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Be the Match Be a Donor and Save a Life

If I told you that you could save someone’s life with a couple minutes of your time and a big Q-tip, would you do it? Of course you would! That’s all you need to do to determine if you could Be the Match for someone fighting cancer.

be-the-match-website-uncovered

A friend of mine from college has fighting lymphoma for awhile now. This past November, our college alumni helped sponsor a bone marrow match drive and partnered with Be the Match to help make it a success.

They planned the drive to happen during Homecoming weekend at our college. They were told to be happy if they had 100+ people register and test to be a match, they had almost 500 participate!

The other night my family and I were watching an episode of Extreme Makeover: Home Edition on ABC and they also partnered with Be the Match to help find and register donors out of their huge army of volunteers.

If you’d like to have the opportunity and the honor of saving someone’s life, visit the Be the Match website and read about what all is involved in making this difference in someone’s life. Don’t stop there though, be sure and register to be a donor.

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Is Internet Explorer Missing Changes to Pages

Every now and again I’ll work with a computer user that complains about the information they’re seeing on the web not being up-to-date. The problem is with settings in Internet Explorer to decide whether it should try and help you out with downloading new content.

internet-options-refresh

Before the web got all Web 2.0 on us, web pages didn’t update very frequently. Connection speeds weren’t what they are these days and it actually could take awhile for that page you’re looking at to load into your browser.

When your browser downloads a webpage it saves all the individual files that make-up the webpage in it’s temporary Internet files cache. The next time you visited the page, if it didn’t think anything had changed, it would load the files from the cache instead of downloading all the files again.

For the last 5-10 years I’ve been using the web, I haven’t had to worry about my download speeds being an issue, and have just changed my Internet Options in IE to reflect that desire. Just follow these steps:

  1. Go to Tools > Internet Options
  2. On the General tab, look for “Browsing history” and select the “Settings” button
  3. Under “Check for newer versions…” be sure and select the option for “Every time I visit the webpage”
  4. Click “OK”

That’s it! You’re all set. Every time you hit a website it will always check for and download the newest files to your browser for you to see and read.

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Facebook's New Privacy Settings and Search

I’ve now seen a couple of different comments on Facebook now regarding the new search indexing that’s now on by default for all Facebook users. From what I can tell though, there’s a bit of misinformation.

facebook-privacy-changes

I think the big fear is that people think unless you uncheck this “Allow Indexing” checkbox then absolutely everything you post on Facebook will now be available to search engines. From my understanding that’s just not the case.

If you read the text under the settings it says (emphasis added by me):

“Allow search engines to access your publicly available info and any information visible to Everyone“

The only thing Facebook is going to allow to be indexed is that information that’s publicly available from their site already, and anything you’ve set to be available to “Everyone” in your new privacy settings that you can configure for different things: i.e., photos, status updates, links, friends, About me, etc.

I’d recommend going into your Settings > Privacy > Profile Information and specifically decide what you want to share and with whom.

It’s also interesting everyone that narrows this down to Facebook is allowing “Google” to have all this information and they’re “indexing” everything. Folks, they’re opening it up to ALL search engines, not just Google and “indexing” isn’t EVIL, it’s what search engines do to collect the information on the web to populate all those search results you’re looking for online.

I’m not sure about the “Facebook Search Results” section, I’ll have to read up on that one.