Seven More Articles for Suite 101 to Start the New Year (January, 2010)

Another seven articles found their way into Suite 101 in January to start the new year. It's beginning to feel like a trend. Seven a month that is. Well, here they are.

Three Articles About Holidays and Special Dates

Celebrate Chinese New Year in the Classroom. This is the Year of the Tiger according to the Chinese calendar. Find out what activities are available and appropriate for classroom celebrations.

Celebrating World Tai Chi & Qigong Day. For those practitioners of Tai Chi and Qigong, every last Saturday in April is World Tai Chi and Qigong Day. If you've thought about this gentle martial art, this is an excellent way to find out more about it.

President's Day in the Classroom. This consists of suggestions about activities in the classroom on or around President's Day.

Two Articles for Better Use of the Internet

Copy Text From Web to Word with Paste Special. If you've ever copied data from a web page to a Word document and got a whole lot of reformatting to perform, then this is the article that will help you to deal with the problem more efficiently.

Free Internet Recipes for All Tastes. If you like to cook or are just looking for a couple of recipes, this article shows the way to filter through to find the best choice.

Two Potpourri

Advice to Beginning Tai Chi Chuan Students. A brief article informing people of what's involved in beginning a training program in Tai Chi Chuan.

Historical Trips Around the World. Magellan to Fosset and a number of folks in between are discussed and how they made it around the world.

February listings will be coming soon.

Sample Resumes for Job Seekers

Whether looking for a job the first time or you're a well seasoned veteran of the job resume, this site has things to offer. It provides sample resumes in a wide variety of fields. Anyone can get something from looking at these samples.

Seven Articles Posted to Suite 101 for December 2009

During December our articles covered a lot of territory. In the middle of December we had 3 articles about PowerPoint. The remaining four covered a lot of different territory.

Three PowerPoint Articles

Bullet Point Errors in PowerPoint This one focuses on the misuse of bullet points in PowerPoint, more specifically overuse. You'll want to look at my recommendation to follow the 6 x 6 rule when using bullet points. Your audience will appreciate your efforts.

Common Text and Font Errors in PowerPoint This article discusses such things as how to pick the right size typeface, the viewability of different text/background combinations, and the importance of correct spelling.

Less is More with PowerPoint Even PowerPoint can go over the top if you let it. It works best when it is used in a simple straight forward fashion. Those new to PowerPoint and all its power tend to overdo things a bit. Too much transition, too many fonts, far too much sound and animation. These can distract rather than gain attention for a presentation.

Two Articles about Eating

How to Get Free Birthday Meals Many chain restaurants have special programs in effect that give people free meals on or around their birthday. Advice on which restaurants do this and how to properly take advantage of it are provided in the article.

How to Reduce Salt in the Diet If you eat processed food of any kind there's a very good likelihood it contains salt. This article provides some suggestions for reducing your salt intake. It doesn't suggest eliminating all salt, just reducing it.

Happy New Year--Chinese Style

Matching Birth Dates to Chinese Zodiac Animals If you think you know your animal in the Chinese zodiac, you may have to think again--especially if you were born in January or February. Since the Chinese New Year occurs on a different day every year, your animal may be different than you think. This sight explains more thoroughly how to discover the animal that fits your birth date.

Editor's Choice Award

Accessing Extinct Websites This one received an Editor's Choice award, which means the editor really thought it was a good article and it gets linked on several special locations within the magazine besides the contents page. The article talks about what to do when a website is no longer available on the net. Many times it's still hanging around somewhere. This article tells you how to find it.

November Articles in Suite 101

We wrote seven articles for Suite 101 in November of 2009,. Two of them have already been listed here. The two are: "Classroom Suggestions for Veteran's Day" and "Setting Google Preferences."

Three Articles for Teachers
"Gettysburg Address in the Classroom" is covers presentation ideas for the classroom. The reason for the article in November is that this is the month when the speech was given. To put some variety in the classroom, teachers might find it interesting to discuss and promote Lincoln's speech now instead of waiting until Presidents' Day in February.

"Holiday Activities for Children at School" presents ideas for projects in and out of the classroom to celebrate the various holidays that occur during the month of December and throughout the winter.

"Use Reenactors to Make History Come Alive" discusses various types of reenactments that take place throughout the country all year long. The article covers military reenactors to residential reenactors who are basically docents at museum and historical gatherings explaining the past.

One for Computer Users and Teachers
There's something for teachers and computer users alike in this article titled: "Teaching Cyber Safety in School." Different sources are provided that can help both in and out of the classroom in dealing with Cyber Safety.

This One is for the Working Computer User
"Computer Security Day in the Workplace" presents this very special day and its purpose. What follows is a discussion of suggestions for making employees more aware and concientious in the Workplace.

I'm Back with Apologies for Being Away So Long

Things got kind of hectic around the last two months of the year in 2009 and I couldn't quite give enough time to maintaining this blog. We will attempt to do better in the future. As stated in previous blogs, I will post websites that I consider interesting to me and that I may consider to be interesting to those reading this blog.

In the past I have tried to post a blog every time I found a new site or wrote a new article. I think the entries are going to be a bit less frequent now. Most likely I will post only about once per week. Articles I write for Suite101.com will be listed monthly in a single blog entry. This should cut down on the time needed for blogging. If a picture happens to make itself available and is appropriate and easy to obtain, I'll pop it in. Otherwise images will no longer be included in each post.

I should be starting this new system within the next week. In the meantime, please let us know what you think of the materials we post. If you like a piece let us know, if you don't let us know that too.

Who's Watching and What are They Looking At?

When was the last time you waded through a privacy statement? Be honest now. Any site that requires a login has a privacy statement. Some of the data is kept in cookies on your computer and other data is kept and shared offline. At PrivacyChoice you can choose from a list of home pages and find the short version, as well as the long one, concerning your terms with any particular site. Click on a URL from a long list on the left. The right side displays a thumbnail of the home page and four buttons below it to explain the sites privacy policy and what software is being used as well. PrivacyChoice also provides the ability to opt-out of various info gathering online gathering services. For the privacy minded this is a must visit.

Setting Google Preferences

Whenever a new program is installed on our computer, there is usually an option that allows us to see the tools available for modification. We go to something like Tool/Options or Apple/Program Preferences. We make a couple changes from optional ways for the software to run and the program becomes more useful than it was before. Google also has preferences that we can set. As long as the machine we use has cookies turned on, we can tell Google exactly how we want it to run on our computer. To explore some of the possibilities read the article "Setting Google Preferences."