If you use Amazon regularly, be sure to check out AmazonSmile. You choose a charity and then Amazon gives them about half a percent of the money from your purchase. There’s very little work that needs to happen on your end to give the charity a nice donation. The hardest part is just remembering to start your session from smile.amazon.com so that your purchase qualifies for the program. There are lots of charities to pick from and if you run a 501c3 organization, you can add it. For those of you affiliated with the WELS, you might be interested to note that MLC is already on the list.
Power BI World Cup
I’ve been posting lots of quick, little examples showing off pieces of our Power BI offering, but now I’ve got a huge one for you. Our team recently acquired access to a HUGE data set of statistics. With the World Cup starting up, we decided to use World Cup statistics for a great demo.
It’s running now at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/powerBI/solutions/demo/qna/qna-demo-worldcup.aspx and I encourage you to check it out. Ask it any question about World Cup statistics and watch the magic unfold! The stats we used to build up the data model behind the scenes is super detailed so I think you’ll be surprised about what you can ask. Hopefully a bigger example like this makes it pretty obvious how useful Power BI could be operating over your own company’s data sets.
OneNote Is Free
We make heavy use of OneNote which probably isn’t much of a surprise, but Tyla and I also use it a lot at home. We both have our own sections where we keep all kinds of notes and then we have a shared section where we keep the grocery list, ideas for gifts for friends and family, lists of doctors, and much more. It’s a great tool for getting rid of miscellaneous pieces of paper and for keeping in sync with other people.
OneNote used to be a paid product but now it’s completely free. You can get it on Windows Phone, Windows, Mac, iPhone and Android. The Office blog has more information and links to download all the freebies.
Death Of Expertise
MattB posted an article on Facebook that I felt deserved it’s own post here. It’s from thefederalist.com and is called “The Death Of Expertise”. The article discusses how our society is full of people who search the internet for 5 minutes and then denounce legitimate experts as idiots. Here are a couple quotes from the article but I encourage you to read the whole thing:
Yes, it’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us. But mostly, experts have a pretty good batting average compared to laymen: doctors, whatever their errors, seem to do better with most illnesses than faith healers or your Aunt Ginny and her special chicken gut poultice. To reject the notion of expertise, and to replace it with a sanctimonious insistence that every person has a right to his or her own opinion, is silly…
People in political debates no longer distinguish the phrase “you’re wrong” from the phrase “you’re stupid.” To disagree is to insult. To correct another is to be a hater. And to refuse to acknowledge alternative views, no matter how fantastic or inane, is to be closed-minded…
Thus, at least some of the people who reject expertise are not really, as they often claim, showing their independence of thought. They are instead rejecting anything that might stir a gnawing insecurity that their own opinion might not be worth all that much.
Goodreads
The ratio of good books I hear about to good books I have time to read is approximately 7000 to 1. Ok, maybe it’s not that bad, but I do have a huge backlog of books that I’d love to read. Keeping track of them was a bit ugly in the past but it got a lot cleaner once I started using Goodreads.
The concept is pretty simple. Think of it like a Netflix catalog and queue except it’s for books instead of movies. You can easily add books to your queue, keep track of books you’ve read, write reviews for books, and see recommendations of other books you might like based on what you’ve already read. There are apps for just about every platform (on Windows Phone look for “Social Reads”.) If you have one a Kindle Paperwhite 2, Goodreads is integrated straight into the operating system!
With so little time to read, I want to make that time count. Goodreads has really upped the average quality of books that I’ve read since I started using the site.
NFL Jerseys
A couple weeks ago, TimS told me about a website that sells NFL jerseys for really cheap. They come from China so it’s a good bet that they are unlicensed. There seem to be a lot of websites that do this but the one we looked at was UnboxingJerseys.com. They have tons of jerseys from lots of sports. I even found an old school Ryne Sandberg Cubs jersey on there. Lots of the jerseys are available for $20.
Ordering from them is sketchy. Don’t use a credit card that you care about getting stolen. Every email you receive from the website and the payment company are full of typos and grammatical errors. Shipping takes about two weeks. You’re only paying $20 so don’t expect a perfect replica. For example, on the Seahawks jerseys, there are multiple green colors used. But from a distance it looks good and you’re not paying $250 from nfl.com.
Waze For Windows Phone
Waze is a traffic app that has been around on iPhone and Android for quite a while, but it finally came to Windows Phone. It quickly replaced the other traffic apps that I use. Waze combines public traffic data along with data that it receives from everyone who is using the app. That means that theoretically every street in your area could be covered as long as someone has driven it recently. The more you use Waze, the more points you get. You get points for the distance you’ve driven as well as for reporting accidents, police, road hazards and more. What are the points good for? Well, not much, but they of course encourage competition. You can link the app to your Facebook friends list to see which of them are also using it and see how many points they have.
There are about three major choices I can make for my commute. Chose the wrong one can easily turn 30 minutes into 50 minutes. Waze has been doing a great job of making good picks for my commute and I use it every day!
The Bally Bomber
Wives, do you think your husband has a hobby that takes up too much time and space? It could be worse. Hack A Day recently posted an article about a guy who is building a 1/3 scale replica of a B-17G Flying Fortress! You might think this is just a big RC plane, but no, it’s actually designed to carry a human. This scale model plane has a wing span of 34 feet and is 25 feet long. He started this back in 1999 and there’s no estimate that I can find on when he’ll be ready to fly but it looks like he’s getting close. You can follow along on his website or on Facebook.
RC YouTube Series
In addition to the simulator, I’ve also been learning a lot from the Flite Test YouTube channel. These guys have apparently been around for quite a while so I have a lot of videos to catch up on. They review various RC planes, have instructions for building your own planes from scratch, and they recently started a fantastic beginner series. If I’m not messing around in the simulator, I’m probably watching one of their videos.
Quick Install
It had been a while since I rebuilt my computer so I decided to do it over Thanksgiving break. I was amazed at how quickly it went! Windows 8.1 installed off a USB key in the blink of an eye. I probably could have used the reset functionality built into Windows 8 but I really wanted to do a bare bones completely clean install. Windows 8.1 remembers pretty much every customization I did to the machine and even all of the apps that I had downloaded from the Windows Store. Office and a few other desktop apps required manual install, but Office 2013 is takes literally a couple minutes to install.
I also gave Ninite a try for the first time. It’s free to use and it streamlines the install of some of the most popular apps. Put a check next to whatever you want to install (Chrome, 7-Zip, Skype, Notepad++, ImgBurn, Steam, etc) and it will install them with default settings and tell you when it’s done. It saves so much mindless clicking!
The final thing that made the reinstall so quick and painless is that all of my files are backed up in the cloud. So I didn’t think twice before formatting my hard drive. I knew if I had forgotten some important files, I could quickly restore them from a backup.
I remember when a task like this used to take the whole weekend or more. This time I fired it off before going to bed, clicked a few buttons in the morning, and I was pretty much done!