I’ve finally started to get sick of the standard Mac desktop backgrounds (probably because I set them to cycle every 30 minutes). Today I wanted to add some new ones and had a tough time finding where/how to do this.

If you want to pull pictures from iPhoto, then you can easily do this through the System Preferences menu. However, I store my photos on an external drive that isn’t always connected. So, to put new images into my Mac’s default image folder:

1. Open Finder
2. Open the “Library” directory off your hard drive root
3. Find the folder called “Desktop Pictures” and drop in the new stuff
4. Go back to System Preferences, then Displays and choose which one(s) you want.

———-

I also noticed this extremely handy new tip from TUAW today.  To open multiple tabs on inspector windows, simply hold down the Option key when clicking on the tab!

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One of my favorite websites lately is BNET. The site is a great tool for anyone in business but is especially helpful for managers. Their articles are well done and extremely well laid out. You can easily work through lots of information in a short period of time thanks to their executive overview style layout.

This week, they’re featuring a short video that couldn’t be more up my alley! Its all about how to present like Steve Jobs. They also have an additional article recapping some of the details on the video, incase you prefer to read. Incase you’re really under a time crunch and want an even shorter run-down, let me help by providing the bullet points I wrote down while watching it:

• Headline - Start with a memorable headline to provide a theme that will carry through the presentation.
• Outline - Tell people what you’re going to talk about briefly. Then, open and close each theme to help transition from topic to topic.
• Enthusiasm - Be passionate and excited about what you’re talking about. Use words like “best,” “biggest,” “exciting” and “cool.”
• Sell an Experience - Numbers and stats are meaningless unless their in context and relative. Jobs talks about how many iPods are sold in a quarter and then quickly breaks it down into how many are sold per day, or hour. — Its easier to envision yourself in an Apple store, watching that number of iPods be sold before your eyes vs. the entire quarterly total.
• Visual & Simple - Use as little text as possible in your presentation. Use images. Don’t use more than 2 or 3 images on a slide.
• Dramatic Flair - Make it a show.
• Identify and build up to the most memorable moment
• Reherse
• One more thing… - Probably Jobs’ most well-known line, it gives people a bonus or an encore to the event.

I thought these were all great suggestions. I’ve implemented some of these into my presentations lately and its been met with lots of success. I have stopped short of wearing a black turtleneck and jeans … but that didn’t change the fact that I felt very Jobsian during the presentation. That’s a good thing for me because he’s one of my favorite presenters of all time!

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I’m starting this week off-topic, so why not keep going. If I had a fourth blog (one, two, three), it would be about cars. I love cars. I’ve even blogged here about cars in the past. And right now, I’m looking for a new car.

Which has me in dealerships. Which made me realize that I should finally write down my list of the top 10 reasons you should instantly leave a car dealership:

1. “What can I do to get you in this car today?”
2. “I want you to meet my sales manager…” (bonus points if they do this but DON’T let you go back to see him when you’re negotiating)
3. A dealer who insists that they go on the test drive with you.
4. Showing you an offer that only has a monthly payment (and conveniently omits your down payment, tax, title, license, trade value, etc.)
5. Dealers greet you before you can close the door on the car you arrived in.
6. “What are you currently paying per month?” – They may need to find out what you want to pay per month later, if you’re negotiations are centered around a monthly number as the primary element, but the only reason they care what you are paying now is so they can make an offer that’s not far off from that … to make it seem like less of a jump for you. It says nothing about the “deal” you’re getting on your car.
7. Offers made on any of the following:
   - Post it notes
   - Sheets of paper divided into 4 quadrants (the 4 square box is actually a sales technique - and not an effective one)
   - Paper that was ripped in half
   - Paper that originally had something else on it … like the menu of a local restaurant
8. Dealers who use any of the following statements:
   - “That’s priced right.”
   - “You won’t find a better deal than that!”
   - “If you want to go all the way up to [some town more than 15 minutes away], go ahead. But this car’s right here now and it won’t be when you come back.”
   - When asked why another dealer has a comparable car for less, they answer: “There’s something wrong with that car.”
   - Any comment that bashes another brand
   - “I suggest you get our protection package.”
   - Calls a sales manager to “ask if the car is still available”
9. A dealer who says: “What’s your phone number? I won’t call you.” — If you’re not going to call me, you don’t need my number.
10. Anyone wearing a green suit OR more jewelry than you and your spouse combined.

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I sat in a meeting this morning where someone observed that (on a Windows XP machine) I was “pretty quick at navigating around Windows Explorer, for a Mac user.” I had to admit that the Windows Explorer interface never really has bothered me and that it was easier to delete files than in the Mac.

Or so I thought.

Even though I’ve used a Mac as my main machine for a few years now, there are some “basics” I still find once in a while because I never take a moment to learn a new (read: faster) way. Today, I learned that instead of dragging a file to the trash, you can simply hit “Command” (apple) and “Delete” on your keyboard and the file will instantly be sent there.

And now that I’ve admitted that out loud (via this post) I really feel like I should have learned that sooner. Maybe it’ll help one of you so you don’t have to admit it on your blog. 

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I’ve spent the last week in all-day meetings … which is (not) exactly the thing I want to do as I try to wrap up a year early to go visit family over the holidays. I’ll post more about those meetings later because they really were interesting.

However, during the meetings I was surprised to see how many people left the room with their PC (and yes, it was always a Windows PC) wide open for all to hack upon. People would leave for lunch, or worse, for the rest of the day, leaving their entire computer logged in and open to the world.

As an IT department, we have not yet enabled (forced) settings to prevent this (but it is on the schedule for 2008). After the first meeting day, I made a comment about it to the group and didn’t get much more than a (less than heart-felt) “yeah, we shouldn’t do that.”

By day three, I couldn’t help prove my point. On the laptop (of a good friend of mine) I decided to use the open machine to make a few adjustments, or customizations:

As you can see, hiding his “start” bar, adding a Mac background and increasing the size of his scrollbars (which is found DEEP in display properties) left his computer just anoying enough to get my point acrossed.

Amazingly enough, everyone started locking their computers (or taking their computers with them) after that!

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Every once in a while I am reminded of the fact that we still live in a mostly Microsoft world. Yesterday, I pulled up a webpage from our office in Europe and realized that no one had ever tested it for any other browser for IE. I was also in a hurry to find some information on it, so I had to open Parallels, start up Windows, fire up IE just to get one tiny piece of information from the page.

Rest assured, that problem is now fixed.

But it got me thinking: is there a way to run IE on a Mac, now that the browser is officially mothballed for the Mac O/S? I found that the answer is “yes” and its a slick solution!

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At the office, I get called into helping out on a lot of presentations. Usually, I can just show up with my Mac and Keynote, apply a template and make an instant (and quick) impact (upgrade) to their presentation.

That’s great, because it adds the “sizzle.” But most people don’t start with a good “steak.”

It seems like the most common presentation no-no’s are:

• Too many sentences on a slide
• Too many words in a bullet-point
• Full paragraphs! (seriously? how can someone read that AND pay attention to you?)
• Too few images (a picture is worth…)
• Too many transition variations (more is not always better)

I thought I’d post two of the most helpful (and short) articles I’ve found on how to improve your presentations:

“20 Tips to Improve Your Presentations” (Epson.com)

“The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint” (Guy Kawasaki)

… the only other tidbit I’d add to these articles is this:
If you’re using transitions, try to pick ones that help tell the story. Your presentation should have a theme and as few words as possible on each slide. So you might need to break a concept up across a few slides. If so, you can use a transition that “moves” the presentation from slide to slide to help tell the story.

For example, Keynote has a great transition where the screen splits in half and the next slide approaches through the background. This is a GREAT transition to use when you have a slide that talks about a concept and want to go into more detail on the next slide. — It helps “tell the story.”

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I’ve been an avid Mac user for almost two years now and I still find myself finding cool things about the O/S that impress me. Sometimes, its just cool applications that have been there the whole time waiting for you to discover them; however there are also a TON of great looking applications out there for. A great place to get started finding them is at iUseThis.com. (You can see what I’m using in my iUseThis profile.)

Since I haven’t blogged for a while, I thought I’d share two particularly helpful tips for other Mac users:

1. Put Album Art in your Dock. - This cool application replaces your iTunes dock icon with the album art (if available) for the song that’s currently playing. (See below)

2. Screen Captures, without extra software. -

Capture your full screen
Press shift open-apple 3 to create a full screen print image on your desktop. (If you have dual screens, two images will be created, one for each screen.)

Capture a portion of your screen
Press shift open-apple 4 to get a cross-hair selection icon to capture a portion of your screen.

Capture a single window
Press control shift 4 space and you’ll get a camera icon that selects a window for you to capture.

And if that’s not enough … you can also access an application called “Grab” in your “Applications\Utilities” folder that will give you some nice menus to do all this and more!

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The Finder window on a Mac has all sorts of cool icons for my desktop, documents, music, etc. I have created some aliases (”shortcuts” for you PC people) in my Finder window to get to frequently used folders more quickly but didn’t know how to give them their own unique personality (icon) until a friend of mine (blog link would go there, if he had one - don’t worry, he knew I was going to say that) bailed me out. Here’s how:

1. Find the image you want to use as the icon and copy it to your clipboard
2. Find the folder where you want to change the image (below)

3. Press “APPLE + I” to access the information about the folder. The “info” window will appear.
4. Click once on the folder icon in the upper left corner. It will glow (see below) if you’ve done it right.

5. Press “APPLE + V” to paste the image over the existing one. (see below)

You can also press “delete” when you have clicked on the glowing icon to remove what you just pasted, if you don’t like it.

How handy … now to go find some good Mac icons!

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Everyone gets calls from telemarketers, students (or so they say) doing surveys or calls from Sales Reps. Talk about a time-waster! I mean, I get that the cold-call is an important part of getting new sales but I do question just how effective it is.

Regardless, I find that most of the calls I get during the day at the office are from one of these three groups of people. I rarely call them back. After all, I get paid to get things done, not return phone calls from these people. (I’m amazed how many attempts people make to try to reach me after getting voicemail … one guy is up to 12 voicemail messages … and that’s just from the time I started counting! )

Nonetheless, you can’t avoid these people forever and will eventually answer the phone and have to talk to one of them live. You know the instant they start talking that you’re committed to call that’s going to waste 3-10 minutes of your time. Here’s some things I like to do/say in these situations:

• “I’m sorry, we have a corporate policy that prohibits us from taking part in surveys.”
• “I’m sorry, we have a corporate policy that prohibits us from giving out ANY information about our systems” (or networks, servers, PCs, … anything really).
• “Instead of me telling you what I use, how about you tell me in 3 minutes or less, what makes your product/service/company so great.”
• (Follow-up to the one above if they say they need more than 3 minutes): “Really? I ask this of everyone who calls and no one has ever had a problem doing it. — Its often the best way for me to learn what your company is all about … I think we’re done here.” (hang up)

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