Friday Five

The Excuse

I was actually working Saturday, so I couldn’t get my brain to understand that Friday was Friday.

The Week

I found myself in Tampa this week, which, as I’ve mentioned before, is usually a good chance to see friends. Of course, having said that, the only friend I generally tend to see out here is Michael – although that’s not bad because it usually involves a trip to the International Beer Garten. I was also staying in downtown, which is really just all commercial district. At some point I need to make it over to Ybor, which is the “fun” part of town.

The Exercise

Huh

The Restaurant

They serve food, well bar food and pizza, so I’m going to give props to the International Beer Garten. They have about 40 taps, and a huge bottle selection, meaning regardless of your taste in beer you’ll find something – unless of course you drink yellow fizzy stuff. When I was there on Wednesday they had a rep from Stone Brewery there, which was a tad weird – in Tampa meeting up with a rep for a San Diego brewer. Their food is normal bar food, although I’m here to tell you their pizza is out of this world after about 6 beers. It’s well north of Tampa, but worth the trip if you’re a beer geek.

The Travel Note

If you travel at all check out TripIt. It’s a fantastic service that tracks all your travel information. Uploading your trip is as easy as forwarding your confirmation email to plans@tripit.com. I’ve found that it can read just about everything, and does a great job of collating data together. For our Australia trip I went San Diego to Tampa to Houston to Brisbane to Houston to Home, on two different airlines. TripIt was able to put everything together into one trip. If you’re willing to pay for the pro version, you’ll get text alerts 24 hours before your flight, 4 hours before your flight, and upon landing. It’s great being able to walk off the plane, open up my phone, and see the text with my gate information.

The Five

Karin asked me the other day how to send an email with a shortcut key. She’s pretty savvy, but, like most users I’d say, only knew about the normal ones (Ctl-C, Ctl-X, Ctl-V, Ctl-Z (undo), Ctl-Y (redo)). So here’s five shortcut keys on Windows everyone should know.

1. Ctl-Enter – sends an email from Outlook.
2. Windows Key-E – opens Explorer
3. Windows Key-D – shows the desktop
4. Windows Key-Arrow – In Windows 7 this moves a window around
• Up arrow – Maximize
• Down arrow – Restore or minimize
• Left arrow – pin to left side of screen
• Right arrow – pin to right side of screen
• The left and right are especially nice if you need to see two windows easily on one screen
5. Windows Key-R – brings up the Run menu (not really needed outside of Windows XP)