Five Technologies You Should be Using

There are many time saving technologies out there that are not widely known. To start rolling back the frontiers of ignorance in modern technology, I am listing five of my favorites.

But I want you to contribute to the effort by sharing your own favorite technologies in the comments section. To sweeten the deal, I will grant one extra credit point to every student who posts a technology, with one point per posting.

Google Desktop

We all know that the Windows search function is next to useless. It takes ten minutes to return hundreds of results; none of which is the file you want, and let’s not even talk about MS Outlook. We find files by surfing our folder hierarchy, not sure if that marketing memo from the boss is under “Marketing” or “Memos.” But in the end it doesn’t matter because the filename doesn’t match the contents of the file anyway.

Google has come to the rescue with Google Desktop. This free system integrates easily into your computer and uses the exact same search page that Google uses to search the Internet. But instead of searching the Internet, it searches your own desktop. I use Google Desktop almost exclusively to find files, and probably save a half hour a day by doing so.

Here is a short video I made on how to download and use this free feature (how I made the video comes next):

http://screencast.com/t/uyeG1Jkc

Jing

Jing is wonderful little web application that allows you to make narrated videos of the contents of your monitor. I used Jing to create the Google Desktop tutorial. These videos are a much more effective way to teach others a simple task than describing it with text. Jing also allows you to do screencaptures with drawings.

Best of all, the files can either be saved on your own computer, or the Jing server, with links to the file to send to others. Again, this is what I used with the Google Desktop tutorial.

Visit the Jing website, watch the tutorials, and download the free software at: http://www.jingproject.com

TinyURL

We all know the frustration of having someone send you a long URL by email that gets separated onto more than one line. Invariably, your browser only picks up one line of the URL when you click it, and so returns an error message. Tiny URL solves this problem by converting any length URL into a shortened version.

This free service is found at:

http://tinyurl.com

Delicious

Most of us have hundreds of bookmarks on our browser that are cluttered and hard to search. Plus, they are tied to one machine, and so we can’t reach them when working on another computer. Delicious is a free website that allows you to save your bookmarks online, where they can be accessed from any computer. Better yet, they can be tagged to make them easy to search. They can even be shared with others. I leave the Delicious sidebar open on my browser to allow me to quickly search for bookmarks. Take a look at the screenshot of my Delicious sidebar below (the screenshot was made using Jing):

http://tinyurl.com/mcywyp

Download the Delicious software, which integrates into your browser, at:

http://delicious.com/

YouSendIt

I frequently need to send very large files to others, such as 50+ MB narrated PowerPoints, Zip files of class material, or videos. These files are too large for email attachments, so I send them with YouSendIt, which allows users to send files up to 100 MB to others for free. You upload the files to a server, enter one or more email addresses, and hit “send.” The file is uploaded to the server from your machine, the system sends the recipients an email with a link to the file, and the recipients click the link to download the file from the server to their machine. You can also pay for upgrades that allow you to send much larger files.

Take a look at the YouSendIt video I made (with Jing) and set up your own free account:

http://tinyurl.com/kkng95

Weekly Question

Last week’s question was:

Why did Norwich University move from its original location in Norwich, Vermont, to its current location in Northfield, Vermont?

The answer is:

The original campus building burned down. The university was temporarily moved to Connecticut, and then to its current location in Northfield, Vermont.

As nobody got the question right, the copy of the book 100 Encrypted Sudoku Puzzles for the Information Assurance Professional rolls over to this week’s winner.

This week’s question:

What position did Alden Partridge, founder of Norwich University, hold in the military before resigning his commission?

Send your entry to: jorlando@norwich.edu

Writing for Success

High level writing skills are one of the most important qualities for success in the workplace and here at the School of Graduate Studies. Students seldom lose points on written assignments because they simply did not get it. Rather, they failed to express their ideas clearly. When grading an assignment, a teacher can only evaluate what lands on the page, just as a boss can only read a memo or report, not the writer’s mind. Improving the transfer of ideas between brain and paper is the number one way to improve your grades.

I’d like to provide some principles for writing well both in your education and your profession.

Start by Motivating your Topic
One Lou Grant episode began with Lou, the cantankerous newspaper editor, looking over the first paragraph of an article written by a neophyte reporter. “You make murder sound boring,” he deadpans. The writer replies, “But I did what they told me to do in journalism school; provide the where, what, when, why, and how in the first paragraph.” Lou explains that if the first paragraph hasn’t grabbed the reader’s attention, he or she will never read the second one.

The same principle applies to scholarly writing. Motivate your work by first telling your reader why your topic is important. Notice how I began this article by telling you that good writing will help you in your studies and career. Do the same in your own work before jumping in to the subject matter.

You can come up with a good opening line by asking yourself what makes your topic important. Are you going to fix a widespread misconception in the profession? Is your topic critical to the reader’s job? Will your article improve your reader’s looks?

I like to state a problem that the reader or a profession faces and how I will solve it. I also like to start by stating a common belief that I will prove wrong. Some examples of opening lines include:

“Employee resiliency is critical to the success of any emergency response plan, yet it is often overlooked in a business continuity management program….”

“All business continuity methodologies claim that a Risk Assessment is needed for a Business Impact Analysis, but in reality the two are independent of one another….”

“Access control is one of the most important elements of an information assurance program…”

Avoid Shop Talk
Whether you’re an information security director or business continuity manager, you’re going to be spending much of your time working with people outside of your profession. Persuading these people to follow your advice requires expressing yourself in language that they can understand. This means avoiding “shop talk,” or professional jargon.

Even articles for professional journals should avoid shop talk. Besides losing people who are not as technically savvy as the writer, shop talk makes the writer appear to be showing off their technical knowledge to compensate for a lack of original insights. We encourage our students to use language that anybody could understand, not just those in the profession. This prepares them for writing to those outside of the profession.

You can use technical terms, but define them when they are introduced. For instance, instead of saying:

“An organization’s DMZ needs to be hardened both inside and out”

Use something like:

“An organization’s most secure computing systems, sometimes referred to as it’s Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), should be secured from the perimeter to its core.”

Note how “DMZ” is defined right away. You can now use the abbreviation in all future references. Also, “inside and out” is better explained as “from the parameter to its core.”


Simplify, Simplify, Simplify
Clutter is the disease of American writing. We are a society strangling in unnecessary words, circular constructions, pompous frills, and meaningless jargon.
(On Writing Well, William Zinsser, p. 7)

Henry Thoreau told us to “simplify, simplify, simplify,” and I can think of no better advice for improving your writing. Many people who start the MSIA or MSBC program think that they must write in what they believe to be an “academic” style: long, verbose sentences with sophisticated-sounding words. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Write in plain, simple English.

Simplify your language and streamline your prose by eliminating any unnecessary words.
I highly recommend reading On Writing Well, by William Zinsser, a classic that focuses less on the rules of grammar and more on creating readable text. Follow his advice, and I can almost guarantee that your grades will improve.

For instance, Zinsser recommends writing your first draft, and then going over it with a red marker to cross out as many words as possible without losing the meaning. This is the best writing advice I’ve ever heard, and has improved my writing tremendously.

As an example of what to avoid, let’s take a look at some poor writing by a lawyer. This passage should make your skin crawl. My own comments are in parentheses:

The discourse of this book review sets out to critically focus on and to descriptively evaluate (replace with “I will examine”) the writer’s literary writing (huh?) of the expressive renaissance of Caribbean nineteenth and twentieth century writers. The author seeks to establish how the Afro Caribbean post colonial literary writers used the art form to develop a consciousness of self, culture, economics and freedom. His supposedly main objective in the book is to demonstrate how the Caribbean literary writer in his newly imposed culture and language, has accepted as a norm, the intellectual teachings extracted from the imperialist, to become the bourgeois of an art form namely in status, color and race (I’m doing my best to follow him here).

In this review the author (Is he talking about himself or the author of the book?) is observed to be attempting (replace with “attempts") to demonstrate that post colonial Caribbean Literary writers use the educational system, imposed upon them as a ‘new world’ of acceptance, as the means to achieving a status for which most of them cannot show any contribution toward the emancipation of post colonial struggles of the Afro Caribbean peoples--this preview leaves the mind boggled. However this conceptualization of Caribbean literary art form as a medium of developing consciousness for the deliverance from the post colonial struggles and the negative cultural engineering was not clearly identified by the author (he lapped me).

GURU Law Student Book Review, August 8, 2007

The author of this review is clearly trying to sound smart, and only proves the opposite. Rule of Rules: Be smart, don’t try to sound smart.

Cultivating good writing skills is not easy; if it were, we wouldn’t focus on it in our programs. It takes years to develop an ear for writing. But focusing on these few simple principles will improve your writing considerably.


Weekly Question:
Last week’s question was:

What major event happens at Joe’s Pond each spring?

The answer is:

The Ice Out Contest, where people try to pick the exact moment when a cinder block will fall through the ice at Joe’s Pond in the spring. See all the action at the following site:

http://joespondvermont.com/iceout.html

Dianne Tarpy’s name was chosen among the thousands of correct entries to win a copy of my latest book: The Importance of the Wet Bar for Emergency Operations Centers.

This week’s Question:
Why did Norwich University move from its original location in Norwich, Vermont, to its current location in Northfield, Vermont?

One correct entry picked at random will win a copy of the book 100 Encrypted Sudoku Puzzles for the Information Assurance Professional.

Good luck.