Office Professional Academic 2010

Contrast that with the $199 you would pay for Office Home and Student, which has doesn’t have Publisher, Outlook or Access. Professional Academic is essentially Office Professional (which costs $899) at half the cost of Home & Student, with the caveat being that you have to be a student when you buy it.

In addition, Windows 7 Professional Upgrade, which has been around $120 on the same site since around April, has been dropped down to $49.95. You won’t get a legitimate copy of either for cheaper anywhere else. So if you’re a uni student who will eventually upgrade to office 2010 / windows 7, go get it before the price increases.

UPDATE: If you’re unsure about whether you should buy office 2010 or not, Lifehacker has a great guide with lots of info.

Empire Avenue is an online virtual ‘stock exchange’, where the companies are people/websites and their value is determined by their online social influence. You can buy and sell shares in your friends or other people or even brands / websites. When you start off, you have an initial influence value, and a small amount of money to buy shares with. To increase your value, the system needs to know how influential you are.

Share prices based on influence

To get that information, you add services to it:

• Your website
• Your blog: This is interesting. To prevent people using someone else’s blog and to reduce spam, there are 2 systems in place. Once you add your blog, you have to verify it by editing a post and adding a small code to it. The system finds the code and knows you are an author. Once that’s done, the blog has to be recommended by 5 people, who are willing to vouch for it and have their profiles linked as a person who vouches for that blog. This aims to make sure the content is actually influential.
• Your twitter account
• Your facebook account: You can give the system access to your profile as an app. I can see the privacy-conscious quietly whispering “omg” at their keyboards. Worry not! Not too much anyway. They won’t put any of that content out in public. The only people on Empire Ave that will see some of your content are your friends on facebook (who are also on Empire Ave), who have access to it anyway. It basically checks how often people like or comment on your content to increase your Influence value. It’s not compulsory, so for those with strong feelings about privacy, feel free to leave this out.

If you want to try it out, it’s in invite only beta. I have a few invites that I’ll be giving out to readers. All you need to do is follow me on twitter, @ritwikr (twitter.com/ritwikr).

Once that’s done, tweet this: I want an invite from Ritwik’s blog to Empire Ave: Buying and Selling shares of your friends online (http://bit.ly/bufUAr).

I’ll give invites to the first people to post that, and continue as I get more invites.

The directions you get are given in an Australian tone, as in the screenshot below.

Aussie Version of Google Maps

Big thanks to my friend Alex for pointing this one out.

Microsoft Messenger for Mac 8 Beta

The biggest lesson learned from today? If you don’t have a camera on you when you least expect a great moment, you’ll have to watch it pass you by. It doesn’t matter how great the camera in your closet is if you can’t use it when the (literal and metaphorical) storm hits.

Lane markings: These suggest a possible division of the road into lanes. For example, a single line in the centre of the road suggests that the drivers form 2 lanes. This suggestion is rarely taken as it appears to be a waste of space. Hence a suggestion of 2 lanes usually results in 3 or 4 lanes forming, depending on whether the cars are able to drive on the footpath. In clear open roads, drivers sometimes take the lane markings as guidance tracks, and driver centred above a lane marking.

Traffic lights: These suggest an order motion at an intersection. The red light suggests that drivers on that road should not proceed, unless the other cars are moving too slow, or the driver is late to lunch.

Speed limits: These are suggestions for a standardised speed that all cars should move at on the road. In reality, your speed limit depends on your car’s capability and your own braveness in the face of death.

One-way road: This sign suggests that the traffic along a narrow road only goes in one direction. This is only applicable when there are cars on that road, and can be ignored if the road is empty.

Vehicle indicator lights: If one indicator is blinking, the driver may or may not turn in that direction. If both are blinking, the driver wishes to inform you that he exists and his vehicle does in fact have indicator lights.

There’s many more similar suggestions, but in short, its up to the driver to decide what parts of the traffic code they have the patience to follow.

Our stop over in Malaysia was about 8 hours, so they put us up at the Concorde Inn, which was good enough as a transit hotel. The breakfast there was great, with a choice of continental or local breakfast options. We jumped on a train and went to see the twin towers quickly before our connecting flight. It’s a pretty impressive sight, but if you have a short transit time, I wouldn’t recommend rushing to see it. It’s not worth the chaotic transport systems and risk of delays. There isn’t anything spectacular to do once you get there, just look at the towers (unless you want to shop, in which case there’s a shopping mall in there).

At the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi, my cousin and aunt picked us up, and gave us our first road experience in India. Suffice it to say, I wasn’t sure I would make it home to write this post. The chaos is unlike anything I’ve ever seen anywhere. There were cars going perpendicular to the road to get to the rightmost lanes. Everyone was in a rush to get ahead of everyone else. And if the vehicles were not enough confusion, people walk haphazardly onto the road, weaving between the cars in a desperate race to the other side of the road. There was barely 20 cm of gap between cars sometimes.

Despite all that, we made it to Gurgaon in one piece, and had a good night’s sleep.

Some of us who have both Facebook and Twitter accounts have a setup where anything they tweet becomes their Facebook status. Recently I found an interesting app called Selective Twitter status that only takes tweets that are tagged with #fb and sets those as your Facebook status (after removing the #fb tag). This reduces the noise you generate on Facebook when you say/retweet/reply to something on Twitter which your friends on Facebook have no clue about. Twitter, after all, is used for more than just status messages. Having all your tweets as Facebook statuses means your Facebook friends only see one side of the conversation. This app helps solve that by allowing you to select tweets for Facebook and improve your signal-to-noise ratio. It would be great if the service had an option for removing all #tags from the status since they don’t usually mean much to a Facebook user.

The Twitter app on Facebook also recently started adding a “Follow @username” link under statuses from Twitter, which is a good step in integrating the two services.

What I would really like now is to have a way to link Twitter mentions to Facebook status tags. For example, say I have a friend “@alice” on Twitter, who is also “Alice inWon” on Facebook. If I mention her in a tweet which gets to Facebook, she’s still @alice, which means nothing on Facebook. What would be useful, and semantically better, is if the Twitter app could recognise people who are on both Twitter and Facebook, and convert the mentions into status tags as it gets pulled into Facebook.

For example:

Twitter status with Alice mentioned

Could become:

Facebook status with the person tagged

This would improve the integration between the two services by providing the same information, and linking the mentioned person in the relevant service.

I don’t know if this is possible with the Facebook API, but if it is, I’d love to see it get implemented. If not, I hope that sort of functionality is enabled somehow in the future.

Another idea for this sort of integration is with Twitpic photos. Many times, Twitter users will post a photo on Twitpic and tweet the link to it. This is currently one of the best ways to tweet single photos as they happen. When these tweets get to Facebook they are just a link in a status message. Facebook has its own well developed and well understood photo management system. A nicer integration would be where tweets with a Twitpic link (and other popular photo-tweeting services) could appear on Facebook as a photo wall post. That way, on facebook, users can discuss the photo, like it and tag it.

These are just some of the ways I think Twitter and facebook integration can be continued and improved, for the benefit of users on both platforms.

One of the tools I install every time I install a new OS is Dropbox, a multi-platform file syncing service. For those who haven’t heard of it, Dropbox basically allows you to sync a folder across multiple computers connected to the internet. Any file changed on one computer, gets updated automatically on all of them. The latest build has a feature called LAN sync that I’ve been waiting for eagerly.

I have, at almost all times, at least two machines running dropbox at home. Sometimes there are up to 4 or 5 running dropbox at the same time, all in sync. In the past, this meant that every time I changed a file in my dropbox, it would get downloaded by each machine independently. That’s 4 downloads for the single file if there are 4 other machines running. With LAN sync, the dropboxes that are linked to one account recognize when they are on the same local network, and synchronize with each other. Thus, the update is downloaded at most once, and shared among all the local computers.

Hit the link to see the official post from the Dropbox forums.

Dropbox forums