Jenn Martinelli Blogging in Boston

Hey everybody, did you hear the news? Facebook is buying Instagram for a billion dollars.

A fucking billion dollars.

This is a simple app that uses an API built into your phone to take pictures with the phone's camera, and then applies preset filters and shares them on a little social network. Honestly, anyone with any decent amount of programming skills could write this in a week. It is not worth a billion dollars.

So, I heard this news from Rob Reed last night and I immediately deleted Instagram from my phone. Fuck off Facebook. And fuck off Instagram.

What a bunch of nonsense.

For background, I got an email from Apple December 19th confirming that my nano qualified for replacement. About 2 weeks later I got a package to send it in. They received in January 10th. Over a month later it is "pending".

Nice work, Cupertino.

They fucked up.

I was using the outliner view in Word which was actually working surprisingly well and I was pretty happy about it. Then I went to look at what my non-outline view document actually looked like - i.e. if I were to print it, how it would read. And I hated it.

So then I tried to edit the styles in the document. Which sort of worked. Except, whenever I tried to select a style to edit, and made changes to it, it did update the style but it also selected every item BELOW the item at that style level and reset it all to the style I was working in.

For instance, I have a level of the outline using Heading 2 as a style. I edited Heading 2 and it took everything BELOW "Heading 2" which were originally styles such as Heading 3, Heading 4, etc., and just made them all Heading 2. So effectively broke my outline. Luckily Undo exists.

But I have now tried this several times following Microsoft's instructions and it doesn't work.

So, thanks for the shitty outlining formatting tools Microsoft.

I once again long for the days of Word Perfect. Guess what? Their outline style tools worked perfectly you fuckers.

Here is today's tip. For me this comes up all the time when I do mail merges using an Excel file for the address data and a Word document for the actual letters.

In Excel 2010 I couldn't find the command I was used to finding under the "Insert" menu in earlier versions of Excel (pre-"ribbon").

I found these instructions online which told me exactly how to do it. (Of course, you have to customize a special sub-menu - why not? Thanks, Microsoft, once again.)

I thought I would pass this on to my many many many readers. ;)

I hate when they quirkily don't do what they should. I hate when I have to call customer service at Verizon and sit through 4 prompts listening to messages about 3G versus 4G activations which do not apply to me before I can get a human being. I hate people whining about which phone they want and why they need an upgrade when they don't qualify for one yet through the carrier and their current phone works just fine.

I would in fact be quite happy to go back to everyone just having a phone at their desk and that's all. That would be kind of lovely.

(I manage the cell phones for everyone at my company, thus my day of cell phone extreme annoyance.)

I saw an article online today about Facebook "clouds" gathering over Google.

Do I care about Google's earnings or stock price? No, I don't own any Google stock. What I care about is what it means about technology, the web, and people's use of it.

Here is the most upsetting bit to me.

"With more than 30 percent of aggregate Internet minutes spent on Facebook, the Internet's center of gravity is shifting from Google to Facebook," explained Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus, in a recent note. "The strategic position of Google is weakening."

I don't care that Facebook is taking internet traffic from Google. I care that Facebook is taking internet traffic from everybody.

Remember AOL? Yeah, that's what I thought.

Hey, I got sucked into Facebook too, I get it. It's fun to be in touch with your friends, it's fun sometimes (not all the time!) to get back in touch with old friends. It's easy to find people because Facebook "helps" you so much. I really do understand.

However, we don't need Facebook to send notes to friends. Email exists. We don't need Facebook to post our gripes, our joys, our frustrations, our funny stories. Weblogs exist. We don't need Facebook to share pictures. There are many ways to share photos online.

I don't like thinking my entire experience on the web is channeled through one place. One place which has a huge interest in mining my information and that of my friends to sell us stuff.

I'm not an idiot. I'm well aware that many things are ad supported. I'm also not going to complain about things I post online being made somehow public. You should censor yourself. Don't post personal information online if you don't want it shared. That includes on "private networks" like Facebook.

But I do have a problem with a company who is trying so hard to get everyone to do everything online exclusively through them. I'd like to think of a clever parallel to show you what I mean but I'm drawing a blank. Something like a cable provider insisting that you watch all television through some kind of master channel which they control, where they can watch what you watch, what you fast forward through, etc. But there's no real world comparison I can think of really.

So the closest thing I can point to is AOL. At one point a lot of people had internet access, dial-up internet access (remember that?) through AOL. And you didn't go to a website like cnn.com for your news. You went to an AOL landing page. And maybe they had some content from CNN or other places, but it was all filtered by/through AOL. Long term it didn't work. So I hope that means long term Facebook's plans won't work either.

But in the meantime I'm frustrated by everyone continuing to pour all their time and energy into a platform that doesn't give a shit about them. The web is supposed to be open and full of innovation and exploration.

Ever wonder if it's possible to add page numbers to a pdf file after it's composed? For example, maybe you are combining 2 Word files and an Excel file and a couple of photos into one pdf to send to a printer or something, and you'd like all pages to have consistent page numbers.

Well it IS possible my friends! Thankfully the internet told me how.

How to add page numbers to a pdf file

I had sort of forgotten about ping.fm but I've been trying to figure out an easy way to have my blog updates post to facebook and twitter automatically.

So I just added my feed to ping.fm and now I'm posting something to see if it updates those accounts.

Happy long weekend everybody!

We just instituted a policy at work of everyone with a mobile device such as an iPhone or Blackberry having it time out and lock with a password.

One of the Blackberry users reported to me that his Blackberry no longer vibrated to alert him to new messages when it was in the locked state.

I did a little testing and found that if you edit the profile you're using (in my case, the "Normal" profile) so that it always vibrates both in and out of the holster to alert you to new desktop messages, it fixes the problem.

Here's exactly what to do:

Read the rest of this post

I heart the internet. Did you know that if you're viewing your message list on a blackberry and you want to jump to the top of the list you just type "T" and to jump to the bottom type "B"?

The internet told me that.

Thanks, RIM!

Blackberry Support - Tips