I saw a post on the local Freecycle Forum asking for some help as follows:

Looking for the instructions to scrabble cards. They look like playing cards can be used on the floor or table. Even if you could give a run down of the bonus cards etc that would be great we know the basic for scrabble but with the cards games there is extra rules for the bonus cards etc

For all of use internet connected peoples there is always a Google search. I am continually amazed at the sheer volume of information that someone has taken the trouble to type up and publish on the WWW.

This is also part of the problem as a typical search can return millions of results. But with a few little tricks you can really narrow down your Google searches. Just to prove my point I did a search for Google search tips and came up with the following blog site - read it to get all the specifics:

Ultimate Google Search Tips Guide

Anyway back to the question at hand. I did a Google search for "scrabble cards" game rules with the quotation marks around the scrabble cards to search for the 2 word phrase rather than the 2 words individually.

One of the pages that turned up was this review of the game which explains most of the rules: BGG review

By the way the Freecycle forums are great and a good way to turn your Trash into someone's Treasure or the other way around - check it out

Shoalhaven Recycle Link

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Spam email accounted for between 90 and 95 percent of all email in 2007, up from an estimated five per cent of email in 2001, according to a report from web security company Barracuda Networks..

The report, which analysed more than one billion daily email messages sent to more than 50,000 users worldwide, also tracked the increasing complexity of spam techniques over the past several years. 2007 witnessed the majority of spammers using identity obfuscation techniques, in which spammers send email from diverse sources throughout the internet.
Other spamming trends also include the increased the use of attachments, including as PDF files and other file formats.

Prominent spam techniques from previous years include:
2006 - Image spam and botnets
2005 - Rotating URL spam
2004 - Automated generation of spam variants
2003 - Open relays, blast emails, spoofing
“The spam war is a continuous battle between spammers and security vendors,” said Dean Drako, president and CEO of Barracuda Networks. “Security vendors now require 24-by-7 defence operations to continuously monitor the internet for new spam trends and distribute new defensive solutions immediately.”

A separate poll of business professionals by the same company found that more than half (57 per cent) of the 261 respondents, now consider spam to be the worst form of junk advertising, nearly double the 31 percent that cited postal junk mail and well ahead of the 12 percent who chose telemarketing as their chief bug bear.

Spam accounts for nearly 95 per cent of email - www.itnews.com.au

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I use WLW for all my blog posts now and hosting via Blogger using a custom domain. So easy it's ridiculous! MATT

Chances are, if you’re a blogger, you’ve heard about Microsoft’s free blogging tool, Windows Live Writer (WLW).  In case you haven’t heard about it, WLW is an offline WYSIWIG (What You See Is What You Get) blogging tool that integrates very nicely with most blogging platforms, allowing you to create and edit blog posts from your desktop. Although it is usually great fun to mock Microsoft’s efforts, as it happens WLW is really very cool.  If you regularly write for several different sites, it can really help to simplify your blogging life!

Unlike a lot of Microsoft products, WLW makes a strong effort to work with a variety of non-Microsoft services and products.  So while it gives Microsoft’s own “Live Spaces” service pride of place in the setup dialogue, WLW works well with a variety of blogging platforms, from hosted services like Google’s Blogger and Wordpress.com to Wordpress and other blogging programs hosted on your own servers — it even works with non-mainstream platforms like Drupal, albeit minus a few of the bells and whistles.

Setup is pretty easy, as WLW works hard to auto-detect your website’s settings.  You might need to tell WLW where the interface is on your host — it’s usually a file called “xmlrpc.php”, and I’ve found that if I just assume it’s at “www.[domain name].com/xmlrpc.php”, it usually works. Once you’re set up, WLW will download the stylesheet and post template, so as you write your posts you can see exactly how it will look when it’s posted.

WLW is pretty straightforward, but here’s a few pointers to some of the intermediate and advanced features that WLW offers:

1. Categories: WLW reads the categories from your site, so click “categories” at the bottom of the post window and check off whatever categories you want your post to go in.  If you use tags as categories, a list of all your previously-used tags will come up — useful if you want to avoid using multiple variations of the same idea (e.g. “e-book”, “ebooks”, and “e-books”).
2. Set Publish Date: If your blogging software allows you to schedule posts to go “live” in the future, you’ll find a drop-down calendar at the bottom next to the categories field.
3. Tagging: Hit the double up-arrow at the bottom of the post window (or press “F2″) and a range of other options will open up, including a tagging field.  List your tags just like you would if you were editing online.
4. The “Read More” tag: For blogs like Wordpress, where you use the <!–more–> tag to mark the end of the excerpt you want on the front page of your blog, the same thing is accomplished by placing your cursor where you want the “Read More” tag and selecting “Split Post” from the “Format” menu.
5. Remind yourself: If you’re the kid of person who forgets to add categories, tags, and titles to your posts, open the “Options” (in the “Tools” menu) and under “Preferences” check off “Remind me to specify a title before publishing”, “Remind me to add categories before publishing”, and “Remind me to add tags before publishing”.  When you go to publish or save a draft to your site, WLW will check that all these are present and, if not, ask you to add them.

   While you’re in the “Options”, go to “Spelling” and check “Check spelling before publishing”, too — this will launch the spell-checker automatically when you go to publish your post.

6. Use templates: If you use snippets of text, code, or other material regularly, you can use a plugin to save and insert templates.  I use Joe Cheng’s Dynamic Template Plugin, which is the most flexible: you can create templates with several fields and containing any kind of text or code you want, even interactive fields (though I admit I’m not enough of a programmer to understand how this works, but watch the demo on the site).  Then you select “Insert Template” from the “Insert” menu (or the sidebar) and select whichever template you want to use. Boom! Instant text.
7. Insert pictures: You can use the built-in “Insert Picture” dialogue to add images from your hard drive, but you can also use a variety of plugins to add images from services like Picasa and Flickr.
8. Round-up links from del.icio.us: The del.icio.us bookmark plugin will collect your links from del.icio.us, convert them into HTML, and insert them into your post. Coupled with the template plugin above, this is a pretty handy way to do almost instant daily or weekly round-ups of links you want to tell you readers about
9. Blog This: “Blog This” plugins are available for both IE and Firefox users, allowing you to highlight some text on a webpage, hit the “Blog This” button, and open a new post with your elected text already inserted in WLW. If you’re using IE, you can add the ‘blog it!” button to Windows Live Toolbar; Firefox users use the Firefox plugin.

I have a few minor quibbles with WLW, like the fact that I can change the date a post will be published but not the time — which forces me to use the “Post Draft and Edit Online” feature instead of just publishing directly.  But by and large, WLW works the way I blog, and because it integrates into so many services I can a single tool on my desktop instead of logging in to half a dozen separate websites and using half a dozen different interfaces.

9 Ways to Get More Out of Windows Live Writer - lifehack.org

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I found this quite interesting although some points apply more to business emails than personal ones

E-mail is a shallow way to communicate. It’s easy, fast and lacks the depth of understanding most people have face-to-face. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize just how much of this understanding is lost. As a result, they pick up bad habits and start driving coworkers, bosses and friends crazy.

Here are seven particularly bad habits, and how you can fix them so people don’t want to kill you:

1) Hanging Questions

Any e-mail that involves a request or question requires a follow-up. Even something as short as, “K.” However some people seemed to have missed this point, and leave requests or small questions completely unanswered. The problem here is that the sender has no idea whether you even read the message yet.

Here’s the fix:

1. For small questions, answer them immediately after reading. Get an auto-responder or simply shorten e-mails to a few words if you’re facing a time-crunch.
2. For questions you can’t answer yet, tell them that. If you won’t know until the 15th, don’t wait until the 16th to reply.
3. For difficult or long-winded answers, tell them you aren’t sure/don’t have time to answer right now. If the message is important add writing a response to your to-do list. If it isn’t, just leave it there. Any response is better than silence.

2) Buried Requests

A buried request is where the question or actionable information is sandwiched between unimportant info. Consider the difference between these two e-mails:

Hi Bob, I’ve been considering your new proposal for adjusting the customer service policy. I think we should meet up and talk about it. Your proposal seems actionable, but I have a few concerns.

Compare to…

Hi Bob, I’ve been considering your new proposal for adjusting the customer service policy. I think we should meet up and talk about it. Your proposal seems actionable, but I have a few concerns.

When do you want to meet up?

In the first e-mail, the request is in the second sentence, buried away. In the second it is repeated and given a new paragraph. Which one do you think is easier to read?

3) Wrong Medium

E-mail works best for direct and non-time sensitive information. Conversations, discussions and anything that requires a heavy amount of back-and-forth should be done on the phone or in person. Trying to use e-mail to have these conversations can be slow, time-consuming and painful.

The solution is to bridge the e-mail gap when you recognize you’re wasting time with it. Ask the person if you can discuss the issues in person or on the phone at a specific time and date.

4) Trying to Be Clever

Don’t try to be witty or sarcastic in an e-mail and pretend as if everything you say will be taken literally. Although a few metaphors can come across well in an e-mail, most don’t. The person on the other side can’t tell with what intensity or emphasis you typed the words. If anything can be ambiguous, reword it and leave it out.

And don’t think using emoticons gives you the green-light to be clever and charming. A symbol can’t replace the hundreds of different varieties in voice, tone and gestures you normally use to communicate intentions.

5) Sending Urgent Requests Through E-Mail

My guideline is that I shouldn’t send an e-mail if I need a response in less than five days. Not only do some people take days to respond to e-mails, you won’t be able to convey urgency in text. When you are on the phone or in person, you can transmit the impending need of your request, while in text you can only resort to using CAPITAL LETTERS or exclamation marks!

6) Bulky Paragraphs

People don’t read e-mails, they skim. So don’t write an eight sentence paragraph in one chunk. Here’s some guidelines:

• More than six lines? Split it up.
• Important information? Make it a one-line paragraph.
• Multiple pieces of important information? Make a quick bulleted list. (Like this one)

7) Playing E-Mail Tag

This probably won’t bother other people, but it might make you stressed enough to take it out on yourself. Don’t try to keep your inbox open to receive e-mails immediately as they arrive. Set times each day to answer and keep yourself by those limits. It will reduce distractions and force people who want to banter to pick up the phone and call you.

Scott H Young » The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits 

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As discussed at Mullies last week it seems the new Labour government will get cracking on their promised policy to roll out fibre optic cable sooner rather than later.

While there are many things on Labour's Policy agenda, implementing a national broadband network to deliver minimum speeds of 12 Mbps to 98 percent of Australians and improving broadband services for all Australians is top of its list.

Senator Stephen Conroy, the newly appointed Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and a member of cabinet in the new Rudd Labour Government said the newly elected government will also “be focusing on the roll out of digital television and radio and restoring media diversity within Australia.”
In a statement to the press on his new position Conroy said his previous position as ‘Shadow Minister for Communications and Information Technology’ has helped prepare him for the role as the Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy.
Senator Conroy has worked closely with the industry to develop policies which he hopes will take "Australia’s communications sector into a new era of digital convergence".
The Australian Computer Society has also thrown its weight behind Senator Conroy.
ACS President Philip Argy welcomed the new Federal Government’s continued commitment to the ICT portfolio and applauded the creation of Australia’s first ministry focused on innovation.
“Stephen Conroy has demonstrated a keen interest in our ICT industry and has been very actively campaigning on key industry issues. We look forward to working with him and Kim Carr to implement many of the announced initiatives – in particular the plan to convert Australian secondary schools into digital schools, as well as the proposed National Broadband Network," he said.
According to outgoing president, Argy, Prime Minister-elect, Kevin Rudd, has acknowledged technology as the driving force of our nation’s economic prosperity and reinforced this stance by including the ICT portfolio in Cabinet.
“The two sweet spots on the innovation continuum are when the broader community makes innovative use of existing technology, and secondly where our ICT industry creates innovative technology. Our views on these issues were outlined in the NICTIA 10 Year National Strategic Vision released earlier in the year," he said.
Argy was also gracious enough to formally thank "Senator Helen Coonan for her good relations with and contribution to, the Australian ICT industry.”

Delivering broadband network top of Labour's list

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