Yup. Just click your cursor at the beginning (or end) of the text you want to highlight then press F8. Then go to the end (or beginning) of the section you want to highlight and click there. Everything in between gets highlighted. So simple. F8 marks one point of your highlighted text and anywhere you click again with your mouse marks the other point of it. And don’t worry if you make a mistake because you can just click on the right place again and it will highlight that instead. Seems like F8 keeps highlighting until you copy or cut what you want. Easy peasy. This works for me in MS Word 10 but I’m not sure about the other versions of MS Word. Hope this helps you as much as it’s helping me.

The Internet Movie Database tells you almost everything you want to know about movies, television shows, and actors. In amongst all the information providied on IMDB about a certain movie is a Parents Guide. It’s further down the page, in the storyline section and under the movie’s MPAA rating. The guide is edited by users and not verified by staff so you should, as with everything on the Internet, take it with a grain of salt, but I’ve found it very helpful.

The guide is broken down into different categories of “Sex and Nudity”, “Violence and Gore”, “Profanity”, “Alcohol/Drugs/Smoking” and “Frightening/Intense Scenes”. It varies from movie to movie, of course, since it’s user driven, but it lets you know everything from the amount of cleavage you might see in a movie to that a character held a cigarette in her mouth to whether someone gave another person the finger in the movie. I know there’s a rating system for movies but there’s a lot of variety in the classification of a PG movie, for instance. A movie can get a PG rating for something very mild (in my opinion).

Recently I was thinking of taking both my kids to see Journey 2: The Mysterious Island. It’s rated PG but so is, say, Alvin and the Chipmunks so that doesn’t give me enough information. For the “guidance” part of the Parental Guidance rating, I turned to IMDB. I found a long list under “Violence and Gore” that for some kids might be fine but for my littler guy I knew that giant spiders and insects would probably be the stuff of nightmares. Sometimes, the guide relieves my concerns about a movie that’s rated PG and sometimes it lets me know that this parent is guiding my kids to not see a certain movie because of some of the content. And the great thing about the IMDB Parents Guide is that it’s not there to impose certain opinions on you. It just lays the facts out. Or at least that’s what it’s supposed to do. With user driven web content, it’s always hit and miss but IMDB Parents Guides helps me a lot in decisions about movies (for me too not just the kids) and I wanted to tell you about it in case it’s something you didn’t realize was out there. I hope you find it as helpful a resource as I have.

My husband said, “what show was he in before?”

“It’s driving me nuts trying to remember it,” I answered.

We furrowed our brows for a few seconds and concentrated hard. Then I picked up my phone and googled it. A few days later I had trouble finding the right word I wanted in a conversation. I thought about googling the word I was looking for but then it hit me: the reason I don’t remember stuff as well, besides age and the brain deficiency having young kids around gives me, is probably Google itself. Well, not Google but the ability to search for anything I want instantly (which I pretty much only do using Google). Half of 3/4 of a cup–google it. The song by that guy I heard on the radio yesterday, you know, he had that other song out: google it. It used to be we’d sit and think and make connections about something we needed to know until we remembered it. Or maybe, after much thinking and frustration, we let it go, only to remember it three days later in the middle of a meeting, blurting out “Kevin Spacey” because it finally hit that he was the guy who starred in The Shipping News. Or after singing the same line for two days, I could remember that “I’m gonna take you on a trip so far from here” was from Eddie Money’s Two Tickets to Paradise (What? That’s a classic. That doesn’t mean I’m old just because I remember that song).

So now, while we don’t get the nagging frustration of not being able to reach such things in our brains, we also don’t get the simple, joyous satisfaction felt when remembering the name of every one of the Harry Potter books (younger reference there, hey?) after struggling to find them. And I think it’s not doing our brains a bit of good. It’s a muscle and it needs to be exercised and no amount of Angry Birds is going to make up for trying to figure out the name of that guy or that song or where I saw that actress before. I bet I’m right. Just google it and see.

I received one email from a woman in the United States, who was related, by marriage, to a man lost on the Ocean Ranger. She was doing some research into the Ocean Ranger and asked me some questions. She also said, “I am curious as to your choice to blog about the incident with no ties to anyone on board the rig.” I was surprised by her question and told her so. I added, “I guess if you don’t live here, you don’t realize what a huge impact the disaster had on our province and people. It would be something like (although, of course, on a much smaller scale) asking someone why they would blog about the disaster on September 11, 2001. I would say that any Newfoundlander who was alive then remembers where they were when they heard of the disaster and the dark days afterwards. Every year we remember and think of those men and the families they left behind. There is a memorial service here and their names are read out.” She thanked me for that explanation and we had some more back and forth, her sharing with me her reasons for her research.

It was very interesting to see, from someone outside our province, our memorializing of that day and those men. I remember thinking at the time, that we Newfoundlanders and Labradorians hold the memories of our disasters quite close, but especially disasters involving the sea. More recently, the crash of Cougar 491, on March 12, 2009, is another one seared in our memories. But today, as on February 15 every year (and the 14th too because that’s when the storm started), we remember the men of the Ocean Ranger and the families and friends left behind. Today my facebook news feed is full of my friends who didn’t know anyone on the rig remembering those who were lost, with pictures, and quotes, and poems, and songs. That’s what we do. We remember.

Activision is the maker of the obsession known as Skylanders. In my house, both my boys love them (as does my husband, truth be told). It’s a video game that uses figurines, called Skylanders, that you can put on a special portal that is connected, wirelessly or through USB, to whatever gaming system you’re using. Whichever Skylander is on the portal is the Skylander you play in the game. Each has its own special powers and upgrades and the like. Collecting these Skylanders is something both my sons love but they are hard to come by. Pretty much as soon as a store in town has a shipment come in, they’re gone very soon after. So, when one of my son’s Skylanders, Eruptor, stopped working, it was cause for upset in the house of Chaulk, I can tell you. Now, my problem right away was that the Skylander had come in a package with two other Skylanders. In order to return them, I thought, I had to get all of them, pack them up and bring them back to the store which probably did not have replacements for them. So we’d be down three Skylanders (first world problems, believe me, I know).

I thought I might be able to figure some remedy out to fix Eruptor myself and started searching for a solution online. The one I found was almost too good to be true. Activision has a warranty site and I filled in Eruptor’s model number, my name and address and was told a new Skylander would be on the way. And within two weeks, we did get the replacement Eruptor delivered to our door free of charge. I was amazed. Still am. A company, albeit one that’s making money hand over fist on the Skylanders I would imagine, had given me a seamless, hassle-free customer service experience. And made my children very happy. So kudos to Activision for a brilliant job. And thank you!

There’s a lesson in this. Word of mouth of bad customer service can fly fast but the reverse is true too. Every day is an opportunity for your business to be one that does, or at least, appears to, care about its customers. When you do that, people will talk and they’ll share the good things. The cynical part of me also thinks that we’re so used to getting lost in the shuffle or having to jump through hoops (cliche of the day calendar, anyone?) that we are extremely grateful when someone treats us the way we should be treated. And maybe that’s true. But let’s bask in this positive note today.

Your turn. Any good customer service stories you want to share? Email them to me or post them in the comments here. Or tweet them to me (twitter.com/tchaulk) and I’ll pass them along. Let’s do some positive reinforcement for companies and let them know that when they treat us right, we’ll be loyal and spread the word about their good products and service. And please, don’t make this a place where you bring your bad comments about the company I’ve referred to here or any other company. I know for every good story there’s probably a bad but this is not the place for them. I’m trying to make this a positive post.

(FYI, I hope it doesn’t need to be said but, just in case, I am not paid by any company to give my opinions about anything. This is just me trying to give some positive feedback.)

Well, the beginning absolutely sucked! Out of the box the battery was gone to 0%. It was so low that the Playbook couldn’t even register that I was charging it. A quick Google search showed me that it was probably charging so I hoped for the best. The next morning, the screen was lit up with something other than a charging screen–a big error message. Seems the Playbook needs to update its own software before you can use it and that day all the updating servers seemed to be down. So I checked that my wireless connection was fine (pinged my own website with no problem), checked a few more settings on my end and went to Google again, looking for guidance. I found that a lot of people who had just bought Playbooks had the same errors and some of them had called Blackberry tech support and had been told this was a problem they were working on. So, I knew it wasn’t me at least. About five hours, and numerous failed attempts later, I finally started the necessary update. That went smoothly. Although this wasn’t true for some of the people I met on Blackberry’s “Blackberry Community Support Forums” (AKA, got a problem? Try to figure it out amongst yourselves). Some of those people, mostly in other countries like India, were still having trouble up until yesterday. No one from Blackberry came on the forum to say there was a problem which would have saved a lot of hassle for us, and for their tech support lines, I’m guessing. It seemed to me that customer service from Blackberry was sadly lacking.

So the beginning was so not good but since I got it up and running, I am very pleased with the little thing. It is so responsive, multi-tasking is really multi-tasking with quick ways to get in and out of various apps I have running with no lag. The Playbook comes with enough stuff to make us happy. Hubby loved Need for Speed: Undercover on it and we’ve both enjoyed social media apps, web browsing, reading on it (a real pleasure!), a wee bit of Tetris, and I’m editing Word documents with the Word To Go app that comes with the tablet. The display is brilliant as well. So far, I like it but I know for sure that if that new 2.0 update comes out anytime soon, I’ll wait a while and make sure people are not having too many problems before I update. I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll continue to enjoy the Playbook without anymore big problems. And, when I think about it, I spent a lot of time, as did many, many others, dealing with huge hassles after a couple of updates for the Apple OS versions so anyone can and does have bad days in tech. But I honestly don’t believe you could do the things I’m doing with the Playbook as seamlessly on an iPad and for a small fraction of the iPad’s price. All in all,I really like the Playbook and will try not to fault them the fact that the thing sat on the shelf so long the battery went to 0% and I got them on a day when they were having server problems. But I’ll keep you informed.