Down with SOPA

There are a few SOPA news stories out recently about the Stop Online Piracy Online act in the USA congress/senate.

Here is an informative video on SOPA.

“Inexplicably, and almost overnight, SOPA has morphed into a full-on assault against lawful U.S. Internet companies,” said Markham C. Erickson, executive director of NetCoalition, a group representing Web firms and public interest groups opposed to the law.

An acquantance of mine felt so strongly about SOPA that they were recommending "If I was someone who had "shopping carts" accessible on an internet site, I would make sure I had the best geolocation database I could, and if someone connected to my site from the USA I would tell them that we can't accept orders from the USA due to SOPA."

I'm presuming he felt that a few days of this and with a large volume of ecommerce sites, that it would make the US think twice about SOPA.  I'm not sure that would help.

Another friend brought up the point that if you have a competitor in your business, they could claim you copied a paragraph of theirs and then start trying to shut down your site.  Can you imagine?

But when big companies like Google, Facebook and Yahoo go up to the plate to stop SOPA, I'm sure congress will be squashing SOPA very quickly.  Plus they are probably all fans of Bieber and don't want him to go to jail.

Elephants are dying on a daily basis due to current heat wave

This is sad news

Wildlife conservationists who spoke to The Zimbabwean said the current heat wave had worsened the situation in the park where jumbos and buffaloes are reportedly dying every day due to thirst and stress.

http://www.thezimbabwean.co.uk/news/zimbabwe/54813/elephants-in-grave-danger.html?utm_source=thezim&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=listarticle&utm_content=headinglink

Excel swap vertical cells to horizontal cells

I am not sure where I picked up this Excel tip, but it saved me some time. 

Let’s say you have data in Excel that is currently laid out vertically:

1.2

2.3

3.4

5.6

and you want to change it to be laid out horizontally as such:

1.2, 2.3, 3.4, 5.6

You can do so by:

1. Copy (CTRL+C) the original data.
2. Select a cell where you want your new data to be inserted to
3. Select the edit menu > Paste Special and check the Transpose tickbox. If you fancy shortcut combination keys, you can get there with ALT+E, S, ALT+E.
4. Voila, your new data will be pasted and transposed from vertical to horizontal. 

The same steps apply when you are trying to copy data laid out horizontally to be shown vertically.

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Seth Godin on Plans and Missions

I really do like Seth Godin, but I'm not quite sure what he was saying with this post:

Plans are great. But missions are better. Missions survive when plans fail, and plans almost always fail.

One of my colleagues pointed out that:

Missions are toothless without plans. Plans move missions from rhetoric and paper to reality. Plans make someone accountable to deliver on the mission by a specific date.

Seth's post suggests that Plans and Missions are substitutable.  But I don't think that is what he means. 

While it would be nice if Seth could expand on what he meant, I think he is just saying that both are important together.  Missions can't get the job done but plans do.  Yet plans alone won't keep you focused and motivated but Missions will.