Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Today’s list of cool tools and weird things is brought to you by – well actually just me. But Kitty can hold her iPhone next to her Dell Laptop showing that she loves both PC and Apple. and yes pink is her favourite colour!

Lets start off with some Microsoft Technologies

Amit has written a good how to article explaining How to Insert Images in a Word Document without Embedding

john has written about his ongoing OneNote testing as part of the OneNote development team in at Microsoft. Interesting stuff. We love OneNote here – its our primary team communication tool (after Outlook) and we use Livemesh to synchronise our shared notebooks with our team spread around the world.

www.ferrari.com is written using Sharepoint Designer (now being offered for free) and is published with a Sharepoint Backend. Awesome! I like the 612 Scaglietti best.

Philip writes Exchange Integrated Outlook – Recovering Deleted Items. A good detailed how to.

Weird and wonderful

Cake Wrecks has some photos of awesome cake decorating – Stargate style!

BumpTop is a new 3D desktop – see JoeTechs review and the video demonstrating it – looks pretty cool. I have downloaded it to play with on a dev machine – not risking it on my production box.

FragDoll, Phoenix, writes about her love of gaming stemming from a childhood where her family gamed together. We are doing the same thing, and it comes from my childhood also. My siblings and I endlessly played Monopoly, The Travel Game, Pit and lately as adults Settlers of Catan.

Interesting facts about Lego

Sarah posts about a new Twitter desktop client for PC (not using the memory hungry Adobe AIR) called DigiTweet. Still in Beta.

Tweetstats are supposed to give you your twitter statistics – It took a while for mine to be generated! They came back nicely. http://tweetstats.com/graphs/spyjournal. I’m a 7.8 tweets a day bloke.

Manda (not our aManda) has a position vacant – for a boyfriend!

I discovered Shoppingera. Phink writes an very good article for women in the work place – what to wear. So many women just don’t seem to know how to dress at work. Of course those who don't probably wont read this and this will be wasted on them – and for those who already know – well you already know. See Kitty above – she always dresses well for work!

Not weird but very sad. Compassion has written an article about the estimated 1.8 million children being sexually exploited, forced into prostitution or pornography. I only wish that the government’s plan to spend money on a un needed censorship system filter could be instead used to crack down on the consumers – and ultimately the purveyors of this stuff. Market economics tells us that if you can reduce the consumption, the demand will also drop. How to reduce the consumption – scare the crap out of the people who are tempted to view this stuff with massive fines and jail sentences.

Lullabot announced Drupal UE, the Usability Edition

For those in Australia, the Tax Office has announced the tax break they are passing to small business with accelerated deductions for asset purchases – including computers. We have already taken advantage of this!

Social Networking

Kate Carruthers has written a very interesting post comparing the use of social media technologies in the work place to that of the telephone or email – technologies that were once controlled and limited – and now provided without question in most work places.

Laurel Papworth continues the theme with a post titled Behavior Guidelines: Unblocking Social Media at the Firewall. She provides practical ways an organisation can gain acceptance and indeed demonstrate business needs for the use of social media at work.

Moodle is a site I am bookmarking to come back to and explore more when I have time. Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is a Free web application that educators can use to create effective online learning sites.