LinkedIn is starting to make inroads into the Australian professional community, and yours truly succumbed this week. So Wired's How-to Wiki on how to get ahead on LinkedIn was timely.
They suggest that you keep your profile professional (save the quirky personal hobbies for MySpace) and that you expand your network by helping others rather than asking for recommendations and introductions:

Want a thumbs-up recommendation next to your profile, but don't want to bribe your contacts? Write a recommendation for someone else first, Alba says. When a colleague reads your glowing review of his business prowess, he'll be more inclined to reciprocate.

If you want someone in your network to introduce you to one of their network, then you need to have something relevant to offer, not just a sales pitch or a request for help:

Utilize social graces with a professional message describing your general interest or an informational interview."When I see your message, I'm looking for something that isn't 'join my Shaklee business,'" Alba says. "I want to see significant reasons for me to open my network, endorse you, and feel confident."

Any Aussie LinkedIn users out there care to share their power networking tips?


Get Ahead on LinkedIn [Wired]

Although choice is generally seen as a positive thing, the New York Times examines how and why closing a few doors can help you take major steps toward moving forward with projects and getting things done. The article begins with a look at a third century B.C. Chinese general named Xiang Yu, who burned his troops' ships and destroyed much of their means of survival on arriving in enemy territory.

He explained this was to focus them on moving forward — a motivational speech that was not appreciated by many of the soldiers watching their retreat option go up in flames. But General Xiang Yu would be vindicated, both on the battlefield and in the annals of social science research.

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The Simple Dollar blog today talked about some research which suggests that buying one item while shopping increases your 'shopping momentum' so you're more likely to buy other items. Apparently once you've made the decision to buy something, your deliberation process for buying subsequent items is less than with the initial purchase.

So how can you rein in this 'shopping momentum'? Well, having a shopping list and sticking to it is one obvious way. They offer six suggestions for how to cope with the temptation to splurge after a period of living frugally. The one that stood out to me was:

"If you make a mistake, don't follow it with another one."

This is a classic - it's shoddy reasoning, but all too often it's easy to say 'well I fell off my budget/diet, I may as well buy/eat another one". You need to accept the slip up and get back on track, rather than giving yourself permission to make it worse.

Got any tips for how you avoid overspending? Please share in comments.

Six Ways to Break Free of the Purge and Splurge Cycle [The Simple Dollar]

Windows Mobile only: Freeware Windows Mobile application Google2GO! marries the functionality of Yahoo! Go to Google apps. As you can see in the demo video above, that means search, calendar, email, RSS, and more are all tied to the Google offerings of each application. It's no Google Android, but if you use Google apps for most of your web services, it looks pretty nice. Google2Go is freeware, Windows Mobile only, requires Windows Mobile .NET 2.0.

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Windows only -You know that big collection of LPs and tapes you don't play anymore? Well the Giveaway of the Day website is offering a free app which looks like a great way to kick off the move to digitising your music collection. Similar to open source app Audacity, Cool Record Edit Pro is a Windows-based app which allows you to record and clean up sound files from a range of sources.

It includes a click and crackle filter for cleaning vinyl records, a noise filter for cassette-tape recordings, and an equaliser to enhance the sound quality of all recordings.

Cool Record Edit Pro supports MPEG (MP3, MP2), WAV, Windows Media Audio, Ogg Vorbis, Audio Tracks and Dialogic VOX) audio formats, and you can convert audio files from one format to another.

The system requirements are: Windows 98/Me/2000/2003/XP, Windows Vista or better; CPU: >750MHz Intel or AMD CPU; RAM: 64 MB RAM or above.

Sounds like a good potential weekend project. If you try it out, let me know how you get on. :)

Cool Record Edit Pro [Giveaway of the Day]

We've seen what you can do with limitless workspace possibilities in our Coolest Workspace Contest, but fact is, most of us don't have the limitless freedom to tweak our workspaces that many of the Coolest Workspace entries did. With that in mind, and with the idea that necessity is the mother of invention and all that, today we're kicking off our first Coolest Cubicle Contest, with $500 to Amazon at stake. So without further ado, hit the jump to take a look at this week's coolest cubicle submissions.

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Weblog Web Worker Daily sits down with Getting Things Done author and productivity evangelist David Allen to discuss his upcoming book and how GTD is more than just lists. To Allen, it's about control:

If you walk into anywhere and want to get more control, all you really need to do is a version of collect. That is I need to sit down and just get everything that has my attention or the attention of everybody in the group I'm trying to get [in] control.

The new book, which Allen describes as "GTD on steroids," provides a higher-level look at implementing GTD in your everyday life, which is what Allen focuses on in this interview. If you've given GTD a once-over but have had trouble seeing the forest for the trees (or the project for the lists, as it were), this interview may give you a better idea of how and why you might want to integrate GTD philosophies into more aspects of your life.

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Web site Wirenode turns any web site with an RSS feed into a mobile-friendly version of that site, perfect for browsing sites on your mobile device when they don't have a mobile-friendly interface. "Mobilizing" any site with an RSS feed is a breeze, and when you're done you'll end up with something like this mobilised version of Lifehacker. You can also use Wirenode to create your own mobile sites from scratch, though I'm not sure how much use most of us would get from that (maybe a start page with links to your favorite stuff?). Of course, you can also mobilize individual pages with RSS feeds with Google Reader style if you prefer the GReader layout but you're not already using Google Reader mobile.

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If you use your cell phone in environments where a blaring ring isn't always the ideal, but vibrate alone doesn't always get your attention, then you'd probably do well to set your phone to vibrate first and then ring if you don't pick it up after a few seconds. This functionality is available on some phones out of the box, but many other phones (ahem, *iPhone*) don't offer this functionality. Weblog jkOnTheRun offers a simple workaround:

Customize a ringtone by adding a period of silence before the actual sound. Then load up up the custom ringtone on your iPhone. Now, make sure you set your iPhone to use the new ringtone and also to vibrate upon an incoming call. When you get dialed up, your iPhone should "play" the silenced part of your ringtone while vibrating.

Obviously this tip works with any cell phone that can vibrate and ring on incoming calls, and it's a great way to take calls discreetly while still using your ringtone when you need it. If you really want to keep your calls on the down low, try assigning an inconspicuous ringtone.

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Reader's Digest rounds up 24 tips for changing your habits to improve (or stop harming) your vision, like this gem for those of us who sit in front of a computer all day:

Move your computer screen to just below eye level. Your eyes will close slightly when you're staring at the computer, minimising fluid evaporation and the risk of dry eye syndrome, says John Sheppard, M.D., who directs the ophthalmology residency program at Eastern Virginia Medical School in Norfolk, Virginia.

Beyond that, the article offers tons of other eye-enhancing tips, from the obvious to the obscure (roasted beets, anyone?).

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• How do I convert my blog entries and comments into a book on-the-cheap?
• How do I get rid of that horrible new carpet smell?
• How to remap Windows XP keyboard shortcuts to standard Apple shortcuts?
• How can I copy all content from one iPod to another?

Windows only: Freeware application Zorro aims to take distractions like flashy ads out of your online video watching experience. It does so by blacking out all content that isn't your video, including your browser window, so it's just you and your video. Zorro is brilliant in its simplicity: it's basically a see-through application window, so you launch it, resize it so whatever you want to isolate is inside Zorro's boundaries, and hit escape to black out everything outside the Zorro window. It could even work as a distraction-stopper for any application you want to bring focus to, like the many distraction-free word processors. Zorro is freeware, Windows only.

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You know you put that phone number in some file on Monday, but you're drawing a blank as you gaze at your Vista desktop. The How-To Geek offers a solution for those who haven't explored Windows Vista enough to learn the syntax of the Start menu's search box. The syntax for finding an Excel spreadsheet, for example, within a range of dates is:

name:xls modified:2/1/2008..2/20/2008

The Geek has, as always, way more information on this technique and a mouse-powered one as well, including the syntax for finding files based on date created or just "date." Got any more Vista-specific search tips for your fellow Lifehacker readers? Feel free to drop them off in the comments.

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Zoho Writer, part of one of Lifehacker's favorite (and underhyped) webapps, has added a bunch of new features, and many of them add to the online office app's appeal to even grizzled Microsoft Office veterans. Most significantly, Zoho now exports to the Office 2007 .docx format, and its creators promise import is coming soon. Also, when exporting to Word formats, headnotes, footnotes, headers and footers will be retained with proper formatting. FInally, a 10-language thesaurus is available for right-click use, and users can create groups of users to share documents with, rather than entering individual email addresses each time. Pretty nifty stuff, and another good reason to check out Google Docs' main competitor.

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Mac OS X only: Dashquit is an elegant response to an niggling issue many Mac users have known for years—that the Dashboard widget screen, while awfully convenient sometimes, can also be a memory-sucker. When activated, the Dashquit widget shows you how much memory the Dashboard feature is using at the moment, and offers a big, bold "Stop" button to shut it down (after confirmation). It's basically a graphical way to perform the terminal commands that shut down Dashboard, which is going to be a lot more convenient for many folks with less memory. Dashquit 3.0 is a free Leopard-only download and uses 50% less memory than it predecessors, but a 10.4-friendly version can also be found at the link.

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Want to read a printed copy of a PDF that's portable and staple-free? BookletCreator is a free PDF conversion webapp that creates documents that can be printed and folded into an easy-to-read booklet. Assuming your PDF is oriented to "portrait" layout and is less than eight pages, you can get what appear to be pretty decent-looking booklets from your document. Got more than eight pages? Tell BookletCreator to split the file into so many pages per booklet, and spread your words and images across multiple copies. BookletCreator is free to use and doesn't require a sign-up.

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Need an on-the-go, no-time-to-iron solution for wrinkled clothes, but loathe paying a premium for spray bottles of liquid wrinkle releaser? The TipNut blog has a recipe for a homebrew version. Pour one teaspooon of liquid fabric softener and one cup of water (distilled, preferably) into a spray bottle with a nozzle that can produce a fine mist, shake it up, and, just as with the commercial stuff, apply it to a small patch first to make sure it won't stain or discolour. The bonus is that you can halve the mixture if you want to save room while traveling, which is when this magic elixir really comes in handy. Hit the link below for more iron-less tips for smoothing out clothes. Photo by sometimesdee.

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Google has unveiled the results of their purchase of JotSpot—the free collaboration tool you could once use to make wiki-like collaboration pages and organize your family—and while the offerings are somewhat slim at this point, it's looking like a promising addition to the Google Apps suite (both free and premium). You can set up Sites to create pages that only users with email addresses on a certain domain can use, or have your page open to edits or viewing by anyone. Each Sites account gets 10 GB of storage, and importing data and tools from other Google services, like group calendars, spreadsheets, Picasa slideshows, and the like, is pretty streamlined. Google Sites is free to use, and requires a sign-up with a non-Gmail email address.

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