Archive for April 26th, 2007

There is nothing that slows down word processing more than taking your fingers off the keys. The only way most people know to highlight text is to find the mouse, move the cursor to the area of the text and drag the cursor across the text.

Here is a tip that will save you days of hunting for that mouse. The next time you need to highlight some text in your word processor, use the Shift-Ctrl-Arrow keys to highlight text.

Let me start one step back. In your word processor, hold down on the left Shift key. Now tab the left arrow key. This will highlight the previous letter of text. Keep tapping the left arrow and eventually you will highlight the whole word. Now speed things up even more. Hold down the left Shift and Ctrl keys. Now tap the left arrow key once. This highlights the whole previous word. Three taps of the arrow key and three words are highlighted. Shift-Up Arrow highlights the whole line of text. Shift-Ctrl-Up Arrow highlights everything back to the beginning of the paragraph.

Let’s say you don’t need to highlight but instead need to move the cursor over a few words. Ctrl-Arrow moves the cursor over one whole word with no highlighting. Ctrl-Up or Down work the same way.

Happy word processing.

TSPY=4.22

I really tried. I’ve spent more time in Second Life this week than I should have. So far, 53 people have said “hello” to me. Other than that

hi: 6
can i help you: 4
greetings earthling: 1

Extended conversations were variations of “what have you found around here that is interesting?” Let’s face it. This is a chat room where everyone has an avatar that looks like Barbie. Am I suppose to think that watching someone’s avatar typing is better than IRC? I have been in SL four days straight and I can’t find anyone doing anything interesting. In the educational areas it is hard to find anyone… period.

I did manage to get a free ISTE T-Shirt on EDUIsland. I swept the floor in a Univ Cincy building and made a dollar. Actually it is a Linden dollar. I saw a link where I could exchange Linden dollars for real dollars. I didn’t have enough cash to make it worth a look. Frankly, I didn’t have enough to buy a tattoo from a kid on a skateboard.

I visited the computer museum, a farm with sheep, a camp ground and many corporate buildings. The corporate people were usually the ones that asked if they could help me. I did like I do in Best Buy and told them I was just looking around.

Behind the scenes there are some things that could be used in education. All the objects created in SL are programmed by SL users. There is value in learning how to create objects that are interactive in real time. An art person can express a lot of creativity here.

I can’t imagine trying to teach a class in SL. With no voice broadcasting, it is just a glorified chat. I also saw a lot of “questionable” things in the educational areas. Once again I am bagging SL for a while. Maybe later in the summer I will have some time to mess around some more. I bet people will flock to me if I say I’m John Rappold.