What you definitely do NOT need to WRITE a good screenplay?

You definitely, absolutely, positively do NOT need any of the following to START and FINISH writing a good screenplay:

An encyclopedic knowledge of every movie ever written.
Watching ten movies a week.
An intimate knowledgeable of the “lingo” used in Hollywood shoptalk.
Subscriptions to all Hollywood related magazine and newsletters.
Spending thousands of dollars on famous screenwriting workshops.
A Hollywood agent, manager and/or publicist.
An intimate knowledgeable of the way Los Angeles and Hollywood works.
An English, Film Studies or Screenwriting degree from a well-known college.
A college degree of any kind, including a Master’s or a P-h-D.
An intimate knowledgeable of Shakespeare.
Any drug habit.
Smoking cigarettes and/or drinking alcohol.
To be a Christian, Moslem, Jew, Hindu, Scientologist, Atheist or to belong (or not to belong) to any other religion or belief system.
An intimate knowledgeable of the underworld and the seedy side of life.
An intimate knowledgeable of police and court procedurals.
An intimate knowledgeable of doctors and hospitals.
Lots of cash in the bank.
To be homeless and at the edge of absolute poverty.
Lots of free idle time.
An “Oscar material” subject matter.
An idea that has never been written before.
A film that A-List Hollywood actors would die to star in.
To be under 25 or 30.
To be over 40 or 50.
To be any given specific age.
To be a male or female.
To be straight, gay, or of any other sexual orientation.
To be white, black, Hispanic, Indian, Oriental or belong to any of the thousands of ethnic/racial groups.
To have a child or not to have a child.
To come from a large or a small family.
To have been born in the United States or abroad.
A top-notch professional screen writing software.
A Mac brand or any other brand computer.
A blog and/or web site visited by thousands of people a day.
A house in any neighborhood of any city on earth.
The latest cell phone or Blackberry with all the bells and whistles.
A great looking sports car or any given brand of vehicle.
Visiting Europe for your vacations or any other country or spot on earth for any occasion.

Safari - A Handsome Browser with Google Limitations

Mac's SAFARI browser is a great, sleek browsing machine until you want it to accomplish some specific Google-related chores that you could do easily with Firefox and IE.

One great disappointment, for example, is the way Safari cannot display most of the Google Blogger posting controls. You cannot bold or italic your text, cannot spellcheck, etc.

Also, if you are using Google's great online web builder and free hosting service "Google Pages," Safari does not work AT ALL. Period. Google is aware of the pesky issue and a message page recommends the user to download Firefox. Thanks, really.

But I have to note that, if you are using Firefox on a Linux distribution like Ubuntu, the editing function of Google Pages still does not work. You still need IE on a Windows machine to edit your Google Pages. Consumer beware!

What excuse Apple has to let Safari lag so many steps behind in functionality compared to Firefox and IE? For a company that markets itself as "on the cutting edge," it is unbecoming to rely on a browser that is not totally Google-compatible.

Great looks are great but we need full Google compatibility as well.

10th Year - Happy Blogging!

I did not realize this is the 10th anniversary of the invention of blog.

Wall Street Journal observed the moment with a great piece: Happy Blogiversary.

"The spell check on Microsoft Word has yet to awaken to the concept of the blog. Type in "blogging," for instance, and you will promptly earn a disapproving underscore in red, with the suggestion that "bogging," "clogging," "flogging" or "slogging" (unappetizing alternatives all) might, in truth, be the word you seek."

Here are some famous folks and the blogs they read:

Harold Evans
Editor at large, the Week
Former editor, the Times of London
Favorite blogs: AndrewSullivan.com (political pundit for the Atlantic Monthly); MichaelTotten.com (Mideast affairs blogger); HeadButler.com (news and culture roundup)

Mia Farrow
The Editor in Chief: Me
Actress
Favorite blogs: BoingBoing.net (Tracks nooks and crannies of the Web); GPSMagazine.com (Everything about global positioning systems)

Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner
'Milblogging' the War
Spokesman for Multi-National Force, in Iraq
Favorite blogs: "Around here, folks like to read Small Wars Journal (http://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php), Blackfive (http://www.blackfive.net/) and The Mudville Gazette (http://www.mudvillegazette.com/)."

Newt Gingrich
Former House speaker
Favorite blogs: RedState.com (Republican news and notes); Corner.NationalReview.com (conservative magazine's politics blog); PowerlineBlog.com (covers law and right-leaning politics)

Jim Buckmaster
CEO, Craigslist
Favorite blogs: Slashdot.org (one of the first tech blogs); Metafilter.com (community blog anyone can edit); Valleywag.com (tech gossip site); TechDirt.com (popular tech news site)

Avoid Stuffy English

Commercial prose is so open to dragging in the deadwood to the center of your living room and just forgetting it there...

One such oddity I've heard this morning on the radio was the phrase "near impossibility."

People (in America) don't talk like that. They say something is "almost impossible" -- not "it is a near impossibility."

Even worse -- have you ever heard anybody saying "honey, don't forget to take your umbrella against a precipitation activity" (which might very well be a "near possibility"!).

Listen to any weather report and you can perhaps hear them issue an alert against "precipitation activity."

Sometimes even the traffic reporters get in the mood and start talking about an "accident activity on the right shoulder on I-95"... ugh!

Read aloud what you write and ask yourself if normal people talk like that. If they do, you've got great prose. Congratulations. If not, burn what you've written and don't tell anyone about it. We'll all be better for it.

Shuttle's Name Misspelled On NASA Launch Pad Sign

(What an incredible story!)

local6.com

Shuttle's Name Misspelled On NASA Launch Pad Sign
Someone Called Kennedy Space Center NASA To Fix Typo

POSTED: 7:38 am EDT July 13, 2007
UPDATED: 9:25 am EDT July 13, 2007

The first NASA sign at launch pad 39A encouraging the next launch of space shuttle Endeavour at Kennedy Space Center was misspelled and noticed by someone looking at the craft.

When the shuttle rolled out from the Vehicle Assembly Building Wednesday, a giant "Go Endeavour" sign was put on a fence in front of the craft.

However, one item was missing from the sign: the "u" in Endeavour.

Someone spotted the mistake and called KSC to fix it, WKMG-TV reported.

NASA scrambled someone out to pad 39A with a new sign that has orbiter Endeavour's name spelled correctly.

A photo with the correct spelling was also posted on the Kennedy Space Center's Web site.

The orbiter is named after HM Bark Endeavour, the ship commanded by 18th century explorer James Cook; the name also honored Endeavour, the Command Module of Apollo 15. This is why the name is spelled in the British English manner, according to Answers.com.

Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.

Importance of Keeping Your Work Close to Your Vest

It happens all the time...

A writer working on his or her first script, first novel, thinks it would a "great" idea to "share" it with a spouse, lover, child, friend, parent, co-worker or neighbor...

And the result is an unintended punch to the gut. The work stops right there. Enthusiasm and joy is replaced by doubts, second thoughts and eventually depression.

Why? Do our loved ones mean to harm us? Of course not.

Do they have an "ulterior motive" or a "sinister agenda"? Absolutely not.

But this is their problem -- they are NOT writers.

So they have no idea about the sensitive "mental and spiritual soup" in which our ideas and most precious creations ferment, multiply, and take shape as stories, scripts, articles and novels. It is a mysterious process, part "science" but mostly magic. That soup can be soured very easily by criticism while we are still adding crucial ingredients to it.

A lot of people think to give a "feedback" is to point out to the things that are missing. We all have that impulse to come across as "thoughtful" and usually the way we try to come across as thoughtful is to point out at what's "missing" or "wrong" with a project.

Even a casual and well-meaning comment like "I think that's been done before" is usually enough to dampen the spirits of a writer and mortgage her determination to press onward.

That's why I strongly recommend all my writer brothers and sisters not to show their hands too early, and not to ask their loved ones to read their stuff until it is 100% DONE. Only then they can read it if they please and enrich our work with their thoughful insights and learned suggestions.

But until then you have to protect your work just like a mother hen protects her chickens or a banker protects his vault.

Value of a Web Site ~ "Page Views" or "Time Spent"?

Nielsen rating company has shifted from the traditional “number of page views” to “time spent viewing a page” to measure a web site’s commercial worth.

This is a decision that will have a serious impact on all advertising companies that determine their web advertisement rates on the basis of such "objective" metrics.

The new Ajax technology seems to be the main culprit why Nielsen felt the need to adopt this new criterion. Ajax allows refreshing the web content without refreshing the page view. You must have noticed the way a new mail appears in your email window without re-loading the page, as we all used to do in the past.

Another reason why the traditional “page view” is considered losing its relevance is the streaming video sites like YouTube where visitors spend a lot of time on a single page watching one video clip after another.

On the basis of this new measuring stick, Nielsen has announced AOL as the winner of May’s “most popular” web site, with a total viewing time of 25 billion minutes, followed by Yahoo at 20 billion minutes. But by page view alone, AOL would have ranked sixth.

Google, although ranks 3rd by page views, dropped to fifth in terms of time spent since people leave Google screen quickly after a search is completed.

But I believe this new criterion has a serious flaw in this day and age of tabbed browsers.

What if you visit a site on one tab, then open another tab and go to another site, then do it for a third or fourth time? I find myself doing precisely that all the time.

What happens to the site left open for 20 hours on a forgotten tab? Does that mean that I have spent 20 hours on that site? Of course not.

How come Nielsen missed such a simple point is beyond me. I’m sure major advertisers are already grappling with this real issue.

Ambiguous Envelope Teaser

Envelope teasers are very crucial in direct mail since the prospective customer has about 3 or 5 seconds to decide whether to open your envelope or chuck it into the trash bin.

Here is a weak and rather annoying envelope teaser that would've directly gone to the trash basket if I weren't a professional copywriter who likes to meditate on these things and tries to learn something new everyday about this fascinating business of direct mail:

"Is This Little-Known Energy Company America's Next Major Uranium Producer?"

My first reaction is:

"You are asking ME? How the heck would I know? YOU are supposed to be the expert and yet you don't know whether THIS [whatever it is] little-known company is the next big thing on the horizon or not?"

As I read the envelope teaser I'm wondering if THIS is a way for me to make money OR provide free information to someone who doesn't quite has the skinny on this "little known company" yet...

Who knows, perhaps this "little known company" is little known for a very good reason indeed!

This teaser has already lost me with its indecisiveness.

Then comes the next line:

"Time-Sensitive Report. Open Immediately."

No. Sorry. I won't. Because who ever wrote the copy is not sure of this company at all. If the publisher is not sure of his/her facts, how can I trust him/her to lead me?

Why didn't this teaser really teased the heck out of me and did its job with no holds barred by saying something like:

"Little known company... about to explode (guaranteed!) as America's next major uranium producer. Limited-time opportunity to get in on the action before the little known company is not so anymore..."

Now, THAT would have perked my attention because of the firmness of the voice and the strength of the promise.

If you want me to open that envelope DO NOT ASK ME PUZZLES and DO NOT MAKE ME THINK.

If you are trying to write a teaser don't be halfhearted or shy about it. Make sure you are really TEASING instead of posing intellectual puzzles with no answers.

No Copy is Better Than Lazy Copy

I have received this auto insurance offer by mail from a very well known wholesale merchandise company that reads:

"Save up to 20%..."

"As a XXXXX Member, you are now eligible for Money-Saving Auto Insurance RATES OF UP TO 20% OFF..."

My heart sank. Because XXXXX is a good company and they usually know what they are doing.

So how come they approved this lazy piece of copy that will not work for most of their prospective customers?

20% off OF WHAT for God's sake?

What is the base line here? What is our frame of reference?

How can the XXXXX officials know they are saving me "up to" 20% if they have no idea what my CURRENT rate is?

How do they know that their rate is not actually 20% MORE than what I have now?

What they are REALLY saying is "call us now and we will talk about it."

No sir, I will not call you now or later because your copy does not make sense and it also insults my intelligence. And if I were you I would hire a new copywriter right away.

If, however, they did quote a real person with real savings, then, who knows, I might've given them a shot.

A much better copy that read something like...

"THEY SAVED...

Our Member No. 123456 John Smith has saved 19.7% from his car insurance. And so did Jane Doe -- she couldn't believe it when we proved to her that she could save 18.5% over her existing rate.

How about YOU?

Wouldn't you like to find it out with a single toll-free phone call?"

Then I might very well have given them a call. But not like this.

When consumers are treated like idiots they recoil. The only ones who won't will probably be the ones in desperate credit or financial problem. But are those the kind of customers that big corporations are trying to attract? I don't think so.

Good customers deserve good copy.

That's why I think "no copy" is much better than lazy and unintelligent copy.

Why?

Because when you do not send out any tired old mail pieces like this, you at least do not create question marks about the quality of the decisions made within your company. Your profits might remain level but your reputation and brand image would be intact.

5 Principles of "Freakonomics"

I'm reading a book so provocative and amazing that it is challenging many of the "self evident" truths that I've held for quite some time now.

For example, did you ever consider that the late-90s precipitous drop in crime rates in large American cities, including NYC, could very well be a delayed effect of Roe vs. Wade decision? WOW!

Steven Levitt (Univ of Chicago and MIT) is obviously not your typical economist since he asks questions like "what are the similarities between the way sumo wrestlers and school teachers act?"

Here are the 5 tenets on which "Freakonomics" rests:

1) Incentives are the cornerstone of modern life.

2) The conventional wisdom is often wrong.

3) Dramatic effects often have distant, even subtle, causes.

4) "Experts" -- from criminologists to real-estate agents -- use their informational advantage to serve their own agenda.

5) Knowing what to measure and how to measure it makes a complicated world much less so.

When we write and design information, isn't that what we all are trying to achieve -- to make a complicated world less so?

Even in sales, you won't sell anything unless you can reduce a list of complicated features into a few solid benefits, correct?

I recommend this book to all my readers who would like to understand not how the modern world SHOULD work, but how it really DOES.

If you like a "tuneup from the neckup" (as Zig Ziglar used to say) you'll enjoy this gem of a book.

The Official Freakonomics Blog

New York Times Magazine Freakonomics Column

Missing Fourth Element in Basic Screenwriting Paradigm

You must have read the following "Basic Screenwriting Paradigm" a few times too many:

1) Get the cat on a tree.
2) Get the cat in trouble.
3) Get the cat down the tree.

This is of course very true. That's your basic bare-bones Aristotelean "3-Act Structure." It has not changed for the last 2,300 years or so.

However, it is not complete.

You also need a Fourth Element: the emotional reaction of your protagonist to the Step #3.

Without that fourth element, a "dramatic" movie rapidly devolves into a video tutorial of how to rescue a cat from a tree.

Don't get me wrong: video tutorials are great. They are fantastic tools of information design. But they are not dramatic stories for which the movie audience spends hard-earned cash.

As a creator, you have to be very clear on whether your are a documentary or a dramatic writer.

So here is the corrected basic paradigm:

1) Get the cat on a tree.
2) Get the cat in trouble.
3) Get the cat down the tree.
4) Get the hero react to the cat's rescue.

Or, for even a deeper dramatic twist:

1) Get the cat on a tree.
2) Get the cat in trouble.
3) Show the cat either getting down or not getting down the tree.
4) Get the hero react to the previous step.

Happy 4th and an E-Card Utility for All Occasions

Happy 4th of July to all my American readers!



Here is an article by Peggy Noonan, one of my most favorite writers, that expresses the sentiments of the day very well:

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110010269

In case you're wondering where I got the image from, here is my source (thanks to my client and reader Steve G.) :

Click here for iCards

It is a great utility to send quick, tasteful, and free postcards through e-mail.

Enjoy!

Great Companies Respond Quickly

I always believed that speed is an essential part of many successful projects in life. Sylvester Stallone wrote his classic “Rocky” in four days. Jack Kerouac wrote his unforgettable “On the Road” in three weeks. Friedrich August Kekulé discovered the benzene ring in a dream, over a single night.

Yes, “haste” also leads to “waste” but the kind of “speed” I’m talking about is not haphazard, disoriented, Brownian motion. It is a disciplined, focused, sincere movement forward towards a target with no reservations, no inertia. It’s an arrow flying at mach 2.

Recently two companies impressed me by the speed with which they’ve responded to two postings on this very blog. Given the fact that this is still a relatively new blog with not even 100 postings on it yet, I was delighted with the response. I found myself meditating about the serious care with which these successful companies monitored their brand image.

The companies are FeedBlitz (the RSS and Blog-to-E-Mail company) and Jajah (Internet phone company). They both quickly responded to either a complaint (Jajah) or a piece of inadvertently missing information (FeedBlitz).

Their responses was an inspiration for me in my own line of work to treat my own clients with the same speed and transparency that they all so richly deserve. Jajah and FeedBlitz light the way to our corporate future in this age of instant communications and 60-second news cycle. Kudos to them both!

Joel Siegel (1943-2007)

We have lost film critic Joel Siegel to colon cancer. May he rest in peace.

I have never met Joel Siegel but in a sense I knew him better than a lot of people that I've met in person.

How come? Because we shared a passion for arts and the movies. Because I also loved movies for their own sake, for their own beauty and exhilaration, since I was a little kid.

Just like Joel, I also always enjoyed talking about movies, thinking about movies, and meditating on the art of script writing and movie making on a daily basis. It is not a career choice. Not the result of a cost-benefit analysis. It is love, strictly.

In that sense, I knew Joel Siegel and knew him quiet well. I exactly knew where he was coming from.

I used to watch Joel occasionally on ABC News' "Good Morning America" show where he was the entertainment editor. But I also frequently came across his writings on the Internet and enjoyed his vast knowledge and true passion for the moving images.

Hollywood has lost a kind, good-hearted friend. But Joel lived well. He did what he enjoyed doing most. We should all be just as lucky.

Bad "Information Design" Leads to Medication Errors

Why are there so many medication errors in the nation's hospitals?

The American Nurses Association (ANA) researched that question and came up with interesting answers.

It turns out such "information design" related mistakes like mislabeled medication or poor hand writing contribute to such errors more than we thought.

The survey of 1,039 nurses across America revealed the following factors responsible for injection-related medication errors:

1) Too rushed or busy environment (78 percent).
2) Poor or illegible handwriting (68 percent).
3) Missed or mistaken physician's orders (62 percent).
4) Similar drug names or medication appearance (56 percent).
5) Working with too many medications (60 percent).

Items 2, 3 and 4 can certainly be avoided by a more careful and user-friendly "information design" program.

As I always say: good information design is not a luxury but a vital necessity. Not only poor information design leads to inefficient and unhappy lives, but sometimes people lose their lives altogether because of it.

For more on this study, please click here.

Plot Points - SERAPHIM FALLS (2006) , APOCALYPTO (2006), SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

SERAPHIM FALLS (2006)

Starring: Liam Neeson (Carver), Pierce Brosnan (Gideon)
Directed by: David Von Ancken
Writer: David Von Ancken & Abby Everett Jaques

PROTAGONIST GIDEON’S DILEMMA: He is trying to leave his old life behind by Carver won’t let him..

PROTAGONIST'S DESIRE: To forget about the past and get on with a new life.

PROTAGONIST'S OBSTACLE: Carver on his tail with a posse of five.

ESTABLISHING SHOT: Snowy mountain peaks. “Ruby Mountains 1868.”

INCITING INCIDENT: He is shot at the shoulder by a sniper.

PLOT POINT 1: Gideon takes out the bullet in his shoulder. We know he will survive.

MID POINT (REVERSAL) EVENT: N/A

PLOT POINT 2: Through a flashback, we learn why Carver is mad at Gideon, who used to be a Union officer during the Civil War.

3rd ACT RESOLUTION: Final confrontation at the desert. The two exhausted men decide to bury the hatchet and go their own separate ways.

-----------------------------------------------------------

APOCALYPTO (2006)

Starring: Rudy Youngblood (Jaguar Paw), Dalia Hernández (Seven), Jonathan Brewer(Blunted), Morris Birdyellowhead (Flint Sky), Carlos Emilio Báez (Turtles Run)
Directed by: Mel Gibson
Writer: Mel Gibson & Farhad Safinia

PROTAGONIST JAGUAR PAW’S DILEMMA: He is afraid of death but he has to face and overcome his fear to save his wife and son from enemy hands.

PROTAGONIST'S DESIRE: To live the good life with his family.

PROTAGONIST'S OBSTACLE: Slave traders capture him to sell to the Mayan temple..

ESTABLISHING SHOT: A tapir hunt by the local Indians in a South American jungle. Jaguar Paw is the chief’s son.

INCITING INCIDENT: Jaguar Paw and friends meet another tribe in the jungle who are migrating away. Something happened to them and they are scared..

PLOT POINT 1: Jaguar Paw’s village is ambushed by slave traders and all are taken captive.

MID POINT (REVERSAL) EVENT: Jaguar Paw is saved from the religious execution at the temple by the solar eclipse.

PLOT POINT 2: Jaguar Paw defies the odds and runs away from his captors, launching a long chase.

3rd ACT RESOLUTION: Jaguar Paw and family survive the slave traders only to be introduced to a new reality down at the beach – Spanish galleons.

-----------------------------------------------------------

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)

Starring: Tom Hanks (Captain John H. Miller), Tom Sizemore (Sergeant Mike Horvath), Edward Burns (Pvt. Richard Reiben), Barry Pepper (Pvt. Daniel Jackson), Adam Goldberg (Pvt. Stanley Mellish), Vin Diesel (Private Adrian Caparzo), Giovanni Ribisi (T-4 Medic Irwin Wade), Jeremy Davies (Cpl. Timothy P. Upham), Matt Damon (Private James Francis Ryan), Ted Danson (Captain Fred Hamill), Paul Giamatti (Sergeant Hill), Dennis Farina (Lieutenant Colonel Anderson)
Directed by: Steven Spielberg
Writer: Robert Rodat

PROTAGONIST JOHN MILLER’S DILEMMA: He is a high school English teacher but he has to serve his country at D-Day..

PROTAGONIST'S DESIRE: To find Private Ryan and go back home to his wife.

PROTAGONIST'S OBSTACLE: They don’t know where Ryan is. They have to find him somewhere in France while fighting the Germans.

ESTABLISHING SHOT: A much older James Ryan visits the military cemetery at Normandy, France to flashback to the D-Day.

INCITING INCIDENT: Army Chief Staff Gen. George C. Marshall decides that, since all his three brothers are killed in action, Private Ryan must be found and safely delivered back to his mother in Iowa.

PLOT POINT 1: After gaining a foothold at Omaha Beach, Capt. John Miller is issued his orders to find and take Private Ryan safely back home.

MID POINT (REVERSAL) EVENT: Private Ryan refuses to leave his squad and go back home.

PLOT POINT 2: Germans attack the strategic bridge that Ryan’s squad, together with Miller’s squad defend.

3rd ACT RESOLUTION: Miller, while dying, whispers to Ryan’s ear and asks Ryan to “earn it” so that the death of all those who perished to save Ryan won’t be in vain. Back to our own day, his wife assures Ryan that he is a good man and he indeed lived a good life and “earned it.”

5 Tips for Email Marketing Success

Here are the 5 tips that e-mail marketing guru David Atlas suggests for your success:

1) Use CertifiedEmail provided by Yahoo and AOL.

"ROIs in the 300 percent range and up are common because consumers trust the email."

2) Use a dedicated IP

"Having a dedicated IP lets you establish a sending reputation."

3) Use the same "From" Address

4) Tell Your Customers What to Expect.

"State your mailing policies up front. Let consumers know you are using CertifiedEmail, if you plan to. Run an education campaign telling them "here's how to confirm a legitimate email: Look for the blue ribbon envelope icon.""

5) Survey Your Customers.

And here is a sixth one from me:

6) Never ever allow a spelling error in your e-mail, especially in your SUBJECT line. That pretty much destroys all your credibility as a marketer before the user can even read the body of your message.

Headlines - One Hit, One Miss

Best headlines provide a link between the verb and the subject of the sentence. Try to come up with verbs that also define the subject in some important way.

In Object Oriented Programming (OOP) jargon, the "method" should be an "attribute" of the "object" itself.

For example, here is a great headline from Wall Street Journal (June 25, 2007):

"Gazprom Pipeline Plan May Fuel Worry."

"Fuel" is what flows from a pipeline and it also has a double meaning of "exacerbating."

But here is a miss from the same issue:

"Milk-Price Rise Expected to Steepen in July."

"Steepen" is not a verb intrinsically related to milk. But milk, when overheated, boils over in a froth.

So what about:

"Milk-Price Rise Expected to Froth Over in July"?

That would have been perfect in my judgment.

UBUNTU's "Virtual Desktops" End Multi-Window Clutter

Remember how you have a single desktop on a Windows machine and that everything runs there?

Do you also remember how annoying it can get when you have 2, 3 or 4 programs open at the same time, with many windows overlapping and hiding one another? Navigation can become quite a problem when you are multitasking on Windows.

Not so with UBUNTU Linux, thanks to the Workspaces you can create and individually name.

Each Workspace is a Virtual Desktop that displays only those application windows and/or documents that you place there.

You can have up to 36 such virtual desktops, arranged in up to 16 rows. You can click and switch to anyone of them without the clutter of a typical Windows desktop.

To configure your workspaces:

1) Right-click on a workspace square displayed on the bottom-right of your UBUNTU desktop.

2) Select Preferences to display the Workspace Switcher Preferences screen:



3) Select the number of workspaces you need and the number of rows to display them.

4) If you need to name them individually, double click on each desktop placeholder displayed in the list and type in a title. Click the "show workspace names" checkbox to display these titles inside the workspace button instead of a miniature representation of the desktop.

5) Click Close.

Now you can, for example, save all your writings on a workspace named "Writing" and keep all your images on another workspace named "Images."

When you click one, you will see only those items that were assigned to that workspace (virtual desktop) and nothing else. This way you will avoid clutter for good.

Two Useful Tips:

1) When you press CTRL and roll the middle wheel of your mouse, you automatically scroll from one Workspace to another.

2) When you have your Internet browser open in UBUNTU, right click and select "Move to Another Workspace" option. Then select the workspace in which you want your browser to display. This way all your web pages will display only in that special workspace and leave the other workspaces uncluttered.

Consumer Alert - JAJAH Charges Even When the Call is NOT Connected!

I love JAJAH (www.jajah.com) Internet phone service. You do not need to download anything and when you call, your physical phone rings which you pick up and start to talk.

JAJAH is very cheap, has great voice quality and also has many other useful features.

Top two I like:

1) You can have your one one-click-call phone book so that you do not need to enter the frequently-called numbers from scratch every time.

2) You can also save the shortcut of any call on your desk top, or send it to your cell phone so that you can initiate the call by just clicking the icon! Smart.

However, lately I have discovered a nasty feature:

You call someone. The phone rings and nobody picks it up. Or, your call cannot be connected for one reason or another.

Well, JAJAH still charges your account for it! The amount is not that much. Just nine cents. But still -- WHY?

I have written to JAJAH about this obvious software malfunction and haven't heard from them yet.

If you are using JAJAH, I'd also recommend you to do the same and get in touch with the company. If they hear from enough number of people perhaps they would correct it.

And if you are not yet a JAJAH member but consider becoming one, do so while being aware of this serious billing issue.