Perhaps you've seen another video where the presenter asks you to pay attention to only people wearing white shirts in a video scene and not the people in black shirts. While ignoring the black shirts, most people will not notice that a gorilla walks through the scene and waves at the camera before proceeding on its way.

Apparently, the brain ignores extra stimuli when focused on a task. This explains why I can't hear a thing my husband says when I'm at the computer! LOL. And presents a challenge to trainers everywhere.

For more information, see this Wikipedia article on inattentional blindness.

So in my travels, I've actually met people who think that expressing desperation during the interview process is a good thing, because the recruiter/interviewer will recognize that the candidate will do anything for the job. Trust me when I say that is no comfort to your future client or employer, for several reasons. To name a few, the person who is trying to fill a position already knows the following:

1. You will take a job even if it isn't a good fit, and you may even lie about your qualifications to get it. In addition, when you are more interested in paying your bills than building your career, you may take a job beneath your abilities and then bail later when you find a better job.
2. You did not proactively build your network during your flush times. This shows a lack of preparedness that may not be attractive.
3. You will work for less than you are worth. When the economy slows, there are always opportunists willing to take advantage of someone's lack of savvy, and trust me, someone who is willing to savagely underpay is not anyone you want to work for.

No, desperation is not attractive in a candidate at all. In fact, a recruiter told me this week that I am an attractive candidate for a job exactly because I am the only candidate who isn't desperate.

This Dilbert comic strip from Thursday, November 6, 2008, drives home my point.

Avoid desperation. We all know that, while times are good, we are supposed to self-insure against devastation by building a strong professional network and saving at least three months of living expenses, but for some reason hardly anyone does it.

The wrong question. Will you experience a life-changing event in your lifetime? You already know the answer to that one; with 100 percent probability, yes.

The real questions are when? and ... will you be prepared? Because if you aren't, that life-changing event will suddenly become an emergency worthy of desperation.

I think Microsoft has to do it. After all, Google's answer to Office, Google Docs, continues to get traction. For instance, my colleague Dot pointed out just this week that you can now embed a Google presentation into your LinkedIn profile. Meanwhile, there are other scrappy competitors out there like Zoho (which has a start page remarkably similar to the Google Docs page) which are ahead of Microsoft in developing online workspaces for all kinds of things, including word processing and spreadsheets.

And I'll bet Microsoft won't come out with a feature-thin Beta version like Google Docs did initially. Google can get away with that, but I don't think Microsoft can. So we can envision that its competitors will continue jockeying for position and dynamically adding features for months on end as the behemoth Microsoft laborious works to release its full-featured product.

Techies have been grumbling for a couple of years that Microsoft had been slow to embrace the trend of deploying software online where a user can access it using a browser and where updates are performed outside of the user's line of vision. But check out this Wikipedia topic about Software as a Service which explains there are benefits and drawbacks to both the vendor and the customer when using this deployment method. The impact for a company like Microsoft would be impossible to estimate.

So check out this advice on what NOT to do when building a presentation. Be sure to keep watching at least until the chart section. I guarantee you will laugh.

In Windows File Explorer, right-click the file, go to the Open With command, and, if Adobe Reader isn't one of your default options, go to Choose Program. You should be able to figure it out from there.

I learned that you (or I!) can usually open a new Illustrator file into an older version of Photoshop. To do so, you make two copies of the Illustrator file and simply change the extensions: change one to .PDF and the other to .EPS . Then try to open the files from inside Photoshop! The PDF version worked for me. The benefit of using Photoshop rather than Acrobat is that I could scale the graphic to be relatively large image (11x11 inches at 200 dpi) while keeping the image quality. Worked like a charm.

Have a good day.

A 43-year-old Japanese woman was upset when her virtual husband "divorced" her, ... so she "killed" him... or his online persona to be exact. She logged in as him and offed him. That is the funny part.  The sad part is that she may end up with a criminal record because of it.

Check out this article.

Also, to learn more about CommonCraft, check out this article about the couple who run the site. They have quit doing client work for companies like Google in order to focus on their mission of education.

First let me say that consulting is what we do and who we are, and we love it.

We've been consultants since 2000. That means Logical has lived through the dot com bust, 9/11 and the flood of displaced New York City tech workers, and all of the economic ups and downs since then. Consulting is not something we are trying out to see if we like it, and we aren't consulting to fill in while we look for full-time gigs, although we offer our best wishes for individuals in either of those situations. Strange as it may seem, we actually like consulting. We like the variety. We like helping our clients in their times of greatest need.

In addition, we have built our business and bought our gadgets without debt. You don't need to worry about whether a bank will force us to close our doors by calling in our loan, as has happened with other small businesses; we have no loan. And we have no interest expenses either. That is one reason our rates are so competitive.

Technical communicators hail from a variety of backgrounds, since there were few appropriate bachelor degrees until about 10 years ago. I myself have a journalism degree, which suits my work quite well. Active voice, simplicity, attention to structure, flow, and presentation… the things I learned in journalism school serve me still.

Another thing I picked up in J school was a healthy suspicion of adjectives and adverbs. I tend to select descriptive nouns and verbs that eliminate the need for embellishment. This eases the translation of my work into other languages, and complies with E.B. White’s admonitions to “omit needless words” and make “every word tell.”

Still, I have been at a loss for words (pun intended) to explain my descriptor aversion, until now. Ben Yagoda seems to have made a solid attempt in his 2007 book “When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It,” a title inspired by Mark Twain. I haven’t read the whole book, but enjoyed the free first chapter available from the New York Times. It was there I learned that the Latin language had no adjectives.

If you aren’t into language dissection, you may not appreciate this read as much as I did. But really his case is summarized in this one thought: “A resourceful and creative use of these words (adjectives and adverbs) marks, more than any other single trait, the first-rate essayist or critic. It’s an indication of originality, wit, observation… the cast and quality of the writer’s mind.”

I’ll leave you with the Mark Twain quote that inspired the book’s title:

I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English--it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don't let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them--then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

~ Mark Twain in a letter to D. W. Bowser, 3/20/1880

That is what makes this spoof on that challenge such a laugh. You have to check it out.