Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Paper.li allow you create personalised newspapers – summarising your tweets, and community news in various areas.

I have been running two for some time now – the Tim Miller Daily and the SpyJournal Weekly.

Check them out and subscribe if you want an easy grab of my twitter feed in one bite

Apparently Papeete is below us. Not that we can see anything in the dark. Ground speed is 981 miles an hour, we are 10 km high and its minus 39 degrees outside. I'm only 9 hours away from Dallas; it will be my first time on US soil.
This amazing adventure started back in early 2003 when i discovered blogs. I started my first blog and called it spyjournal. It was just going to be an online diary giving others a peek into my life. It grew and so did I. Discovering Darren Rowse (before he was famous) was my turning point. I realised he had figured this out. No quick shortcuts to internet riches. Seeing a space and then hard work writing quality content. Spyjournal has gained me prizes, software, early invites to new technology, an all expenses paid trip to France and now USA. Those are nice things. But not the best. The people I have met over the last few years online all around the world are ordinary people, hard working, faithful, reliable, with integrity, and my friends. I go to USA now not for a gravy train tour, but to meet my friends. Some i have known for a long time like Gordon – now at Tertium Squid. Others more recent like Marcus and Deidra. I think the thing I am going to enjoy most is laughing and crying, hugging and praying with my friends.
Blogging is hard work. It takes guts to bare your soul. It requires expertise to write with authority. It requires research and writing craft and years of wondering why it is that the only comments you get are from spammers. But you stick to your guns. You go through the hard patches and you learn the new technologies to improve and grow as they come. And eventually you get invited and asked to do stuff. Breakfast radio shows. Trips to France. Photography editor paid position thank you very much.
I am excited to see my love of writing being developed in my wife and daughters. Miranda is working on novels and fiction is her thing right now. I am excited to see that happen. Judith has long shared her craft ideas, recipes and more recently running for mums. The younger girls are into art. Jadeen is producing art commissions on Deviant Art.
My advice an encouragement does not come from a super blogger. Nor does it come from someone who knows it all. Rather it comes from someone who was taught from  an early age the value of hard work, the ethos of doing something well if it is worth doing and never quitting. I hope I am passing on the same values to my kids. To you my readers, do not discount this. Work is a God given instruction to mankind and there is joy and beauty in creating through work. Whether it is  physical craft or artistic expression, something can be created from nothing.

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

Microsoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

Microsoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.

There has been lots and lots of rumours, speculation and conjecture on just what the new release of Windows Live was going to contain. The LiveSide website has been the source of plenty of leaked screenshots, links to downloads and other information on the way.

Download links available at LiveSide

Now that is released into the wild, and people are using it I thought I would write up a quick review of some of the new features – and there are plenty.

Live Messenger

• A whole new communicator window, with integration with Facebook and MySpace accounts – means all your contacts, status updates and commenting can be done in one place, along with access to media like photos and videos. Note the Facebook chat feature has not been enabled in the public beta yet but will come later. (Image from LiveSide)
• A new tabbed conversation window – at last!. No longer do you need to have 75 windows open of all your current messaging sessions, they are now contained in one window with tabs at the top. This is a major improvement.