Hasta La Gadget!

A new feature has been added to Gmail which is going to prove very useful for you particularly if you tend to receive a lot of Microsoft Office documents via email. You can now edit Office documents straight within the inbox. Clicking on a new Google Drive edit option will automatically convert those files into Google Docs, Sheets or Slides and thus making it very easy to edit them.

There are certain advantages of editing your files this way. Since they’re converted into Google Drive files, there’s just one single document to keep track of that’s capable of displaying revision history as well. The document will also become accessible from virtually anywhere since it will be stored in the cloud, and can be selected for offline access as well.

Gmail isn’t the only email service that lets users do this. It is obviously possible to edit Office documents from within Outlook using the Office Online service from Microsoft, but that functionality doesn’t exist Gmail since its a competing service after all.

Nonetheless the folks behind Gmail have come up with their own solution. This feature is going to come in handy for users who need to work with Office documents on the go, so it will certainly be well received by Gmail users.

Gmail Gets Ability To Edit Microsoft Office Documents From Inbox

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Falling oil prices might be deemed by some to be a good thing, but not so for oil producing countries since they would lose a huge chunk of their revenue. Having said that, regardless of whether one is riding an economic boom or is staring down the barrel of a recession, it is always a good idea to make sure that one spends in a wise and prudent manner. After all, isn’t it true that a penny saved is a penny earned? The brand name Sceptre has gained enough traction for itself to be deemed as a budget friendly brand that offers plenty of bang for your hard earned buck, and this time around, they will be offering a 27-inch LED monitor that boasts of 1080P resolution, delivering stunning color and picture detail without breaking the bank.

Otherwise known as the Sceptre E275W-1920 Monitor, this particular offering will be accompanied by a 5 millisecond response time that enables all activity on your LED screen to perform seamless transitions almost instantly. In addition, this particular monitor will also boast of HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs so that it will be able to keep up with the times, connecting to a variety of video and gaming devices.

It does not matter whether one is a hardcore gamer or loves to watch movies all day long, the Sceptre E275W-1920 monitor comes across highly recommended, as the high resolution would be able to let it deliver a lifelike picture, making it ideal for movies, video games or every day usage. Sounds more like a TV (which Sceptre does deal plenty in by the way), doesn’t it?

This Sceptre monitor will be fully compatible with Microsoft Windows 8, and it will also sport built-in speakers, the ability to tilt 15 degrees backward and 5 degrees forward, so that it can offer multiple options for finding the optimum angle to view the screen with ease.

Press Release
[ Sceptre E275W-1920 Full HD 1080P Monitor is now available copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

And not die, but just get really badly injured so I didn’t have to go to work for a really long time.

The neat little detail of being ‘on the way to work’ was because then I’d be able to claim under workcover, so I’d still have money coming in while I was in bed with lots of broken bones (for anyone considering the same, I’m pretty sure workcover no longer covers the commute, so please don’t take this as a suggestion!).

So there I was, a ‘lucky’ graduate with a sought-after job in Corporate Reorganisation at one of the big four accounting firms. And I was miserable.

Within two weeks of starting the job I knew it wasn’t for me.

I felt claustrophobic in my cubicle.

I hated the work — I called it ‘sifting,’ and still recall the mental anguish it caused me to sift through old files to photocopy the important bits into summary files, and I couldn’t see any work that I wanted to be doing. I remember sitting at my desk one afternoon, aged only 23, thinking ‘it’s a long life’ (not even it’s a long day!).

I couldn’t stand the people — one of the partners gave a lecture once on how to manipulate people (his words!) and then explained how he used these manipulation techniques to get his own way at home.

I couldn’t be myself, as a laughing blonde girl doesn’t get taken seriously in male-dominated corporate environments (but let’s not open that can of worms right now).

So one night out in the pub, where I was spending far too much time drowning my sorrows, I revealed the bus-accident dream to a friend:

‘I just want to get hit by a bus on the way to work, and not die, but get really badly injured so I don’t have to go to work anymore.’

Now, I really hope you don’t feel as dire as I did then!

But just in case you sometimes feel like your days are a waste of your time (and your time is your life, right?) I’ve got a few tips to help make your workdays better, one moment at a time.

1. Let yourself free from the cubicle.

I was stuck in the cubicle feeling miserable, and didn’t feel like I’d ever get out of there.

So what action could I take? Get to the gym. Move my body each lunchtime, breaking up the day, showing myself that I could, in fact, get out of the cubicle and look after myself. Get out for a walk around the block every single afternoon. With the sky above, and if there’s grass below, you’re not trapped in the cubicle, even if just for those five minutes.

2. Find your people and be around them.

I spent all day with people that I didn’t like. Then I took the free company drinks and spent the evenings with them as well.

But I love my friends, and the effort made to spend time with them was always worth it. So on the weekends, evening and lunches I really tried to seek them out.

Your tribe will remind you who you are, if ever you forget.

I also found a mentor in the office. Only a little bit older than me but quite a lot wiser, having someone to talk to made a big difference. So just one friend can transform the office for you.

3. Show up and do your best work, to give yourself a shot at better work.

I spent a lot of time sifting through papers that bored me. But there was one manager who I thought was alright, and he’d give me more interesting work when I asked for it. So I made sure to ask.

As the work improves, so too do your days. Do your best, even at sifting, and more interesting opportunities will start to come your way (but don’t forget to ask for them!).

4. Look after yourself.

I went to Camp Good Life Project earlier this year. My favorite quote from the whole weekend was ‘when the sh*t gets real, double down on the self care.’ Take that attitude to enable yourself to live your best life.

Live in a way that lets you take full advantage of the time you have, and take action that supports the way you want to live and feel. Get enough sleep, eat well, exercise (refer to point 1), and try to still your mind in some way everyday.

5. Be yourself, in all your glory!

I didn’t think I’d get any respect if I acted like myself and laughed too much. I felt totally stifled and didn’t know back then how much people like to be around people who are authentically themselves.

You know those people with an easy, quiet confidence? They’re happy with themselves, which gives you permission to be and do and say what you like.

Be like that. Be authentically you and you will become a beacon.

I know not everyone can — or wants to — jump ship and head off into the unknown. But there are lots of ways to escape the misery of the cubicle.

Be yourself, do your best work every day, find a mentor (or just a single friend in the office) and make time for yourself every single day.

Sam knows all too well how hard it can be to fit happiness in when you’re stuck in a cubicle. Now she’s a corporate refugee, helping people live awesome lives!

Find the freedom to be happy, entertain adventure while building a life you love, and connect to yourself. Be happier, have more fun. Right where you are.

You can find her at her online home here, on Facebook and Instagram. Have an awesome life!

Elia Kazan directed virtually back-to-back the greatest American dramas of the twentieth century–by Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams–and helped shape their future productions. In The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, edited by Albert J. Devlin, we see how Kazan collaborated with these and other writers: Clifford Odets, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, and Budd Schulberg among them. The letters give us a unique grasp of his luminous insights on acting, directing, producing, as he writes to and about Marlon Brando, James Dean, Warren Beatty, Robert De Niro, Boris Aronson, and Sam Spiegel, among others. We see Kazan’s heated dealings with studio moguls Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, his principled resistance to film censorship, and the upheavals of his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. These letters record as well the inner life of the artist and the man. We see his startling candor in writing to his first wife, his confidante and adviser, Molly Day Thacher–they did not mince words with each other. And we see a father’s letters to and about his children.

An extraordinary portrait of a complex, intense, monumentally talented man who engaged the political, moral, and artistic currents of the twentieth century. I spoke with Devlin about the book.

How did you become interested in Elia Kazan?

My interest in Elia Kazan is longstanding. I was born in 1942 and reared in central New Jersey. By my mid-teens I was an avid reader of fiction and also aware of a theatre world a proverbial stone’s throw away in Manhattan. Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan were dominant figures, fixtures, if you will, in the newspapers that I read, with theatre reviews by Brooks Atkinson in the Times and Walter Kerr in the Herald Tribune. Williams in particular intrigued me, if only because his life differed so radically from my own as the offspring of a rather conventional family of the 1950s. My general research interest in Southern American literature developed in graduate school and led not surprisingly back to Tennessee Williams. The opportunity to edit his letters for New Directions completed a circuit of sorts and again, not surprisingly, led to Elia Kazan. Research for volume two of the Williams letters entailed many visits to the Wesleyan University Cinema Archives, where Kazan had deposited his papers before writing his autobiography, A Life (1988). I read both sides of the Williams-Kazan correspondence and harbored a thought that the latter’s correspondence would complete another personal circuit. Kazan’s letters to Williams were compelling if only by reason of the way they illuminated the vexed issue of the author-director controversies that surrounded the production of Cat on a Hot Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth to a somewhat lesser degree. But the Williams-Kazan letters were only the tip of a much larger and diverse collection of Kazan correspondence held by Wesleyan. I was hooked by the vibrant voice and the historical riches I found in the letters and in 2005 wrote a series of my own letters that led eventually to The Selected Letters of Elia Kazan, which you graciously plan to review.

Many other biographers and indeed his own film America, America suggest that his upbringing and the Hellenic Diaspora shaped many parts of his life. His letters suggest otherwise as well as a forceful personality, often at odds with the one commonly portrayed. Do you think his letters paint a true picture or was he, even in them, putting on a mask of sorts?

In early correspondence with Cheryl Crawford (Fall 1935), one of the founders of the Group Theatre, Kazan described himself as “carefully impulse-broken” in his youth by a domineering father. He signed the letter “Gadg,” the diminutive form of his well-known nickname “Gadget,” which became a trademark of sorts, as well as a measure of his utility. Much later, in a letter to John Steinbeck, he deplored the “ever-ready compliance” and “adaptability” suggested by “GADG” that had made it “possible” for him “to be the ‘necessary’ thing to any man” (August 27, 1960). There were other “fathers,” if you will, authority figures at once inspiring and demanding, encountered by Kazan in theatre: Harold Clurman, Boris Aronson, and especially Lee Strasberg. And there were such overarching collaborators as Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, whose drama Kazan “interpreted” in what he knew to be “a Playwright’s medium” (6/6/1955). In film a studio system, enforced by Darryl Zanuck and Jack Warner, with whom Kazan worked under contract from 1945 until the 1960s, demanded adherence to the economic laws of the industry, predicated upon the satisfaction of a mass audience, and further hedged by the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency, powerful censors of the day. Kazan claimed, again in correspondence with Cheryl Crawford, that he knew from the first what he “wanted” and “early determined never to accept anybody’s estimate” of himself (summer 1934), but in fact he worked in highly restrictive media, and with authoritative figures, for the majority of his productive years. (Novel writing, which engaged Kazan in the later decades, was a welcome antidote.) Just as often as the letters express a “forceful personality” that strenuously advised revision of classic texts or challenged censors, they also show flashes of deference (especially to John Steinbeck), unusual patience (with Tennessee Williams), conciliation (with Lee Strasberg), and strategic flattery.

Who is Kazan? one might ask, the “forceful” director of theatre and film or perhaps the acquiescent son of an immigrant family (hence an “influence”), whose success was a matter of deft maneuvering. Well, in the preceding paragraph I have tried to give personal and professional context to the several “Kazans” that appear in The Selected Letters. Their interaction, I think, is less a consequence of wearing “masks” than living in real time, which “letters” are well positioned to express and preserve. What is it, then, that drove Kazan into singularity of intention if not his determination to become “A SINCERE, CONSCIOUS, PRACTISING ARTIST.” This formative desire, stated to Cheryl Crawford in 1935, when the Group Theatre found little promise in Kazan’s acting, saw the future director and screenwriter through the inherent strictures of Broadway and Hollywood, through difficult collaborations, especially with Tennessee Williams, through periods of exhaustion, depression, and futility, through the historical and political misfortune wrought by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and through marital woes. The goal of artistic independence was finally realized in writing, casting, and filming America America (1964) on location in Turkey and Greece, Kazan’s second homeland.

Insofar as “influences” on direction are concerned, Kazan dismissed “deep and dark inspiration” in preference for “a definite something–the experience of the artist–what he’s felt, known, remembers–in short experienced” (fall 1935). It’s not a divisible or neatly segmented entity but the sum of a life.

It’s that time again, the time when the cleverest, craftiest moms and dads dust off their favorite Elf on the Shelf Pinterest boards and create magic for their Facebook friends — I mean, their kids! Of course, their kids.

Honestly, it’s adorable and I know the kids love those elves. In fact, this year, my 8-year-old flat-out ASKED me why we don’t have Elf on the Shelf at our house. I don’t remember what my response was, but here’s the real deal: the reason we don’t do Elf on the Shelf is not that I am a Christmas Scrooge or that I don’t love my kid enough or because the elf got lost on his way to our house (which is actually a decent excuse, I should remember that for next time the kid asks). The reason is 100 percent because I’m just plain lazy.

Non-elfing moms and dads, I implore you — think about it: once you commit to doing Elf on the Shelf, you are IN. You are IN for YEARS and YEARS of coming up with new ways to delight your kids every morning for a MONTH leading up to Christmas. I mean, for me? One semi-Xanaxish night of wrapping gifts in full Ninja Santa mode, just waiting to be caught in the act of wrapping and taking a bite out of the cookies we left for Santa to make it somewhat realistic and leaving a note (Ho Ho Ho, your cookies are delicious but Santa is on Atkins this year, Ho Ho Ho) is enough. You want me tiptoeing around the kid’s bathroom, sprinkling cheddar Goldfish into the toilet while perching a doll atop the tank and affixing a miniature candy cane “fishing pole” to his hands? And then coming up with a new idea for the next night, and the next, and the next, and then again next year? I can’t. No.

But I can’t escape the elves on the shelves. I see you, Facebook friends, I see all of you. And I admire you! You are seriously amazing and I can tell it’s fun for you and I can practically HEAR your kids giggling every morning. I got nothin’ BUT love for you. But I’m not joining you. And that’s OK.

Here’s the other thing, and maybe this is unique to me and my degree of neurosis, but pull up a chair here: sure, it would be easy enough to use other people’s clever ideas. A quick Google search leaves me a thousand percent overwhelmed. But where’s the fun in that? I’d feel like a sham every time I bent that elf’s arm around a Barbie doll and posed the pair of them in front of the TV screen atop a model car Mustang for their big drive-in movie date night. My kid might think it’s hilarious, but I’d know the truth. Mommy isn’t that clever after all, mommy just went on Pinterest and stole. Merry Christmas!

Also, I feel like every year the elf pressure gets more intense. More of my friends jump onto the elf bandwagon and I am left feeling like a total jerkface because I refuse to start a tradition I have no intention of continuing. OK. Fine. Maybe I’m lame. But think about THIS: what happens when some NEW weird tradition comes along that we all feel pressured to do? What if the Thanksgiving Turkey on the Shelf becomes a thing and we find ourselves up at night posing a felt-stuffed piece of poultry making a run for it out the back door? What about THAT? Are you gonna do THAT, too, for a month, because I’m definitely not. I’m putting my foot down. I’ll take my kid to see a musical, I’ll take him on a freaking Santa train but I am drawing the line at the Elf and the Turkey That Isn’t Even a Thing Yet But Probably Will Become One and Wow Maybe That’s My Shark Tank Idea, I’m Totally Making That.

Fellow non-elf moms and dads, let us unite in solidarity. Let us look upon the cleverly posed elves in our newsfeeds without judgment and choruses of “ugh.” Let us lift up our hard-working elfing friends and family while cozily sitting on our butts doing all of our Christmas shopping on Amazon. Let us raise a glass to each other in our glorious laziness. We need each other. I am here for you.

Are you here for me, too? Come hang out on my blog or chat with me on Facebook and Twitter.

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