Kudos

Steve_Brady on Experts Exchange: Steve_Brady is one of those people Experts love to see coming. He asks his questions in the clearest way possible, and sincerely wants to know how to do things himself, so when his question about styles and headings in Microsoft Word popped up, he got some fairly quick responses from thinkpads_user, teylyn, yobri and matthewspatrick. Steve was effusive in his response: "Thanks for the terrific responses! Each one of them is well thought out, clearly written and tremendously helpful. I will never understand why more people don't use this EE resource! Think of it. For $10 per month, I can ask a question like I did and in just over an hour, get comments back from four separate individuals, each of whom approaches it from a slightly different but extremely knowledgeable perspective, but is responding directly to me and the specifics of my question! That's sick! (As my kids would say to describe something as awesome.) Is there anywhere else that's possible? If so, I have never heard about it!" It didn't end there, though; teylyn used the discussion to write an article about a little trick she uses the Quick Access Toolbar to help manage styles in Word documents.

matthewspatrick on Excel: Understanding a business practice is often key to being able to answer a question like the one gberkeley asked regarding a SQL query for "business weeks". matthewspatrick took the time to figure out what she was looking for and posted a solution: "Thank you so very much!!! There's no doubt in my mind why you're a "Hall of Famer"!!!! The proposed solution is exactly what I needed and I could never have solved this on my own. I very much appreciate not just the answer itself, but the fast reply, the excellent questions to make sure you understood what I needed, and the clarity in the responses. You've made my whole week so much better!!!! A++++"

boomod on Experts: We're not sure which member attached to the London School of Economics sent us the email regarding boomod's Tip from the Moderators in our August 17 issue, but it was to the point (as one might expect): "Boomod, and his Aug 17 tip, rocks!"

In Brief

Yeah... who? Did Zapaday know that Carol Bartz, erstwhile CEO of Yahoo, was going to be candid about her dismissal? Did it know that Yahoo may be for sale or may not be but is definitely a mess, considering you would be nuts to want to take the job at a company that has no idea where it's going. Kara Fisher of All Things Digital, who broke the story, had the best tweet, quoting Saturday Night Live: "it's a floor wax and a dessert topping."

Aol teched and crunched: Meanwhile, over at AOL, TechCrunch boss Michael Arrington announced he was starting his own venture capital fund, and AOL decided to kick in some money, but the company took its time about deciding whether Arrington was in or out as the boss at TechCrunch. When Huffington Post boss (and now the editorial boss at AOL) Arianna Huffington chimed in, that only made things worse -- so much so that even the TechCrunch staff was dazed and confused. As EE's Jenn Prentice wrote, it's a soap opera of epic proportions.

In other words: It was a great week if you're a blogger, and almost as good a week if you're a blogger who wants a job as the CEO (or editor) of a big content site, because in addition to Yahoo and AOL, Reddit found itself being [sorta] cut loose by Conde-Nast (they need a CEO), Google made a bid for Hulu (they'll need content managers) and bought Zagat (and more content managers), and as long as the news industry ignoring this, discounted this and paid attention to this.

Help wanted: HP wants beta-testers for its cloud services. There may also be a few assembly positions in the Touchpad division, but not in the cell phone division.

Apple suing for some kind of patent violation: But we still want a quantum computer simulator. Oh, and a Polaroid camera.

No, it's not the return of Ask Jeeves: Elizabeth II is looking for a new butler.

From the Bar Association Permanent Employment file: Speaking of suing...

• The US justice department is suing AT&T over the acquisition of T-Mobile.
• AT&T is suing the US justice department ove rthe acquisition of T-Mobile. NOTE: either way, it's not good for T-Mobile.
• SCO -- oh, but they're not dead -- lost again. Don't worry, though -- there's still the US Supreme Court.
• Good seats are still available for the appearances of stars like Larry Ellison and Larry Page in a federal court to settle their patent infringement dispute.
• A grand jury has returned criminal charges against five people involved in a video download site. Expect a movie industry lawsuit any day.
• Google is being sued by shareholders angry about the $500 million paid in fines to the US justice department over ads from Canadian pharmacies. For the record, the pharmacies aren't too thrilled either.

Etc. etc. etc.: We're not expecting an invitation to visit Thailand any time soon, but we can't help but giggle a little at the lengths to which the government there will go to enforce the "thou shalt not speak ill of the King" laws. A Canadian ISP, doing business in the US, is being sued by a naturalized citizen of the US, Anthony Chai, who had been critical of the Thai policy of royal infallibility. The Thai government asked the ISP for information about Mr Thai, and when he returned to Thailand to visit his family, he was detained and interrogated not just there, but after he returned to the US as well. A little closer to home, a Bangkok man was arrested for insulting the King on Facebook.

So next summer, we all do our Christmas shopping early: Amazon has apparently cut a deal with California over collecting sales taxes that would leave the state "only" $9.38 billion in the red. The Democrats will probably block the deal, meaning it will probably be on the ballot.

If you're so rich, why aren't you smart? We were going to just entertain you with a list of the all-time worst tech decisions, but losing a second iPhone prototype has to rank up there (maybe they should try something new), as does banking on a cloud product that suffers frequent outages.

Signs of the Apocalypse: Companies that paid their CEOs more than they paid in taxes. A high tech ghost town. Your electronic insulin pump can get hacked.

Milestones

New Geniuses: Two members of Experts Exchange have earned their third Genius certificates: Microsoft MVP mkline71 earned his in Windows Server 2008 and kaufmed's came in .NET Programming. Earning his second, in Microsoft Operating Systems was johnb6767, and following up on earning his first 1,000,000 points was dlmille, who earned his Genius certificate in Microsoft Excel. Congratulations on your achievements!

My First Million: Five members of Experts Exchange reached the 1,000,000 point level for their careers last month. They are cmalakar, ronnypot, hnasr, cmalakar and dlmille. Well done!

Milestones:

• Ray_Paseur is the latest member of Experts Exchange to reach 10,000,000 points overall.
• johnb6767 has reached the 8,000,000 point level for his career at EE.
• arnold and MASQUERAID brought to 75 the number of EE members who have earned 5,000,000 points.