Keyboard Shortcut for Add Comment in Word for Mac

I use Microsoft Word's comment feature (Insert menu → Comment) frequently, both when I'm revising other people's work and when I'm working on something of my own and want to come back to it later. Annoyingly, in Word 2008 (the version I'm using) and presumably in Office 2011 as well, there's no keyboard shortcut listed. I finally did some research, and there is indeed a Mac shortcut for inserting a comment!

In Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, the keyboard shortcut to insert a comment is: Command-Option-A (⌘-⌥-A). Why? I have no idea. On Windows, the insert comment shortcut is Ctrl+Alt+M, which makes just as little sense. Hope that helps!

Seminary J-Term Project: Effective Church Websites

An update on what I've been up to recently: Just in case you missed it, I'm now a Master of Divinity student at Wartburg Theological Seminary, located in beautiful and hilly Dubuque, Iowa. The school is basically a castle, as you can see in this picture. I've finished my fall semester, and I'm now a week into January term. For J-Term, I'm doing an independent study on effective church websites.

Since moving to Dubuque, Christin and I have been looking for a church, and as part of that, we looked at a bunch of different church websites. Disappointingly, although perhaps unsurprisingly, there are a lot of really bad church websites out there. Many churches don't even have a website, and some that do don't have what I think should be basic information on them, like what time the services are, how to contact the church, or even what city the church is located in! Of course, many churches do have good, effective websites, and frequently, those are the ones that are growing. So, with my interest in technology and ministry (remember, my Luther College degree is in computer science and religion), I'm working on a J-Term project to study what makes church websites effective.

So far, I've visited every church website in Dubuque (approximately 72!), read several books on the topic, and started a website about my project with a blog and tips for church websites. We'll see where this goes!

Top 4 Simple Non-Scam Ways to Make Free Money on the Internet

Yes, it is possible to easily make money on the internet! None of these will provide a living, but extra spending money is always nice, and I've personally gotten legitimate money from of them, so I know they're not scams. These aren't work-at-home methods, they're not going to replace your day job, and they won't make you rich, but they do provide something to do in your free time.

So, without further ado, here are my experiences with several different legitimate sites for making easy money online:

1. SurveySavvy
         SurveySavvy is exactly what it sounds like, a site for taking surveys. I've taken surveys for a couple months through them. Your experience will vary depending on your demographics, but I tend to get about a survey every day or so, of which I qualify for about one third. The ones I do qualify for take about 10 minutes and are worth $1 or $2, although I've seen ones for as much as $5. For me, the real money through SurveySavvy has come from being linked to other panels. They occasionally send out surveys for "exclusive online advisory communities," and I qualified for one of those. Through that community, I've made $55 in Amazon gift cards in about 10 weeks with about 10 minutes per week of work. Highly recommended. www.surveysavvy.com

2. Ebates
         Ebates is a site that pays you to shop online. Sound too good to be true? It actually is true. They work by directing customers (you) to online retailers, who pay them a percentage of your purchases as a commission. Many sites do that. However, ebates then turns around and gives you back part of their commission. I've only used it for a couple of large purchases like computers for my family. I keep forgetting to use for little purchases like on Amazon. I've made about $35 through ebates so far. Payment is via check mailed to your house. The definite advantage of this site is that there's no effort on your part beyond remembering to visit the website before you shop. Highly recommended. www.ebates.com

3. Amazon's Mechanical Turk
         Mechanical Turk is sort of a freelance site for jobs that take a few seconds. Called "hits" (human interface tasks), these are a wide-ranging variety of "jobs" for third-parties ranging from performing a Google search, to tagging photos, to proofreading a document, to writing an article, to surveys, to audio transcriptions. Each task completed gives you a small reward ($0.01 - $1.00 in my experience), paid in Amazon Payments credit. The advantage of Mechanical Turk is that there are always many things to do and the payments are faster than other sites. The disadvantage is that you have to be careful because many jobs want you to do things like sign up for newsletters or complete scammy type online offers. These are against the terms of service, but Amazon doesn't seem to very closely police the jobs offered. Again, it doesn't pay particularly well, but it's a great way to kill time and make a little extra money. I've probably only made about $10 from here, but it was all while "wasting" time. www.mturk.com

4. Swagbucks
         I don't know much about Swagbucks yet, but I have a friend who's made $20 or so in Amazon gift cards without too much effort. You get points for things like filling out surveys, or for buying products or services through sites through them (similar to ebates). www.swagbucks.com

Good luck! Please post your experiences and reviews of sites!

Programming Contest

I recently competed in the 35th annual Association for Computing Machinery International Collegiate Programming Contest, regional contest at Macalester College. My team solved two of the nine problems, placing 96th overall out of the roughly 200 teams in the region. All three of us on the team (myself, Jacob Blain, and Andrew Zutz) all had a lot of fun competing, and we were happy to solve at least one problem. We spent 2.5 hours of the allotted five hours on one problem that we were ultimately unable to solve, but we learned a lot for next year and we're all excited to go back and compete again! Here's the Luther Headlines article on the contest, and the full results for the regional competition.

MacBook Pro Swelling Battery

Here's yet another reason why I like Apple computers. I've been working at a camp for the summer, and my sister had been using my 17 inch MacBook Pro at home. When I came home for the weekend, she explained that the computer was "being weird." I looked at it and discovered the trackpad was not working right. It was fine until you tried to click it, but once it was clicked (using either tap-to-click or the actual button), it would not register that the click had been released. The computer acted as though the button was being held down. If an external mouse was plugged in, it worked fine, so it was pretty obviously a hardware problem. I had also noticed that same weekend that the back of the battery in the laptop had started to come apart, almost like the battery was bulging out, and the glue was letting go. Since I was just home for a very short amount of time, I didn't really have time to research at all, so I asked my mom to take the computer to the Apple store in Milwaukee. I figured that I'd probably have to pay a bit for repairs, since the computer's at least 6 months out of warranty, but I obviously needed the computer fixed before college. Well, Mom took the computer in, and the Apple Genius at the store looked at it, and immediately said we had a defective battery, and the swelling of the battery was putting pressure on the trackpad, and messing it up. So, for free, they gave us a brand new laptop battery (saving me probably about $100), for an out of warranty computer. No questions asked. That's good customer service.

Mac Modifier Key Mapping

Reason #[some high integer] why I like Apple Mac computers:

I just got a nice new Razer Lycosa gaming keyboard (from woot.com) and plugged it into my MacBook Pro. Razer's website says no Mac drivers for the Lycosa keyboard are available, but I knew it would work as a normal keyboard. I figured macro functions wouldn't work, and I was fine with that, but I was somewhat disappointed to realize when I plugged it in that the Mac Command key was mapped to the Windows key on the keyboard. So, after a quick Google search for Mac key mapping turned up nothing, I looked in System Preference, in the obvious place, the keyboard and mouse pane. There, I discovered that not only did Mac OS recognize my keyboard by name, but that I could very easily remap the modifier keys.


So, after almost no effort, I am using a great gaming keyboard from a company that claims not to support Apple, with custom set modifier keys, and no third party software. I like Apple.

Photosynth

I have a feeling Photosynth got a LOT of views today, because cnn.com featured it on their front page. That's how I found it. cnn.com did a really cool project where people could submit their digital photos of the Presidential Inauguration to cnn and the photos were assembled into an interactive 3D view thing. This really cool technology was powered by Photosynth, a project of Microsoft Live Labs, and is viewable at CNN's The Moment. After I saw and played with this for a while, I tried my own Synth, as Microsoft calls it. Sadly, the program only runs in Windows, but it works great using Parallels. Here's a tour of my dorm room...sorry for not having a more original topic, but it was available. Enjoy. Silverlight is required for viewing it on a Mac, or a PC without the software.

It's really easy to make these. All that's involved is taking a lot of pictures that overlap, then you just select the folder with the pictures, and tell the program to do its magic. Very neat technology. In addition to being very cool, I could easily see it being used to sell homes, etc. My results weren't quite what I was hoping for, with the photos I took of the chair in the middle of the room and some detail shots, especially of the Muse poster, but the basic circling the room worked pretty well.