Meryl K. Evans Profile and Articles

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1). A Tale of Two Regeds: Registry editors
Tech support tells me to type 'regedt32' as opposed to 'regedit' to access the registry from the command line (Start > Run). I question the use of 'regedt32,' but he says to do it anyway. Whenever I use the registry editor, I recall this incident and never look up the tale of the two regs... until now.

Regedt32.exe is an alternative registry editor available with Windows NT/2000 with features of its own.

2). Business Blog Web Design Mistakes
With more companies adopting blogs, we're starting to see what works and what doesn't work from a design perspective. As a cue from Jakob Nielsen's article on the topic, here are thing problems I often find.

Bad headlines. They're frustrating. Some bloggers like to get creative... but creativity can affect search engine keyword opportunities. The important thing is that readers have a hint of what the post is about.

3). Crisis Management
The Internet may have opened worlds for businesses and consumers, but it has also created a public relations nightmare for businesses. Forums, opinion Web sites, blogs, and anything that is publishable can smear a company's name in moments.

Remember, "Yours Is a Very Bad Hotel" presentation that described one customer's bad experience with a hotel chain? Hotels are run by humans.

4). Information at What Price? Exploring fee-based e-content
In pursuit of a paid model for content, many businesses offer newsletters for a fee or ebooks. These models offer pros and cons. Some organizations send out two newsletters: fee and free. The free version has the basic, watered-down contents found in the fee version to entice readers into wanting more and paying for it. But is it worth the time and energy to do this?

Ebooks are also a way for businesses to make money.

5). Invasion of the Blogs: Is a blog right for your business
Lemmings are cute, but dumb. If you tell them to jump off a cliff, they will. Just like the people who start blogs because everyone is doing it. Guess what happens after a little while? The blogs die.

In managing a list of many Web sites, most of which are blogs, I deleted countless sites from the list because the sites and blogs no longer existed.

6). Spaceflights to Earth Began When Planet Cooled
When earth began to cool the spacemen made their trips to it every thousand years or so. The 1st day (Biblically speaking) was the 1st trip, the 2nd day, the 2nd trip, etc. The Andromedans made the first 2 trips then turned the watch over to the Pleiades galaxy, for the 3rd and 4th days. They then turned it over to Sirion and Venus in the Milky Way Galaxy for the 5th and 6th trips (days).

7). The Crystal of Atlantis was made up of Seven Faceted Rings
The Crystal of Atlantis was thirty feet in diameter at the bottom, and five feet at the crown. It did not track by turning, but was faceted according to the mathematical calculations of the course of the sun. This involved a series of cuts so fine as to be almost one solid ring around the crystal. There was more than one ring; there were seven rings all carved with the most precision-like cuts.

8). The Garden of Eden was a Nutritional Experiment to Help With Intelligence
After Atlantis was destroyed spacemen from the planet Edentia started a controlled environment growing station, an experiment to see if superior nutrition would create a more thinking, reasoning human. Eden, the genius behind the garden, stayed on earth until he had stabilized the crops. It was determined that the progress of the evolving animals was much more rapid when eating special foods.

9). The Universe Compared to a Whipped Cream Salad
A simple explanation of God would be as a whipped cream fruit salad. God is the mixture in which all else takes place. The whipped cream (God) is what holds all parts of the salad together. The fruit are individual themselves but without the whipped cream they have little relationship to each other, except that they are all fruit. God is the agent that bonds all together into a finished product.

10). What Is This RSS, XML, RDF, Atom, and Feeds Business?
It's been a long day at work and you're in no mood to cook dinner or go out. Time to count on the reliable pizza delivery guy. The order is called in and he promptly arrives with smokin' hot pizza within 30 minutes as promised. If it were only that easy with a picky family where no one can agree on the same restaurant for dinner. One wants Mexican, another wants Chinese, and another wants a burger and Mexican.

11). Windows Task Manager in English
You use Ctrl+Alt+Del to see what's running on your PC, to close crashed programs and processes, and to check performance. You probably avoid a few processes whose names mean nothing to you, but they're essential to Windows. svchost.exe sure likes to appear all the time and multiple times at that. What's taskmgr.exe? Oh yeah, it's the window you're looking at right now.

12). Writing an Request for Proposal (RFP)
A while back, a potential client provided me with some general details of the writing work he wanted me to do for his company. Then he asked me to send him a proposal.

Proposal?! I panicked as I tried to confirm with him what he meant by that since I had never done one before, at least not as a freelancer.

I must've not really wanted to pursue this opportunity since I didn't bother to do research or follow up with the company after submitting a contract instead of a proposal.