Reed Olsen

You heard it here first – Speed Charades is available for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Check it out at the App Store!

I’ve recently added a new section to my site to feature my iPhone App(s). Speed Charades is the only one in there right now – check it out here

I really like the caption feature that Wordpress has added into their framework. Unfortunately, many themes don’t support the default formatting or image alignment by default. By pasting this code in your theme’s styles.css file, you can easily add captions with Wordpress’ built-in image adder.

.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}

p img {
padding: 0;
max-width: 100%;
}
img.centered {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

img.alignright {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 0 2px 7px;
display: inline;
}

img.alignleft {
padding: 4px;
margin: 0 7px 2px 0;
display: inline;
}

.alignright {
float: right;
}

.alignleft {
float: left
}

David Wilson presenting during the Omniture Web Analytics Competition.

PROVO, Utah – Jan 6, 2009 – Two Brigham Young University Master of Information Systems students think they’ve figured out how to make successful online retailer Overstock.com even more successful, and the judges agreed. Reed Olsen from Salt Lake City and David Wilson from Highland, Utah, took first place at the fall 2008 Omniture Web Analytics Competition winning $10,000 and HDTVs for their project. Olsen and Wilson, who called their team Group X, also won the crowd favorite award.

More than 150 students gained hands-on experience using Omniture’s SiteCatalyst software to analyze online traffic and how consumers shop at Overstock.com during the two-week competition. They then prepared a presentation for Omniture executives on how Overstock.com could optimize the shopping experience and increase profits.

“The OWAC gives students the opportunity to participate in a competition that closely resembles a situation faced in the real world by marketing and strategic consultants,” says Thomas Gosney, student lead of the competition. “This opportunity prepares students for future situations and tests their ability to work in a difficult and stressful environment.”

Group X put in long hours to pull off a victory in the competition. With only two weeks between the competition kick-off and the submission deadline, Olsen and Wilson spent a total of 70 hours preparing their recommendations.

“We have complementary skills that allowed us to work really well together and made the presentation cohesive,” Olsen says.

Of the 85 teams that entered the competition, 22 teams presented in the preliminaries and only four made it to the finals held in the Tanner Building where they presented in front of three judges from Omniture.

The team Lost Cousins placed second and received a $5,000 award. The third place team, Analysts on Demand, received $2,500 for their project.

The Omniture Web Analytics Competition is held twice a year. The next competition will take place during winter semester 2009 and is open to all BYU students.

The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, public management, information systems and entrepreneurship. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,000 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.

(From http://marriottschool.byu.edu/news/release.cfm?article=427)

A couple of weeks ago, one of my good friends and former coworkers performed a survey of “what others think of him“. I thought it was an awesome idea, and decided to poll my family, classmates, coworkers and close friends to find out what they thought about me. This was not an experiment to fish for compliments, nor was it an excuse to be narcissistic. I am merely trying to establish my personal brand. Here’s what I found:

Breakdown of response categories:
Classmates: 6
Coworkers: 6
Friends: 5
Family: 11

Most frequent responses:
Smart: 5
Witty: 5
Apple: 4
Creative: 4

Much thanks to http://www.tagcrowd.com for generating the tag cloud for me, to those that helped out with the survey, and a huge thank you to Scott for letting me piggyback his great idea.

WordPress kept bugging me and telling me that my installation was out of date, and I’ve never really cared up upgrade. However, someone shared the InstantUpgrade plugin with me, and it blew me away!

http://www.zirona.com/software/wordpress-instant-upgrade/

The whole process took me less than 5 minutes. Zirona – you guys rocks.

There will be an intensive four-day training course coming up this January. I’ll be teaching a small portion on the course, and personally know some of the other instructors. It will be a great expereince!

January 20–23, 8:30am–5:30pm

All of the information is here:

http://www.izatt.com/training.html

Here are two little tricks that will help you take screenshots on a Mac like a Pro. (But not a Mac Pro).

Use Command + Shift + 3 to take a screenshot of everything that is on your screen. If you have multiple monitors, it will save separate files for each monitor you have connected. The file will be saved on the desktop.

Command + Shift + 4 will give you a selection tool to grab only the section of the screen that you want to capture.

If you press the Ctrl key with either of these combinations, the screenshot will be saved onto the clipboard. (If you have multiple monitors, only the primary monitor will be saved onto the clipboard.)

Finally, my favorite: After hitting Command + Shift + 4, if you hover you pointer over an active window and press the spacebar, then click, Mac OS will capture just that window or dialogue box. This method also maintains dropshadows and transparency

Enjoy!

Once upon a time, while cranking away at our Web Analytics presentation, Dave tried accessing our main data file. To his horror, he got the following message: “Excel cannot open this file. The file might have been damage or modified from its original format.” We tried opening the spreadsheet in Office 2008 and on the Windows version, but nothing worked. We even tried the “Recovery Toolbox For Excel” and that did absolutely nothing.

 Though we eventually had to recreate all of our data, I’ve recently stumbled upon the fix.

A classmate (thanks Karl!) recently told me that Office Open XML documents (docx, pptx, xlsx, etc…) are essentially zip files containing all of the document information. So on a whim, I tried the following, and it recovered the file!

• Rename the Excel document so that it has a .zip extension
• When prompted, click “Use .zip”
• Double click to open the file
• Choose “Save as…” and save the file as either xlsx, xls, xlsb…the more the merrier

I hope this helps someone out! If the fix works, please add a comment to let me know.

I just found out that my team will be progressing to the final round of the Omniture Web Analytics Competition! The judges will award a prize to the team that has the biggest fan support, so we need as many people there supporting us as we can get.

Here are all of the details: