Sometimes you’re just looking for something new to play with – I’d like to introduce you to Wordle.  Wordle is an application developed as a side project and is now available as a non-commercial ‘tool’ out on the internet.

The example above uses the lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s Born To Run  (just because it was the first set of words that I thought of that might be interesting.)  Wordle lets you enter any set of text as the starting point for your creation and then from there you can play around with fonts, colors, general layouts and a few other things.  It’s not complicated, but it is fun to play with.

Wordle for you?

Another idea to play around with is to use your LinkedIn profile as the input for a Wordle that’s all about you.  Here’s one that I came up with:

So what does your Wordle look like?

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

  photo by flattop341 

When your hard drive goes up in smoke you likely will end up losing some data, but you will also need to re-install all of those tools that you use to get stuff done.  The basics – Word, Excel, etc. are pretty straightforward, but if you’re like me, you’ve probably collected some more specialized applications that you’ve found just make life easier.

I thought I would share a couple of those here today – these are tools that I hadn’t really thought about using…until I didn’t have them (and then it becomes an issue!).

Screen Capture

I’m sure there are a lot of uses for Screen Capture tools (basically taking a picture of what ever’s on your computer screen to share with others).  I use it when I’m updating presentations and potentially as illustrations for documents or blog posts. 

As far as I know, there aren’t really any ‘standard’ applications that come with Windows (I’m sure the Mac people have something, because they have all of the cool stuff) but the good news is that there are a lot of interesting choices available and many of them are free.

If you’re looking for a good round-up of choices – this site has a good list of screen capture tools.  There’s a premium tool called Snag-it that I’ve used that is excellent, tons of functionality, easy to use, but it costs around $50 – give the free 30 day trial a shot if you think you need a really strong solution.

I also think Jing is really cool  but it’s a big solution when all you really want is a quick partial screen shot.

What I’ve ended up using is an older freeware application called MWSnap, it doesn’t ahave a lot of bells and whistles, but it works well, does what it says it will do and I’ve never had any technical issues (not necessarily true for some of the others that I’ve tried).

Print to PDF

Another tool that I find myself using quite a bit is the ability to Print to PDF format.  A lot of times you’ll find a document online that you’d like to share or keep and there’s not a good quick way to save it (you could also cut and paste into a word document, but that can take a long time and usually doesn’t work very well).

Printing to PDF is done by an application that sets up as a printer option on your PC – when you choose to print something you select the Print To PDF application instead of your regular printer and you will end up creating a new PDF file.

I’ve now used a couple of different free applications for this – the first one is called PDF995 and is actually part of a suite of tools that can do a lot of really cool stuff that I never even knew was possible (like the ability to append and combine multiple PDF documents together).  The free version is the same as the paid version in terms of functionality you just have to deal with a sponsor page view every time you use it.  To upgrade to the ‘paid’ version only costs $9.95 (hence the name).

The other app I’ve used for this is called DoPDF, it’s simple, it’s small and it works as promised and does what you expect (and it’s free).  You can’t ask for much more than that.

What tools do you find to be really useful?  I’d love to get some more ideas on what’s out there, share your comments here.

Shawn Kinkade  Kansas City Business Coach

photo by Bast 

I’m going to date myself here, but my parents had an 8-track tape that I used to listen to when I was growing up – it was the soundtrack to Lost Horizon (a 1973 remake of a Frank Capra 1937 film).  I don’t really remember the movie being worthwhile, but I remember the soundtrack and several of the songs really well – it’s the kind of music that sticks with you.

One of the ‘stickier’ songs is “Question Me an Answer“.

Question me an answer bright and clear.
I will answer with a question clear and bright.
Even though your answer may be wrong my question will be right.
Question me an answer.
Answer with a question.

It was written by Burt Bacharach and it’s catchy to the point that you’ll regret having listened to it (consider yourself warned).

What does this have to do with anything?  If you’re trying to close a sale, then questions are the answer.

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There are some things that you take for granted, sequels are almost never as good as the original, Stephen Colbert is funny and when you hit the power button your computer is supposed to turn on, not give you the dreaded Blue Screen of Death…!

Unfortunately the unthinkable happened to me and it’s been a painful couple of days (so far).  I was initially hoping that it might be something minor that could be fixed (although after a couple of hours of trying, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be fixed by me!).  So I called my friend Tim New over at Onsite Logic and had them take a look at it.

It’s never a good sign when the conversation starts with “Did you notice that burning smell?”.  It turns out that my hard drive had fried (literally) and short of a really expensive procedure all of that data was gone forever – Old Reliable had failed me.

The good news is that not all was lost – I had done a few simple things that kept it from being a major issue.

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   photo by peasap 

Leaky buckets aren’t very efficient (and it’s really hard to find a good leaky bucket picture…). 

One of my clients has long been having a proverbial ‘leaky bucket’ problem with their revenue and they’ve been unfortunately leaving a lot of it on the floor.  When times were good that revenue leak wasn’t perceived as that big of a deal – they were still making money, still growing…everything was good.  However their business (like most) has been impacted by the economy and when things started to tighten up, those leaks really started to be an impact.

Where were the leaks coming from and what could they do about it?

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