I came across several interesting articles the past few days, and am sharing with you in case you haven’t seen them.
The first couple of links relate to improvements in Google Apps:
- Google Blogoscoped describes how to use Google Spreadsheet to do surveys. It relates to the fact that you can easily share the survey spreadsheet and get input from everyone on the shared list. Looks like a quick and dirty way to do a survey. Of course, some of you may already have sophisticated survey tools, as they are getting more popular within the business community, but if not …
- From Tamar Weinberg at Search Engine Roundtable, I learned that Google Docs now has form capability and that Google Spreadsheets now allow column and row freezing. Both are significant upgrades that give further incentive for businesses to use Google Apps.
The next couple of links address how we can better handle situations and/or make better decisions.
- Albert Foong guest-wrote a post at my buddy Leo’s site on how to remain cool in a crazy world. It’s a fine summary on how (1) our emotions can influence how we handle situations, (2) how some of our built-in cognitive “quirks” influence how we handle situations.
- Tim Ferriss does a nice writeup on 6 formulas for more output and less overwhelm.
Regulars know I am big on people remaining aware of, and dealing with, built-in cognitive quirks. I first wrote about it years ago on my Keen PDA site in Problem Solving and Decision Making.
Like me, Ferriss is impressed with the book The Paradox of Choice : Why More Is Less
Now for several unrelated, but also interesting links:
- BlackBerry Cool notes that BlackBerry’s are being used to aid in speedy cardiac treatment.
- Engadget notes that ARM might demo a Google Android prototype at the Mobile World Congress.
- ReadWrite Web lists a few billionaires who blog. Carl Icahn has set up a website and blog, although he does not yet have a blog entry. I have subscribed to his blog, though, as I have a good bit of respect for his thinking.
- Gina Trapani has a great write-up on using an Apple Remote to check Gmail from the couch. This involves using a product called iRed Lite, which I tinkered with several months ago. I was trying to use it to have remote control of GarageBand on my iMac, to make recording of tunes a lot easier. I never got it to work, but perhaps a newer version of it (plus my newer version of GarageBand) will give me better luck now.
- Ben Gray of OpenSwitch wrote an entry on helping parents deal with their teens’ digital lives. Ben raises some good points in the post, and there is some excellent discussion going on in the comments thread. For anyone with teens in their life: this article is a very worthwhile read.