Monthly Archive for August, 2007

MS Office Phooey

Published on August 30, 2007 in Power User Tips, Report Writing and The Investigator's Computer. 1 Comment

The drastically redesigned MS Office 2007 interface, called the Fluent User Interface, (FIU), and yes, it is pronounced Phooey, should be a wonderful exercise in frustration.

The tradional toolbar has been replaced with the “ribbon” that is supposed to be an improvement over the old toolbars, if I ever figure-out where anything is really located. Thankfully the keyboard commands still work.

The people who will suffer most the most performance degradation with this redesign are knowlegable users who employ a wide variety of the features.

Combine the performance degradation with the new file format and you have a massive migration project for the power users.

Thank-you MS for something else that I won’t use until there are no other options.

People Search – Wink

Published on August 27, 2007 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Wink searches the major social networks and the Web to find people. The site also provides search filters such as location, age, and interests to help narrow down your search for common names. This search engine allows you to enter a location and other keywords to help narrow the search.

US launches ‘MySpace for spies’

Published on August 24, 2007 in Intelligence Services. 0 Comments

The Financial Times reports that the intelligence community within the United States government sees more use to social networking sites than just recruitment. The government is trying to improve inter-agency communication that plagued it before the 9/11 attacks, the paper reports that, “Thomas Fingar, the deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, believes the common workspace – a kind of ‘MySpace for analysts’ – will generate better analysis by breaking down firewalls across the traditionally stove-piped intelligence community.”

According to this article, the government expects to deploy the social network – named “A-Space” – to all of its intelligence agencies by December. Its sad that we can’t observe how it functions.

People Search – PeekYou

Published on August 23, 2007 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

PeekYou claims more than 50 million profiles in its index. However,the index isn’t necessarily up-to-date. The results often display material that has been taken down from public viewing on MySpace and others social networking sites. For an Investigator this historical material may be a boon.

People Search – Spock.com

Published on August 20, 2007 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

To index individuals, Spock.com scours through social networking websites such as MySpace, Friendster and Bebo.

In addition to scouring the Web, the site also includes options for users to add information about people such as tags and relevant links.

It would appear that the site still has some work to do in pulling data in from more sources and connecting the dots between profiles of the same person. Spock.com is an ambitious people search effort that plans to eventually index billions of names worldwide.

Crossengine becomes Intelways

Published on August 13, 2007 in Search Engines and Social Sites. 0 Comments Tags: , .

Crossengine.com has become Intelways.com. It is a great way of running your search through many different types of search engines. It’s too bad they keep fiddling with the layout and the name.

Update 22 Feb 09:

It’s now called Browsys Finder.

People Who Investigate

Published on August 10, 2007 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

When most people hear the word Investigator, they immediately think of Police Detectives or Private Investigators. However, any act of inquiry is investigation. The word research derives from Middle French; its literal meaning is to investigate.

Some of the best Investigators I know have nothing to do with policing or the private investigation business. One of best Investigators I know is a fund manager. He manages a fund that invests in companies that may strike it rich and become take-over targets. He travels the world looking for these investment opportunities.

He must collect data from diverse sources in many languages. He interviews people who are often hostile, dishonest, and dangerous. He reviews economic data and forecasts, accounting data, government documents, court records, and corporate filings. Through all this he must sift, to discover companies that represent worthwhile investment opportunities.

Doing all this, when he is the only guy without a gun, in frequently hostile and volatile environments, is not for the feint-hearted or the simple-minded. He is a true Investigator.

Power User 108 – Styles & Templates

Published on August 7, 2007 in Communication, Power User Tips, Report Writing and The Investigator's Computer. 0 Comments

A style is a set of text formats such as fonts, sizes, text alignment, spacing, etc.. A style can then be used to create text or to format existing text.

Styles should form a hierarchy that makes the report look organised and consistent. MS Word is not a typewriter. For instance, the normal style is the paragraph style. It should be set-up to insert the space before and after the paragaraph. The typist does not insert carriage returns to start a new paragraph.

Every document is based upon a template. A template is a collection of document formatting options upon which a new document is based. A template should not have more than 20 styles.

Templates need to be properly managed throughout the company. The templates provide a consistent reporting format and the text that is frequently repeated in each report. To properly maintain the templates they should reside in only one directory on one server. If a change is made it is made by an authorised person and only one template needs to be altered.

In MS Word, a template ends with .dot as in normal.dot. It is not a document that is used over and over again, all the while collecting style after style, until it causes Word to crash because it is creating corrupted documents.

Inexpensive Pens With Good Ink

Published on August 1, 2007 in Fraud, Handwriting and Report Writing. 2 Comments

Normally I don’t use inexpensive pens, but lately I have found three inexpensive pens I now use for work and when I am travelling due to the good ink they contain. They are the Pilot G-2, Pilot G-TEC-C4, and now the uni-ball 207.

My current favorite, the uni-ball 207, uses an ink that contains color pigments which are absorbed into the paper fibers. The ink is in effect trapped on the paper fibres and can’t be washed off, as some forgers do to alter cheques. Refills are available. Uni-ball 207 is sold worldwide in stationery and office supply stores and other outlets. Mike Shea did some interesting tests of the ink in the uni-ball 207 and the G-2 and three other inks. The G-2 survived water but not soap and bleach. The uni-ball ink survived all the tests.

The Pilot G-Tec-C4 or the G-TEC-C writes with a very fine line. I use it for corrections and margin notes. They are so thin they write like mechanical pencils. The G-TEC-C seems to have a more durable ink, but it is hard to find in North America.

If your handwritten records have to survive intact for a long time, then you have to carefully consider the ink used to produce them. It seems I’ll be using the uni-ball 207 a lot more from now on.