUE like this =VALUE(DAY(TODAY())&"/"&MONTH(TODAY())&"/2020") turns it into a date serial number. This can then be formatted as a date, and used as a date in calculations.

the Excel help provides this example:

• =VALUE("16:48:00")-VALUE("12:00:00") The serial number equivalent to 4 hours and 48 minutes, which is "16:48:00"-"12:00:00" (0.2 or 4:48)

This morning started with the girls waking me to say my parrot had escaped while they were feeding it. After a look around the yard I went inside to print flyers while they went to the park to look. Jadeen came running back 2 minutes later to say they found him in a tree in the park. 15 Minutes of climbing a tree that had branches that couldn't support my weight and kept breaking I was at the top of the tree where the reluctant escapee was clinging on. I snapped the top of the tree and drew him down toward me. Getting him inside my shirt I then climbed / fell because branches broke back down to the bottom. I have cuts and scrapes all over me and bird is safely locked away once more.

Jude then said – clear this mess away. When the wife says that you need to listen. So I stared clearing away all the boxes I had stacked in the school room where I had temporarily camped while building hers and my new PCs. My new super duper computer is mostly running OK now, the odd lock up is an issue. While clearing away boxes I got distracted into sorting out motherboard driver and other cds I had on my desk return. Then I found an old CD with NASA space images on it, so I handed this to Miranda to copy to our wallpaper archive. While doing that I noticed the filing boxes that are stacked beside her desk hadn’t been pushed back from the other day when I was chasing a wild mouse and that there was a very large very dead blue crayfish down there. It had escaped from my large fish tank. Seeing as the camera batteries were charging we bagged it and put it in the freezer for some macro photography another day.

I have just been informed that I have baby fish. The convicts in the tank the crayfish escaped from have lots of fry.

Oh and last night we had baby dragons hatch out as well as more laid. You can order and buy dragons (if you are in Australia) from Jude’s website www.rasita.biz.

I might get some work done today.

Before this spider was sacrificed to the fish, I took the opportunity to do some close up macro photos. I love the way you can see the hairs on its legs so clearly. This spider was in our bathroom and around 120 mm across. More shots up on Flickr