Month: February 2012

Working from Home

I heard an interesting statistic on the radio this morning-most Americans would be willing to take a 5 percent pay cut in order to work from home. This is something that may intrigue entrepreneurs; not only could they save money on staff wages, but costs on renting an office space could be lowered. Although it may seem like there is no argument as to why businesses would want to be stationed at a rented office, many entrepreneurs still see the need for a professional and reputable office address to maintain the respect that business partners and customers have for the company. However, with virtual offices becoming ever more prevalent, which you can learn more about at https://www.fuer-gruender.de/blog/virtual-office-geschaeftsadresse/, it seems that working from home may grow even more over the next few years. I’ve been working from my home for 25 years now and must admit that I really wouldn’t want to work anywhere else. However, I started thinking about the whole concept of a pay cut after the radio announcer finished and thought that we’re looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. Sure, the 5 percent pay cut is real, but is it actually a pay cut? Let’s examine that for a moment. The 5 percent pay cut to work at home would result in the following savings:

  • Reduced driving needs, which means lower insurance
  • Less gas used
  • Less wear and tear on the car
  • Lower cost, more nutritional eat-at-home lunches
  • Less need for expensive clothing
  • No day care required
  • Less time wasted in travel (and time is money)


If you don’t already have a home office then you will need to make one. These means buying furniture such as a desk, office chair, drawers etc. and getting some tech like a laptop. Of course, this costs money. However, you can get some good office furniture at good prices from places like Office Monster and it’s a one-off cost and long term investment. I still think in the long run you would save money because from a financial perspective, both the employer and employee come out ahead. In short, the benefits of working at home only start here. This is just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re an employer, you want your employees working at home. According to Business News Daily and many other sources, employees who work at home are significantly more productive in the right circumstances. So the employer not only saves on the pay required for a work at home employee, but also gets more for the employee’s efforts (assuming that the employee is actually working and not getting distracted). Even if you are unsure whether your staff are being productive, you don’t need to bring them back into the office because there are ways of keeping track of it whilst they are working from home. A lot of companies use a survey for remote work for this. In addition, there are other financial benefits for the employer such as reduced absenteeism and reduced infrastructure requirements, such as desks and office space. Because working from home is becoming more of a reality for many Americans, a number of authors have taken a stab at making it work out better for everyone involved:


The one essential tidbit of information that you should glean from most of these posts is that you need some sort of schedule. In fact, a few of these sources actually draw you a picture of a schedule. Having goals that you want to meet each day is an essential part of the work at home experience.

There is no doubt that the effects of working at home extend well beyond the benefits that both employer and employee can obtain. Working at home can be better for the environment because the worker isn’t driving anywhere. However, whether the environment gains or not is really a matter of the environment in which the employee is working. A basement office using incandescent bulbs, a plug in heater, and old computer equipment is hardly energy efficient and could actually end up increasing the employee’s carbon footprint.

Although, there’s no doubt that the employer will have to upgrade the payroll system, as with employees working from home, the hours may vary. Recording these hours and calculating pay can take up a lot of time and energy for the employer, and can result in a lot of dissatisfied employees if done wrong. Luckily, the benefits of outsourcing payroll far outweigh doing payroll manually, and should definitely be considered if working from home is a reality for your business.

The health benefits of working from home are also well documented. Employees who work from home are less stressed, eat better, and spend more time doing something other than driving a car. The mental and physical benefits of working in a familiar, cozy environment make it possible for employees to live better lives. In addition, even when an employee does get sick, it’s often possible for the employee to work part of the day, rather than miss an entire day at work, so the employer gains as well.

I’m not a parent, so I have no personal experience with child rearing. However, in researching work at home statistics, I did run across a few articles that suggest work at home parents actually give their children a better chance of performing well later in life. I’d be interested in hearing from people who have significant experiences one way or the other-especially in situations where one child was raised at home and another in childcare.

Will working from home work for everyone? The answer is absolutely not. Certain professions require that employees still trudge to work. In these cases, working as close to home as possible will still save travel time, wear and tear on your car, reduce insurance payments, and still benefit the environment to some degree. Working close enough to walk to work or use public transportation is even better. However, some people will continue to go to work at a factory or office somewhere, no matter how much technology progresses.

If your employer doesn’t
offer work at home, create proposal that makes it more likely that the
employer will at least consider allowing you to do it. Everyone
benefits! Do you think you could perform your work at home? Are you doing it now? Let me know your thoughts on the whole work at home question at [email protected].

Accessibility on Windows 8 Metro

Anyone who reads my books knows that accessibility is a major concern for me because I see computers as a means for leveling the playing field for those who have special needs. In fact, my desire to make things as accessible as possible is the reason for writing Accessibility for Everybody: Understanding the Section 508 Accessibility Requirements. Microsoft has always made a strong effort to keep Windows and its attendant applications accessible—at least, to a point. You still need a third party application such as JAWS to make Windows truly accessible (the application developer must also cooperate in this effort as described in my many programming books). Naturally, I’ve been curious about how the Metro interface will affect accessibility.

Here is the problem. The most accessible operating system that Microsoft ever created was DOS. That’s right—the non-graphic, single tasking operating system is a perfect match for those who have special needs precisely because it doesn’t have any bells or whistles to speak of. Screen readers have no problem working with DOS and it’s actually possible to use a considerable number of assistive aids with DOS because it requires nothing more than text support. Of all the the graphical environments that Microsoft has produced, I’ve personally found the combination of Windows XP and Office 2003 to be the most accessible and feature rich. The introduction of the Ribbon with Office 2007 actually reduces accessibility. If you have trouble seeing all of those fancy icons and the odd layout of the Ribbon, you’re not going to enjoy working with the Ribbon.

I installed and tried the developer version of Windows 8 to test it for accessibility. Now, it’s a pre-beta product and there aren’t any Windows 8 products out for applications such as JAWS, so I have to emphasize that I didn’t test under the best of conditions. In fact, you could say that my test was unfair. That said, I did want to see how bad things actually are. Let me say that JAWS works acceptably, but not great, with the classic interface. It doesn’t work at all with the new Metro interface (at least, I couldn’t get it to work). So, unless you’re willing to trust Microsoft completely, you’re out of luck if you have a visual need at the moment. Things will improve, that much is certain, but it’s important to keep a careful eye on how Windows 8 progresses in this area.

The new version of Narrator
does come with some new features. Some of the features may seem like
glitz at first, but they’re really important. For example, the ability
to speed the voice up or slow it down, and the ability to use different
voices, helps with cognition. A more obvious improvement is the ability
to use different commands with Narrator. Narrator will also work with
Web pages now as long as you’re willing to use Internet Explorer as your
browser.

It’s with this in mind that I read the post about Windows 8 accessibility entitled, “Enabling Accessibility.” Let me be up front and say that accessibility is an important issue to Microsoft—at least, it has been in the past. According to this post, 15% of the people using computers worldwide have accessibility needs. The more important piece of information is that the number of people with accessibility needs is going to increase because the population is aging and things such as eyesight deteriorate as we get older.

From what I garnered from the post, developers are going to have to jump through an entirely new set of hoops to make their applications accessible in Windows 8. Some developers already have problems making their applications accessible and some simply don’t care to make their applications accessible. If you fall into the former category, you can read my A Visual Studio Quick Guide to Accessibility (Part 1) and A Visual Studio Quick Guide to Accessibility (Part 2) posts in addition to reading my books. If you fall into the latter category, you’re going to find it harder to support users in the future and will definitely see reduced sales because the number of people with accessibility needs is increasing.

Microsoft is improving the Assistive Technologies (ATs) it provides with Windows in order to meet new accessibility requirements. However, my experience with these ATs is that they help people with minor problems, not someone who has a major issue. Even the author of the blog post acknowledges this deficiency in Microsoft’s support. So, if you really do need to use an eye gaze system to work with Windows, you’re going to have to wait for an update to your software before you can use Windows 8 and that update will be longer in coming due to the Metro interface with all the new hoops it introduces.

Part of the new developer interface revolves around the enhanced experience that a combination of HTML 5 and XAML provide. In addition, Windows 8 will require developers to use the new Web Accessibility Initiative-Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) standard. The plus side of the change is that it does adhere to standards that other platforms will use—the minus side is that developers will have to learn yet another programming paradigm. If you want a quick overview of how this will actually work, check out, “Accessible Web 2.0 Applications with WAI-ARIA.” The quick take is that, despite Microsoft’s claims to the contrary, developers will need to do more now than simply fill in a few properties in their applications to make the application accessible. You’ll actually have to code the accessibility information directly into the HTML tags.

The post provided by Microsoft on Windows 8 accessibility support leaves out a few unpleasant details. For example, it gives the impression that your Visual Studio Express 2010 application is accessibility ready right from the start. That’s true to an extent. However, the author leaves out important details such as providing speed keys for users who need them (the requirement does appear in a bullet list; how Windows 8 will help you implement them isn’t). The current templates don’t provide for this need and the Metro interface will make it harder to add them.

One of the most positive changes is that Microsoft is going to test Metro applications for accessibility. If the application meets the baseline (read minimal) requirements, the developer will be able to market it as accessible. At least those with special needs will be able to find software that meets a minimal level of accessibility. However, that minimal level still might not fulfill every Section 508 requirement (something that companies commonly sidestep as being inconvenient). In fact, I’m willing to go out on a limb here and state that minimal is probably not going to be enough to help many of the people with accessibility needs. You’ll be able to support JAWS at a basic level, but more complex software and setups will require additional help from developers.

One of the things you should keep in mind is that Microsoft is proactive to an extent about accessibility. They even provide a special Microsoft Accessibility site to provide updates about their strategy. However, I’ve been finding myself tested with their direction as of late. The interfaces they’re putting together seem less accessible all the time. I’d love to get input from anyone who uses their tools daily to meet specific needs. Talk to me about accessibility requirements, especially those needed to make Metro usable, at [email protected].

 

Obtaining Kindle for Your Non-Kindle System

A number of readers have written me about my post entitled, “The e-Book in Your Future” where I discuss the future of printing and the viability of devices such as the Kindle. The problem for many readers is that they either don’t want to get a Kindle or they want the e-books they buy to appear on more than just their Kindle. For example, they may use a PC at work. It’s not impossible to use your Kindle too, but it could be inconvenient. Perhaps you want to cite the content that you found in a book as part of a report—being able to see that content on your PC would make it a lot easier to copy and paste the citation to the report.

What many people may not realize is that Amazon has made it possible to read your Kindle materials on non-Kindle systems. Because I want to encourage people to use the device that best meets their reading needs, I decided to put the following list of Kindle software downloads together.

 

 

After you download the software, you install it on the host system. Any Kindle-compatible e-books you own are now available on that device as well. I haven’t tested the setup on anything other than the PC so far, but it works well under Windows 7. I’d love to hear how the software is working for other people. If I get enough feedback, I’ll provide an update about the Kindle software here. Send me your comments at [email protected].

 

In Defense of the Hometown Newspaper

I’ve talked with more than a few people who claim the newspaper is dead. In fact, many of them cite articles that say the newspaper is dead mainly because people no longer trust themselves to discover what is true and false. There are commentaries galore about the fact that newspapers can no longer make a profit and the fact that they’re completely inadequate to the task of serving a world bent on news of the moment in sound bites. There is even a Web site called Newspaper Death Watch to herald the event. I imagine that this characterization of the plight of the newspaper is unfortunately true in larger cities where there is a lack of a cohesive community and the news is important enough to garner the attention of a news wire such as Associated Press (AP). However, this dire news doesn’t consider the newspaper that focuses on small-town life (of which there are many). The fact is that there are certain newspapers that are not only alive, but doing quite well. For example, the “big city” of our community, Reedsburg (population 10,014), sports not one, but two newspapers, both of which attract enough advertising dollars to remain viable.

The hometown newspaper remains viable for a number of reasons. An obvious and often overlooked reason in our community is that the newspaper is read by the Amish, a group that is unlikely to ever read it online. A lot of us find out what’s going on in the world by reading online news sources like https://darknetmarket.com but for the Amish, very few have ever even accessed the internet, let alone use it regularly. Because at least some of the advertisement is directly focused on this group and other advertising is at least of interest to this group, the newspaper will remain viable. Advertising that doesn’t reach its target audience is useless. The Amish are just one of many groups who aren’t exactly Internet savvy-these groups will continue to provide a cushion for the hometown newspaper for the foreseeable future (long enough that I don’t need to worry about it). Interestingly enough, most of these groups also live in rural areas where they tend to have a large impact.

That being said, it is undeniable that most local newspapers are now available in online formats too. This means that if you are a local business looking to promote your products and services online then you can market your company through print and online advertisements via a local newspaper. Although it is undeniable that print marketing still holds a lot of power, if you want to get ahead of the competition in business then you absolutely need to be advertising online. Besides, nearly everyone searches for things online these days.

Smaller newspapers typically service a particular area and therefore if you want to target a particular population then newspaper marketing is a common strategy. Moreover, one industry that has unequivocally embraced online advertising is the health and wellbeing sector. Dentists for example are in high demand and therefore in order to ensure that their practices stand out from the crowd, dentists must embrace the web and produce content and advertisements that are optimized for search engines. You can learn more about local SEO for dentists by taking a look at some of the resources on the Avidon Marketing Group website.

When the newspaper content focuses on the local community and the community isn’t large enough to attract the attention of a wire service, then the newspaper is likely the only source of information for community events. If you want to know about the fire that hit the local plumber, you’ll read about it in the local newspaper, not online. Of course, some people may question the need to hear about the fire from the newspaper when Joe at the restaurant can deliver the full report. If you know anything about small towns, you know that the gossip mill is completely unreliable and that you’ll hear different stories from Ann, Zelda, and Sam before the day is out. To get the real story, you need to read the newspaper (complete with pictures no less).

It’s also important to consider the community. Hometown newspapers exist because the community wants them. Many smaller towns are family towns, where intermarriage over the years has produced a super-family of sorts. You know that Marge is a third cousin and that she’s married to Harry who owns the local lumber mill. In fact, you’ve seen them at church and in the bank any number of times and pass the time of day with them when you see them on the street. However, you don’t know that they recently had a baby until you read about it in the newspaper. In order to keep up with these extended families, people in rural communities read what happens to various family members in the newspapers. Yes, it’s really that hard to keep up with everything happening in the lives of every family member. Hometown newspapers don’t focus on the negative–they contain a mix of the good and the bad, the outrageous and the sublime. Hometown newspaper editors realize that they don’t need sensational headlines to entice the reader–they need that picture of Jeremy’s triumph at the spelling bee.

Hometown newspapers are also personalized. The articles of interest in our local newspaper are written by local authors who include their telephone number and e-mail address as part of their byline. You don’t get that kind of service with AP. The reason that hometown newspapers will survive is that they’re written by people you know-real people you can contact and interact with. These aren’t faceless actors on the world stage, but the same guy or gal that you had lunch with this afternoon. Hometown newspapers haven’t lost touch with the community. Quite the contrary, they embrace community contact.

When a hometown newspaper does run a feed from AP or one of the other news wires, they tend to personalize that content too. So, Iran is planning to block the Strait of Hormuz? Why should I care? Well, it means that the price of gas at the local Kwik Trip will go up. The association between the world stage and a local condition is a reason that the value added content of the hometown newspaper remains relevant and useful.

My wife and I actually get two newspapers. There is the local newspaper from Reedsburg and then a second newspaper from Madison that fills us in about state events. The Madison newspaper isn’t quite as personalized, but still fulfills a need. Again, there are the personalized stories about the state and then there is the audience reading the paper, which includes the Amish and other groups who aren’t online. I doubt that the Madison newspaper is in trouble either because it has too many people reading it.

Are newspapers really dead? They’re dead in large cities because the newspapers got lazy and didn’t personalize their content. Profit took the place of intimate contact with the reader and sensationalism took the place of serious reporting of all of the facts, even the good ones. The fact that these newspapers also lack a cohesive community to write about and that community does tend to have a strong online presence has conspired to make the big city newspaper obsolete. I imagine the same thing will happen to the hometown newspaper someday, but it won’t be today and it probably won’t happen in my lifetime. Do you read a hometown newspaper? What is your experience with it? Let me know at [email protected].

Arrival of the Seed Catalogs

A special event takes place each year around this time—the seed catalogs arrive on our doorstep. Nothing says springtime like the arrival of these glimpses into the future. Rebecca and I wait for them each year with bated breath and eagerly anticipate what they’ll contain. The two major catalogs for us come from Jung’s and Gurney’s. We do receive other catalogs, but don’t look at them in detail quite as often as we do these two. The main reason is that these two catalogs generally contain everything we want to grow (and then some).

I’m sure that a few of you are already rolling your eyes and thinking, “Just how antiquated can you get? Why not look online?” I’ve been finding that online catalogs work great when you have some idea of what you want. If I want to buy a specific piece of software or computer hardware, a repair part for Rebecca’s vacuum, clothing, CDs, DVDs, and so on, then an online catalog works great. In fact, using one can save time. Growing a garden is a little different. Often, you don’t know that you’re going to grow something until you see it in a catalog. In short, viewing the catalog provides something online catalogs don’t provide as well—a glimpse of what you didn’t know you wanted.

Before someone places this sort of purchase in the impulse buying category, it’s good to consider how seeing new items can really help the gardener. The following list is my favorite reasons for looking at new items, rather than simply sticking with the old favorites:

 

  • Growing new items can help improve the nutrition the grower receives from the produce.
  • Different items take different nutrients from the soil, so growing new items can help keep the nutrients in your garden more balanced.
  • No one wants to get bored growing their own food.
  • The new items may have different resistance to pests, making use of pesticides less necessary.


These reasons won’t be enough for some people to consider going back to the paper catalog after establishing an affinity for the online version. There are other good reasons to get a paper catalog:

 

  • Some paper catalogs come with discount coupons that you don’t receive with the online version.
  • You can’t take a usable computer screen with you to show friends what you plan to buy (viewing gardening items on an iPad just doesn’t make it in my book).
  • It’s even hard for two people to view the catalog in the same way by sharing a computer display.
  • Using the online catalog often requires that you open your computer to potential virus attack in order to use JavaScript and those fancy multimedia features.
  • Catalogs make it easy to compare what you thought you were going to get with what you actually see in the garden.
  • The paper catalog is a handy reminder that you really do need to start thinking about your garden, even though winter still has a firm grasp.


Whether you get a paper catalog or not is up to you, of course. Some people will say that we’re wasting trees by continuing to get paper catalogs (we do recycle every last piece of paper that enters the house). Whether you use paper or online catalogs though, it’s time to start thinking about that garden. What will you plant this year? Let me know about your gardening ideas at [email protected].

 

Developing the Reader Profile

A lot of people have written to ask me about writing books—about the techniques I use to develop a useful book. So far, all of my books are technical in nature. Not all of them are computer-related, but the majority are. The sorts of books that I write is changing and you’ll likely see me write books in other areas in the future. Whether I ever write fiction remains to be seen, but I do plan to branch out into other areas. No matter what I end up writing, I expect that I’ll use many of the same techniques when writing future books as I use to write my current books. Mainly, I need to find a way to communicate the ideas that I understand in a form that the reader can understand. It doesn’t matter what those ideas are—they exist in my head and I need to get them out of my head and into the reader’s head.

When I’m putting an outline together, I try to put myself in my reader’s shoes. Sometimes that means actually doing a little play acting and trying out things to see how I’d feel if I were the reader. Yes, conveying technology, or any other topic for that matter, means understanding the reader and how the reader feels. It means respecting the reader as a person and understanding that the reader has specific needs, as well as specific skills. Sometimes I’ll talk to the beta readers who are reading my books about issues or bounce ideas off the technical editor for my book. I’ll review materials online and see what people are discussing online. In short, I develop a profile of my reader and roll it around in my head until I can start to see a technology from the viewpoint of my reader. It’s not an easy thing to do, but it’s a necessary skill to develop.

In a way, I’m creating a relationship with what I think my reader will be. Beta readers do offer the opportunity to interact with actual readers, but my reading audience is relatively large, so it really does come down to creating a rapport with an idealized reader—one who encompasses everything I expect that my reader will be. The relationship takes form in a profile that I write down and review relatively often as I write the book. As I come across additional insights during the writing process, I develop the profile of my reader more fully. I keep constantly asking myself how I would talk about the subject at hand if I were sitting in a coffee shop (or some other relaxing environment) with the reader.

To a certain extent, I need to consider the reader’s need for self help. I can’t provide any reader with a specific answer for most problems the reader will encounter. To do so, I’d need to write immense books that no one would want to read because they’d be too bulky. I can provide the reader with knowledge and insights, but I can’t provide the reader with a precise response to any given problem because at the time I write my book, the problem is undefined. So the communication takes the form of ideas, rather than a specific procedure, in most cases.

Authors are hindered by a number of factors. The most important of these issues is the inability to communicate with the reader in real time. It’s the reason that I try to make myself so accessible through e-mail and by writing this blog. Even with these additional levels of communication, however, there are still barriers to communication. For example, I can’t easily read your body language to determine whether my response is actually helpful—I must make my best guess. When writing a book, I have to anticipate your needs and hope that my guesses are good ones because they are, in fact, guesses.

The reader profile doesn’t have to take a specific form, but it does need to provide you with a complete picture of the reader. Even if you define a few reader aspects incorrectly, having a reader profile will help you remain focused throughout the writing process on a particular reader. Here are the sorts of questions I ask myself when creating a reader profile:

 

  • What is the reader’s education level?
  • Will this reader understand these specific concepts?
  • When will the reader be reading my book?
  • How will the reader react to certain types of information?
  • Are there social biases I need to consider when communicating with this reader?
  • How does the reader view the subject at hand?
  • Is the reader likely to have language issues or special needs?
  • Will the reader be alone or part of a team?
  • How does the reader view me?


Most of my books require that I ask other questions, but this a good sampling of the sorts of questions that I ask myself. You’d think that with all of this effort spent considering my reader that I’d communicate quite well. However, there have been books where I ended up missing the reader completely with my profile. I directed the book at one audience, but another audience actually found the book more helpful and purchased more copies of it. When that happens, I get a lot of e-mail from a lot of disgruntled readers (and the online reviews are also less favorable). These failures require that I go back and review the premises on which I based my book and make corrections. I maintain statistics for the book, and if I get the chance to write an update, I tweak the reader profile accordingly to better meet the needs of the audience that purchased my book.

Anyone writing anything can benefit by creating a reader profile. If you currently write documentation, but don’t create a reader profile, I encourage you to do so because you’ll end up with a far better document as a result. As the years have passed, my profiles have gotten better, but I’m under no delusions that I’ll ever write the perfect profile. Even so, I’d never consider writing a book now without creating a reader profile first. Let me know your thoughts about using reader profiles at [email protected].

 

SendKeys for Office 2010 Revisited

Some time ago, I wrote a post entitled, “SendKeys in VBA.” In that post, I described a problem where the SendKeys example in Listing 5-8 of VBA for Dummies isn’t working as expected. It turns out that a lot of people are having this problem and not just with Excel—the problem seems to happen with other Office products as well. I’ve played with the macro in Listing 5-8 quite a lot and while it does work in Office 2007 SP2, it doesn’t work in Office 2010 as written.

Apparently, this problem isn’t unique to Office 2010 either. I’ve found threads online that indicate that the problem also existed in early versions of Office 2007, but was fixed in SP2 after a lot of people complained. Wandering around the Internet has proven interesting because I’ve found other blog posts that try to fix the problem, but didn’t work on my system for whatever reason. The bottom line is that SendKeys is broken and quite a few people know it.

Since my original post, I’ve tried several experiments, none of which resolve the problem, but some of which serve to highlight the true essence of the problem. For example, I tried to break the code in Listing 5-8 apart into room selection and row processing pieces. Here is the room selection piece:

Sub SelectRooms()
    ' Select the first data cell in the worksheet.
    Range("A5").Select
     
    ' Use SendKeys to select all of the cells in the column.
    VBA.SendKeys "+^{DOWN}", True
End Sub

and here’s the row processing piece:

Sub ProcessRows()
    Dim ActiveRows As Integer   ' Number of active rows.
    Dim Counter As Integer      ' Current row in process.
     
    ' Get the number of rows to process.
    ActiveRows = ActiveWindow.RangeSelection.Rows.Count
     
    ' Reset the cell pointer.
    Range("C5").Select
     
    ' Keep processing the cells until complete.
    For Counter = 5 To ActiveRows + 5
     
        ' Call the Sub created to change a single cell.
        MakeChoice3
         
        ' Move to the next cell.
        Range("C" + CStr(Counter)).Select
    Next
End Sub

If you run these pieces one at a time, the example will work just as it did with earlier versions of Office. However, that means running two separate macros instead of one, which does cut down on the usability of the technique. The SendKeys function appears to perform its task at the end of the macro, whenever the end of the macro occurs. Initially, I thought that calling these two macros in succession might do the trick, so I created this piece of code:

Sub ChangeAllRooms2()
    ' Select the rooms.
    SelectRooms
     
    ' Process the selections.
    ProcessRows
End Sub

Unfortunately, the result is the same as before. The SendKeys function really does appear not to output anything until the macro is finished. However, because I’m a glutton for punishment, I tried a few other things. For example, I thought perhaps that the wait part of the SendKeys call was to blame, so I created a manual wait like this:

Sub WaitForSendKeys(Timeout As Integer)
    ' Create a variable to hold the wait interval.
    Dim WaitTime
     
    ' Set the interval.
    WaitTime = TimeSerial(Hour(Now()), _
                          Minute(Now()), _
                          Second(Now()) + Timeout)
     
    ' Wait for the event to happen.
    Application.Wait WaitTime
End Sub

I then modified the original macro to look like this:

Public Sub ChangeAllRooms3()
    Dim ActiveRows As Integer   ' Number of active rows.
    Dim Counter As Integer      ' Current row in process.
     
    ' Select the first data cell in the worksheet.
    Range("A5").Select
     
    ' Use SendKeys to select all of the cells in the column.
    SendKeys "+^{DOWN}"
     
    ' Add a wait interval.
    WaitForSendKeys 5
     
    ' Get the number of rows to process.
    ActiveRows = ActiveWindow.RangeSelection.Rows.Count
     
    ' Reset the cell pointer.
    Range("C5").Select
     
    ' Keep processing the cells until complete.
    For Counter = 5 To ActiveRows + 5
     
        ' Call the Sub created to change a single cell.
        MakeChoice3
         
        ' Move to the next cell.
        Range("C" + CStr(Counter)).Select
    Next
End Sub

The results are that the macro runs a lot slower, but still doesn’t do the job. The only way that SendKeys works is to have it at the end of the macro. In short, you need to execute the code in Listing 5-8 in two parts in order to make it work as originally described in the book. As an alternative, you can still use the code in my previous post. The fix that seems to work best is not to use SendKeys at all.

Microsoft has been quiet about this whole issue. Nowhere have I found any word from Microsoft on the problem with SendKeys and I doubt there is a fix in the offing. If someone has a suggestion for fixing this problem, I’m all ears. Please contact me at [email protected] with full details of your fix. Make sure you’ve tested your code using Office 2010 on a Vista or Windows 7 system. I’ll be sure to give full credit to anyone who does come up with a fix for this problem.

 

Saving Data to the Cloud

Cloud computing is here-no doubt about it. In fact, cloud computing offers the only viable way to perform certain tasks. For example, software such as Sage200 cloud assists businesses with their management, not just for accounting but for other cloud based needs too. Certainly, large organization can’t get by without using cloud computing to keep the disparate parts of their organization in communication. From the modular web services offered by Google Cloud to the CMMS Software provided by Axxerion, there really is a cloud-based solution for everything, making running a large business or organization easier. However, on a personal level, I’ve been unimpressed with saving data to the cloud for a number of reasons:

  • Someone could easily obtain access to confidential information.
  • The data is inaccessible if my Internet connection is down.
  • A cloud vendor can just as easily lose the data as I can.
  • The vendor doesn’t have a vested interest in protecting my data.
  • Just about anyone with the right connections could seize my data for just about any reason.


As a consequence, I’ve continued to back by system up to DVDs and store some of these DVDs off-site. It’s an imperfect solution and I’ve often considered using the cloud as a potential secondary backup. However, when I saw the news today about Megaupload and the fact that the data people have stored there is safe for possibly two more weeks, I started reconsidering any use of cloud backup.

Just look at what has happened. The federal government has seized data from the site and then shut it down, making the user’s data inaccessible to them. If someone who uses that service for backup is having a bad day with a downed system, it just got worse. Now their data has become inaccessible to them. There isn’t any means of recovering it until someone decides to make it accessible again.

If the data does become accessible again, the users have two weeks in which to download everything and find another place to store it. Losing the personal mementos is bad enough, but to lose confidential information on top of that (think accounting data) makes the loss terrifying indeed. There is also that federal possession of everyone’s data for use in court no less. Now everyone will potentially know everything that people have stored on Megaupload–the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Of course, everyone is talking about what this means, but personally, I go along with John Dvorak in thinking that this incident gives cloud storage the huge black that it rightfully deserves. These services promise much, but I can’t see how they can possibly deliver it all. Yes, there are advantages to using cloud backup, such as the benefits of off-site storage that is outside of your location so that if an extreme disaster strikes, you should theoretically have your data stored in a safe location. Of course, there is also the convenience factor, assuming that you have an Internet connection that’s fast enough to make such backup of an entire system practical.

Cloud computing is going to remain a part of the computing environment from now on, but I think cloud backup has a lot further to go before anyone should trust it as a primary means of data storage. What are your thoughts about cloud backup? Let me know at [email protected].

Appreciating Animal Qualities

Every one of the animals we have the pleasure to work with has unique qualities and we try to draw those traits out as much as is possible. For example, Bubba (a cat) is our champion mouser. I often find Bubba stalking the mice in our garage. In fact, we obtained the dogs we have now for the specific qualities that their breed has to offer. Shelby is the queen of the chickens and guards them quite fiercely. Reese guards the apple orchard and dispatches some of the larger intruders that sneak into our garage.

To be honest, our garage would probably be overrun with pests if it were not for our animals! You see, our garage door does not close properly and this provides a perfect opportunity for rats and mice to make their way into our garage. That being said, one of our friends that lives in Pennsylvania recently got his garage door repaired by a garage door repair company after researching professional garage door services in 19406. It is about time that we got our garage door fixed so once I have finished writing this article, I am going to see if there is anything I can do to repair our garage door.

However, this post isn’t really about our garage door, or our dogs, but rather our cat, Smucker.

RebeccaAndSmucker

You may have heard about animals that can detect certain medical conditions in humans. Many of us associate these traits with dogs, but apparently cats also possess this capability. Rebecca has diabetes and sometimes her blood sugar gets too low. This condition produces physiological changes that even humans can detect when it’s almost too late, but animals can detect them before it becomes an emergency. Smucker has this capability and we didn’t even train him for it-rather, he trained us.

Rebecca recently had a severe bout with low blood sugar over a period of days and Smucker was instrumental in helping me save her life. It turns out that he will aggressively pat Rebecca, lick her, bump against her, and yowl when he detects her blood sugar is low. In fact, he gets downright pesty about it and makes a real nuisance of himself. At first I attributed it to a cat loving his owner, but after a while I realized that he only does this when Rebecca’s blood sugar is low. He’s alerting us to a health condition that Rebecca has.

When Smucker woke me up on a Sunday morning by alerting to Rebecca’s low blood sugar, I knew just what to do. I took her blood sugar and found it at only 41. She was unresponsive for the most part, but still able to let me feed her. So, I fed Rebecca some pear sauce from our larder-problem solved. Her blood sugar came back up without a trip to emergency, as would have been necessary had I slept any longer.

This capability isn’t something we’ve tried to obtain from Smucker, he simply decided to provide it to us. Animals are like that. They often provide the most profound gifts if you’ll only let them. What have your experiences been with your pets? Let me know at [email protected].

 

Care and Feeding of a Wood Stove

After reading my recent post entitled, “Choosing Wood Carefully,” one reader wrote to ask me about wood stoves. Yes, you really must exercise care with your wood stove or end up paying the price. For that matter, any wood burning appliance requires care and if you don’t maintain it, you’ll likely end up with a chimney fire at some point. There is little doubt in my mind about it. A fire would cause a lot of damage and it’s likely the whole chimney will need to replaced, not just the Flue Liner. Even if you don’t have a chimney fire, the wood will burn less efficiently and you’ll get less heat from it. In addition, there is always the problem of potential carbon monoxide poisoning. If you haven’t gotten the point yet, maintaining your wood burning appliance isn’t just a nice thing to do, it’s a requirement.

Make sure you perform your required maintenance. When it comes to my wood stove, that means ensuring I clean the glass twice a week so that I can actually see what’s going on inside the wood stove as the wood is burning. Opening a door when there is a burning piece of wood leaning against it (due to shifting) is never an easy task, but clean windows make things easier. You’ll also want to clean out the ash content from time-to-time (I do it daily) to ensure there is no buildup that could reduce the efficiency of the stove. As part of my personal regular maintenance, I also spray some Anti-Creo-Soot into the stove daily to ensure that no creosote builds up in the chimney. This product will greatly reduce the likelihood of a chimney fire and ensure that your wood stove continue to work a full efficiency at all times.

There is also annual maintenance to perform. The most important thing you can do is to obtain the services of a certified chimney sweep. You want a certified professional because they have specialized equipment to clean and check your wood burning appliance. In addition, these professional can usually perform repairs. For example, my wood stove has a very odd shaped window in the front. It broke at one point, causing the stove to operate poorly. Our chimney sweep was able to make the required glass insert when it was discovered that the vendor no longer supplied it, saving me considerable expense and worry.

When the chimney sweep is done, it’s usually a good idea to repaint any rusty areas on your stove. Make sure you wear a mask during the entire process because wood stove paint contains some incredibly nasty chemicals. Use a high temperature paint to repaint the surface after you prepare it. It’s absolutely essential that you paint your stove with all of the windows open and with a fan blowing air into the room. Using a spark proof fan (one designed for use in painting) is a good idea. Always follow the vendor instructions (including using the stove with all of the windows in the room open the first two or three times). Maintaining the paint job will help you enjoy your wood stove for a lot longer and present a nicer appearance when people visit.

Although it isn’t strictly a maintenance task, I also verify that my wood stove is burning at the right temperature. You do this by placing a magnetic thermometer directly on the stove pipe. It’s a good idea to keep the stove in the orange zone of a colored thermometer. Burning wood at too low a temperature causes creosote buildup in the chimney. Of course, keeping the stove too hot could result in a fire.

When you choose the right wood and maintain your stove, you’ll find that your wood burning experiences are significantly better and considerably safer. It doesn’t take long to perform these tasks and the savings from heating your home with wood are incredible. I find that the radiant heat actually feels warmer than the heat produced by a furnace. Let me know your thoughts on wood stove maintenance at [email protected].