1) Windows Tips - "Little Things"
2) File Find! - "Area Code Lookup"
3) Sites-Seeing - "Quackwatch\More Chicken Than KFC"
4) Email Funny - "Office Oracle"
5) MOUS Tips - "Excel Files Ready When You Are"
6) They Said It - quotes to give one pause
7) Hodgepodge - that what fits no where else

Whether this is your first time here, or you've been with The Basement for a while, please know that I sincerely appreciate your attention! Thanks for making NFTB part of your day.

Some of you might have noticed your Noises once again appearing earlier or later than you've been accustomed to. New demands on my time (a high school full of eager minds hungering for computer knowledge) have forced me to adjust the publication schedule. HTML subscribers will receive their NFTB Tuesday evening\Wednesday early AM; text editions will go out starting around 1:00 Wednesday afternoon (EDT). It takes over 6 hours total sending time to deliver each edition, every week! And now you know!

1) Windows Tips - "Little Things"

Sometimes it's the little things...

A student frantically waved me over to her workstation. "My computer's gone crazy! It won't stop selecting!" she said. As I watched her work in Word, when she moved her mouse around the cursor on the screen would behave similar to the "EXT" function (which was not turned on). Wherever she clicked her mouse button, blocks of text were selected and deselected as the mouse moved. She could not place an insertion point.

Then, the errant behavior stopped of its own accord. Chalking it up to micro-gremlins (but claiming credit for the cure by the virtue of my mere presence) I left her to her work, only to be called back several minutes later for the same complaint.

Having experienced a minor revelation, this time I quickly ran the palm of my hand back and forth over her keyboard. Voila! The problem was solved! The culprit? A stuck Shift key! The Shift key was stuck slightly down, which put Word into a "select mode"... after a while it would work its way back up, and all would be okay--until the Shift was tapped again. A bit of cleaning and the micro-gremlins were banished!

Sometimes it's the little things...

Caller ID is nice, but knowing that the caller in Area Code 502 is from Louisville, KY is even nicer. If you have to deal with phone numbers that are disconnected from geographical information; OR if you have a location and are looking for the corresponding Area Code, grab this little utility from Forward Loop Software.

This program contains information about specifically North American telephone area codes. It allows you to find the cities in a particular area code, or the area codes for a particular city. Its database contains 737 North American cities: 675 in the United States, 38 in Canada, and the rest in the other countries that fall under the North American Numbering Plan. [775 Kb\EXE]

CLICK HERE to download Area Code Lookup

A couple of really fowl sites for you this week:

Quackwatch is our first, where many medical scams are revealed for what they really are. A site whose Mission Statement reads: "Quackwatch...is a nonprofit corporation whose purpose is to combat health-related frauds, myths, fads, and fallacies. Its primary focus is on quackery-related information that is difficult or impossible to get elsewhere."

Visitors are greeted by a well-maintained, frequently updated site that provides plenty of thought-provoking information. Just a few of the pages I found particularly interesting - "Quackery--25 Ways to Spot It", "Science vs. 'Alternative' Methods", and "Magnet Therapy". There are over 100 more pages of useful, challenging, scam-busting info to be found. Skeptics will love it, some might find core beliefs challenged.

Quackwatch is one of a family of four websites, along with Chirobase, MLM Watch, and NutriWatch. An essential addition to the Favorites List of anyone who wants to make informed health decisions:

CLICK HERE for Quackwatch's Home Page

Being that it's September, it's almost Oktoberfest time. Each year around this time I grow a bit nostalgic, for it was at an Oktoberfest in 1996 that I made it into the Guinness Book of World Records!

Okay, so I wasn't exactly mentioned by name (it was me and 47,999 of my closest friends), but that was part of the record - we were all participants in the World's Largest Chicken Dance! It was in honor of the fifth anniversary of that occasion that I went searching the Net for Chicken Dance music to share with y'all - here's the one I think is the best, though this one deserves high marks for...effort?  Play it for someone you love.

Anyhow, as I was searching for music, I found way too many chicken-related sites. A few of the more, ahem, unusual ones are Shiver Me Chickens!, Chicken Soup for the Soulless ( a parody site of those "other" chicken soup books), and a collection of Why Did the Chicken Cross The Road? jokes.  Of course, there's the granddaddy of all chicken sites - Mike The Headless Chicken, first introduced to NFTB readers back in April, 2000. 

There's even an attempt to answer that other ageless chicken question - "Which came first, the Chicken or the Egg?" 

See you at the Oktoberfest!

Ah, technology marches on! It used to be, if you wanted to know the answers to the deep questions in life, like "Will I get a raise?" or "Do they know who's making the long-distance phone calls?" or "Are they having pizza in the cafeteria today?", you would have to shake the little black Mystery 8-Ball. Within moments your answer would float to the top of the window...guided by the Power of the Ball.

Thanks to our friends at Office.com, all you need to do now is key your question, the shaking is done for you! Let the Office Oracle guide you through the rocky paths of everyday life. [993 Kb\EXE]

CLICK HERE to download Office Oracle

Do you work on the same workbook(s) every time you use Excel? If so, here's how to have Excel open them automatically every time it runs:

 I) Find your XLSTART folder. The path with a default installation is C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\XLStart. Open this folder.

II) Open the folder than contains your daily workbook files. Right-click and drag the files into your XLSTART folder; when the Shortcut menu opens choose "Create a Shortcut Here".

We use the shortcut so as to not move our files from their original location. If you later decide that a given file should NOT open when Excel starts, simply delete its corresponding shortcut from the XLSTART folder.

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country...corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed." - Abraham Lincoln, Nov. 21, 1864

What should expect from an industry that raises prices with impunity more than 25% before a holiday weekend? Why, a billboard like you'll see in this week's Photo Funny... And, for the latest info on lost suitcases full of diamonds, drunk clowns, and stupid bus robbers, be sure to check out ODDS and ENDS! You know where -

G'nite, and thanks for reading!