Graham Chastney

Writings from a technologist trying to find a way through to the other side

Random images I've taken

My Tools Summary: June 2008

Stagshore GardensHaving failed to publish a summary in May I thought I would get in slightly early for June:

  • Introduction – why on earth am I doing this.
  • Word Outlining – you really should learn how to write documents this way.
  • Twitter and Twhirl – not sure how to summarise Twitter
  • FeedDemon – my feed reader of choice.
  • Blackberry 8800 – my world in my pocket
  • Windows Live Writer – I blog so I writer
  • iTunes and iPod – a sweet piece of apple
  • Synergy – share that keyboard and mouse to get better returns
  • Jing – screen snapshot wonders

     

     

  • My Tools: Jing

    One of the things that I quite often want to do is to show people a snapshot of what I see on my screen. That’s where Jing come in.

    imageJing does stills and movies and it does both of them in a wonderfully simple elegant way.

    Jing appears on the screen as a small yellow/orange half-sphere. When you move over it you get to see three options:

    imageOnce you have selected “Capture” you then select the area which Jing automatically helps with by selecting the active window. You don’t have to use this window, but it’s surprising how often that this is exactly what you want to do.

    The next thing to choose is what type of capture you want to do. If you select “Image” then you are prompted as to where you want to put it, if you select “Movie” then you are given a count down of 3-2-1 imageand then you record the movie.

    Once captured you then decide what you are going to do with your captureimage. Again there are some nice features here, including the ability to send directly to Flickr and to screencast.com. The things that I am capturing are normally going into presentations for my work so I normally save them to a file.

    Movies are in created in shockwave making them easy to transport and to publish.

    I had forgotten how much easier Jing makes this process until I came to write this post. One of the challenges with showing snapshots of a snapshot tool is that you struggle to use the snapshot tool to do it. Going back to alt-prt scr was a real step back in history for me.

    Hello Supplier

    IrisI’ve noticed an interesting trend in the access logs for this blog.

    Every time I have a meeting with a supplier my blog will be visited by someone from that suppliers just beforehand, or just afterwards.

    I wanted to say “Hello” and “Welcome” in acknowledgement of the effort you are putting in to understanding what might be important to me.

    Seth Goblin: "You need to increase your value"

    Jimmy and GrandadSometimes someone says something in such a succinct way that it resonates.

    Today it’s Seth Goblin:

    Your sales force and your customers may scream that you need to lower your price.

    It’s not true.

    You need to increase your value. If people don’t want to pay, it’s because you’re not delivering enough value for the money you’re charging.

    You’re not selling a commodity unless you want to.

    IT service delivery has become a commodity sell; so much so that the only focus is cost reduction.

    The huge opportunity is this – no end-user really wants to buy their IT as a commodity, it’s only their organisation that wants to buy it that way. End-users want loads more value than the value they are getting today. They need to innovate, and we need to help them to do it. we either help them, or they do it without us.

    Wordle – a little diversion

    Just took a little diversion down the Wordle route. It’s a tag cloud creation tool for test, or for del.icio.us tags. Here are my del.icio.us tags, spit the themes:

    If you take the text from my current blog front page it looks like this:

    That’s right – nearly completely different.

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