A while back I posted instructions on how to take a snapshot of your monitor screen and turn it into a photo.  I was quite surprised when I used it today and was no longer able to create a screenshot.  After a bit of searching and finding similar instructions to my previous post, I found instructions on the NEW way to take a screenshot (PC):

Hold down the Shift and Fn keys and click the Print Scrn key – on my laptop computer it’s F11 key in the top row – yours may be a different F key on your computer or on a full keyboard it may be a separate key, but it will have some abbreviation of Print Screen written on the key and be in the upper right quadrant.  The Fn key will likely be near the Shift key in the lower left quadrant.

From there, open your favorite image program (I use Photoshop, but most PCs come with Paint – look under Start – All Programs – Accessories – Paint. You can use Control + V to paste the screenshot into program.

A simple thing to do once you know the right key combination!

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Earlier this week I saw a twitter post with picture of old fashioned elevator buttons with a giant sign above them saying don’t push, they were decorative only from the days of manual operation.  Suddenly my memory flashed back to Freese’s Dept. store in Bangor where the elevator buttons looked just like this “relic”, but in my early childhood they were still working, along with the uniformed elevator man.  Other technological feats of the time were the pneumatic tubes used by the clerks to send cash payment up to the accounting office and get change by return.  I also remember (very young) when my brother read aloud from the newspaper that Freese’s was getting the first escalator in town.  I asked what it was and he told me the tall tale that it was a moving stairway – that you just stood on it and the stairs would move.  (I of course knew he was trying to pull one over on me – whoever heard of such a thing.)

My early work days were as a secretary (before it was known as the more accurate term of administrative assistant). Some of the technological wonders were:

• Moving from manual typewriter to IBM selectric. Moving from carbon paper to photocopiers. Moving from eraser, to white out, to strikeover tape.
• Moving from IBM selectric to a model that would hold one line of type in memory before it shot it out like a machine gun attack.
• Moving from one line of memory to a Wang word processor, where you could cut a whole section of text and paste it in another location (Beam me up Scotty).

Why the trip down memory lane?  In the last 9 years I’ve moved from developing websites with Dreamweaver with templates and library items on local computer, to using includes to change all pages with one small move, to developing websites on Wordpress, where after it’s built even the non-techie customer can take over the majority of their changes without advanced knowledge.

The job I do now has changed since one year ago, changed drastically since 5 years ago, and is almost unrecognizable to the job I entered 9 years ago.  In a few years from now it will change again.  No matter what your age or experience, if you are working for a living it is imperative to not only stay on top of the newest technology in your job, but also in the newest technology period.  The manual elevator operator is long gone, out of most people’s memory, and eventually that will happen to most of us no matter what job we are currently doing.  Look around the corner, down the long mile, and learn for the future to prepare for the job resurgence that WILL come, but might not look the same as the job we’ve done in the past.  Good luck to all the job seekers out there!

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Now that you’ve downloaded IE8, maybe some of the websites you visit look funny or don’t have things line up the way they used to?  In true IE fashion, it’s not friendly to us developers and has come up with some new challenges.  Luckily though this time they’ve given us a break with an icon that helps you see websites built previously.  In the below image I’ve highlighted in red the icon that can make it all ok.  Just click it (on your IE8 browser, not on my image ) and it goes into compatibility mode, returning to earlier compatibility.

For how to take a screen shot and transfer to an image see next post.

Gloria

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My boss and some of my co-workers are big fans/users of  the social networking site TWITTER.  I’ll be blogging more on my definition of, and take on, Twitter soon but my short definition of it is Facebook with a bad case of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).  It’s a social networking site that let’s people answer the question “What are you doing?” – which they must answer in less than 140 characters…. about the length of one short sentence.

I have not even had the urge to follow it until recently, but that may be changing.

I’ve worked for flyte new media (a great little web site company in Portland Maine) for 8 years.  We started in a one room school house type office where we could see everyone….all three of us.  Now we’re up to 8 and are in a larger office with more hall distance in between.  I’m seeing my boss less and less these days as his role of chief rain maker, busy entrepreneur and experimenter in new technology takes him to the far end of the office (and sometimes the country) from our production office.

I recently started following him on Twitter so that I would know where the rainmaking was taking him next.  Then….it happened….I started clicking on the links of other tweeters in his entries….and found out that it could become addictive if not careful!   I don’t even know these people…why do I care what they’re doing?…must stop!

For a half second I even thought of joining and having my own tweets….but I suddenly got this image of myself on the information highway as the middle aged lady in slow lane with all the tweeters passing me by and tweeting their horns at how slow I was traveling….horrors!

If you want to get a taste of what this is about you can view my boss’ twitter here

http://twitter.com/therichbrooks

Gloria
a Maine Baby Boomer living/working in a generation X and generation Y world

PS:  Another twitter analogy I just thought of….Picture yourself skipping stones on a lake – each place the stone skips is another entry from someone…..Now picture that instead of you throwing the stone, it’s being shot out of one of those pitching machines that pitches baseballs at a hundred miles an hour…

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