Dave's Blog

Last year I posted about a deal Microsoft were running for students to get Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 for cheap. If you missed this deal then there is an even better one going now.

You can get Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for only £38.95, that really is a steal since you are saving around 91% on the estimated retail price. But not only that, you will have the added bonus of getting a FREE upgrade to Office 2010 when it becomes available.

The Office Ultimate 2007 package includes the following:

• Access 2007
• Excel 2007
• Groove 2007
• InfoPath 2007
• OneNote 2007
• Outlook 2007
• Powerpoint 2007
• Publisher 2007
• Word 2007

This offer is available on orders placed between 5th March and 30th September 2010.

You can order from:

• www.microsoft.com/student/discounts/theultimatesteal-uk/default.aspx – UK & N.Ireland
• www.microsoft.ie/ultimatesteal – Republic of Ireland (€52)

When you are placing your order you can input your email address in the reminder field and when Office 2010 is available for download you will be emailed. Details are located on the main page.

The real village used as the set for the camp of the ‘Others’ in Lost has been found on street view: here

I must say it slightly spoils the illusion realising that it has a highway running right beside it, but it certainly shows how amazing CGI is these days that when there are 360 degree shots of the camp you don’t notice this.

The video below shows a demo reel from Stargate Studios showing how some shots in TV shows are actually filmed. I recognise some of the scenes in the video and you really wouldn’t realise with most of them that they weren’t filmed on location.

I found this video that we were shown during our induction at Microsoft about what it is like to work there. I think it sums it up pretty well.

A couple of months ago I was introduced to a piece of software called SlickRun. This is a free advanced command line utility for Windows which works exactly like the standard Windows command line, allowing you to use all standard commands, but also allows you to specify ‘MagicWords’ for certain software or scripts.

An example of a MagicWord I use is ‘word’ which links to: C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE. Typing this MagicWord will open Microsoft Word for me.

This means that I have no need to have icons on my desktop to access software or directories, I simply assign a MagicWord to everything I need access to. As a result of this, this is what my desktop looks like:

The only icon I have is the Recycle Bin.

Another example of a MagicWord I have assigned is ‘wikipedia’ which will bring up an input box and ask for a search term. When I enter this search term my browser automatically opens and searches for the term in Wikipedia.

Not only does this clean up my desktop, but it also vastly reduces the amount of time (and mouse clicks) required to access something. I like to find as many ways as possible to reduce the time taken to carry out a task and SlickRun really does help.

To input a MagicWord all you have to do is press a hotkey you have assigned, in my case Ctrl + R as this was as close to Win + R (the hotkey to access the Windows command line) that I could get. A box is then displayed which you can type into, and once you start to type it will automatically go to the most recent MagicWord that matches what is input so far. For example, in the screenshot below I have only typed ‘v’ and it realises that I am probably typing in the MagicWord for Visual Studio. In this case the only key presses I needed to open Visual studio were ‘Ctrl + R’, ‘v’ and then the Return key, taking me literally a split-second to access Visual Studio.

If you want to try SlickRun then you can download it here:

http://www.bayden.com/Slickrun/

We are now into 2010, and thinking back on 2009 it really was one of the best years that I can remember. It was full of amazing experiences which I will never forget from my first skydive to the summer of a lifetime travelling around America and Canada.

I decided to make this video as a summary of the year to remember all those experiences. I now challenge 2010 to better 2009!