If you’re trying to really reach out there and connect to others in ways to develop your business career, I highly recommend using LinkedIn. Whether you are trying to get the word out when you’re looking for a new position, or you are trying to develop your business contacts, LinkedIn lets you connect to a lot of other people. While places like Facebook are fun for extending social contacts, LinkedIn is a social media tool that you shouldn’t pass up.

After signing up, you can start checking where other professionals in your company are connected and issue an invitation to them to connect with you. You can also check to see if contacts outside your company also have contacts that you would like to meet. This helps you connect to them (kind of like the ‘Six Degrees to Kevin Bacon’ idea). Write recommendations for the people that you are connected to that you admire. This can help them with their career. People may also write recommendationa for you, too. That won’t do your career any harm either.

LinkedIn also has other career tools like letting you develop professional groups. Check it out! Over 50 million professionals already have.

Windows Vista

Windows Task Manager has Performance and Networking dynamic graphs, that show you your computer’s CPU and network activity. They also show your CPU history and the amount of network traffic. (You can see this in Windows XP, too.)

You can get to these graphs by pointing your mouse cursor at a blank area of your taskbar at the bottom of your screen. You will see a menu appear. Click your right mouse button and select Task Manager. Then click on the Performance tab. You will see the performance graphs appear. As you watch, you’ll see your computer’s activity being charted.

The main use of these is to help you troubleshoot problems for your computer

To return the graph to normal size, double-click it again.

Clicking on the Resource Monitor button will give you even more information. Click on the CPU, Disk, Network, and Memory bars to expand them to see what is affecting any of these areas. You can also click on any of the help areas at the bottom to get help to create reports on your computer’s performance.

Would you like to have a tool that will let you Associate information and Collaborate on Ideas? Would you also like it to be easy to use and FREE? You don’t have to download it, either. Just go to the website and login whenever you want to create them.

There’s a great brainstorming tool that you can use at www.bubbl.us and all you have to do to get it is register. Once you register, you’ll have access to the bubbles. They’re a lot like organizational charts, only

much more flexible.

You start with a single bubble. Click in the middle and type a label for it. After typing the label, if you tap your Enter key on the keyboard, you’ll get a sub-level bubble, known as a child. Type a label for that bubble. If you want another at the same level, known as sibling, tap your Tab key instead of your Enter key. You can move all of your bubbles around by grabbing them at the top of a bubble and dragging, or just one bubble by dragging it from its top left corner. Delete them by clicking on their top right corner (they explode nicely), make another sub-level bubble (child) by dragging down from the bottom middle, and change the colors of your bubbles when you tap their lower left corners. You can also set up connections between all kinds of bubbles by dragging from the bottom right corner (free connect) of a bubble to another bubble. Don’t worry that you won’t remember where these areas in your bubble are, because when you point at a bubble, these different areas light up.

If you want to split your text to another line, hold down the Shift key as you tap your Enter key.

Play around with your bubbles. Break connections by double-clicking on lines. Zoom in and zoom out with the scroll wheel of your mouse.

Want to collaborate? You can invite others to work on your bubbles with you. Click on the Friends tab at the top of the page. If your Friend has an account with Bubbl.us, you can use the Find tool to find them after you’ve typed in their name. If they don’t, you can send them an invitation by email (click on their link to invite them).

After you have finished creating your project, you can save it. They save as Bubble Sheets. You can come back to use them any time. (Just remember to login).

Play with them. Have fun. I even use mine to create To Do lists. You’ll find yourself using these to organize all kinds of things. Practical, fun, easy and free. This is a great tool to add to your collection.

Hallmark’s website offers many wonderful cards and many of them are FREE. This presentation shows you how to sign up for a free account, add contacts to an address book so you don’t have to remember the email addresses of your family and friends, and how to get and personalize a free e-card and send it.

Open it in a separate window and click on the arrows (right and left) at the bottom left of the presentation to navigate through it.

Link to Presentation on Using Hallmark’s Free E-Cards

Audacity is a free audio program that lets you create, edit and convert audio (vocal and instrumental) files. It can be used to create podcasts, multi-track instrumental songs, record lectures, tell stories, archive family histories, capture audio from videos and games, do karaoke, podcast, record step by step instructions, create audio to do lists, sing lullabies, slow down music tracks to hear exact notes, take lecture notes, practice your singing, clean up digital audio files from records, add sound effects to music and many other uses.

To top it all off, it isn’t hard to use, either. Here is an embedded video I created on how to install Audacity on your computer. Have fun with it!

If this video doesn’t work properly, please click on this link to see it displayed on TeacherTube.
Installing Audacity on your Computer

There’s a little trick you can use to save some time when you’re going to save a file that you’re working on. If you’ve already typed the name that you want to use somewhere in your document, you can copy and then paste it in.

Select the text first by dragging over it or using another selection method. For this example, we’re selecting the text Mad Dog’s Party Ideas.

Choose Edit, Copy or one of the other four ways that you can use to copy.

Choose File, Save or File, Save As (the first time that you are saving a file, it doesn’t matter which one you use).

Click on the location that you want to save it in, if it isn’t the default location (the one that the computer gives you).

If the default name that your program shows in the File name text box is NOT highlighted, you need to select it. Click in the white area of your File name text box to the right of the default name, then hold down your left mouse button and drag back over the name so that it is selected. If you start your dragging to the far right side of the text, you will never end up with just part of your text selected.

You will not need to delete the selected text, because pasting over it will replace it.

Hold down your Ctrl key on your keyboard and tap the v key, and the name that you selected to use will be pasted to the File name text box. Click on the Save button or tap your Enter key to save.

(Note: Clicking your right mouse button and selecting Paste from the menu that appears only works some of the time, but this method works every time).

Note: If you’re used to letting the program that you’re using create a name, you may have noticed that it will generally stop wherever there is punctuation. This method fixes that problem, easily including commas, apostrophes, hyphens, etc. Do be aware, however that there are certain symbols that cannot be used in a file name, like colons, question marks, diagonal slashes, and others.

Note: Remember to save often, to prevent your work being lost unexpectedly through unexpected problems like power outages, toddlers you find the power on/off button on your power supply attractive, or gremlins.

I saw this product out on the Internet, and thought it was worth sharing. SlideRocket was featured at the Under the Radar conference in Mountain View, and won several prizes there. From what it appears, SlideRocket has some wonderful transitional effects, and the ability to incorporate weblinks and multimedia pretty easily. SlideRocket is currently in beta mode, which means that it isn’t quite ready for market yet, but it is on its way. This presentation software appears to be something worth looking into if you have a job where you use presentations often. Their website includes a demo on the home page at:

http://www.sliderocket.com

They also have a blog that includes a video with presentation tips on this page:

SlideRocket Blog Page

I don’t have information on how much it will cost, or when it will be ready for mass market, but I was impressed with their demo, and if you create a lot of presentations in your job, you might find it pretty worthwhile. Even if you don’t, you might enjoy their demo and the presentation tips video on their blog page. Before you ask, let me say that I don’t have any connection with this company at all, but I do like to share interesting things that I run across. If you have any comments, click the comments link and post them.

There’s a great resource on the Internet for both teachers and students. It’s called TeacherTube, and you can find it here:
http://www.teachertube.com
Check it out now!