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From my limited experience as a freelance writer, I know that the second most effective remedy for writer’s block is creating outlines. The first is taking a long walk. But of course, that won’t be a great idea for a tech related post. So, let’s talk about the importance of creating outlines before starting a creative project.

Call an outline a brief sketch or a schema of the main points and you won’t be off the mark. A rough idea of where you are going to go is important for every kind of project, from organizing your life to organizing your next writing assignment.

Whether outlines should come before or after research is debatable. In my opinion, an outline should serve to organize the research data. Even as we begin organizing all the data, an outline will tell us if we have all the gaps filled in or if we need to do something more. In effect, an outline logically shows us the path from the beginning to the end (and the curves in between).

An outline also helps to shape web writing, as web content ideally is about scannable content with bulleted points and headlined sections.

Creating outlines is actually easy. It starts with a bit of brainstorming and then you can reach for some paper or MS Word. MS Word is the processor of choice for documents and creating effective outlines is just one of its more mundane jobs.

Open A New Word Document & Create An Outline In 5 Easy Steps

1. MS Word 2007 has a special view called Outline that makes the task almost child’s play. Click on the View tab and then select Outline from the Document Views panel. Here you have all the commands to manage your document outlines.

2. The new document has a bullet with a minus symbol. This is the marker for the first heading. Type it in and press enter. Enter other headings similarly. The headings define the main sections of the document.

3. You can write the headings spontaneously. The little up and down arrows on the ribbon allows you to change the order and organize the headings. You can also drag and drop to change the order or to move the text right or left.

4. A document has many levels of detail. To elaborate on the headings, keep adding ideas with the same steps of type and enter. Any heading created can be converted into a subheading. Place your cursor in the sentence you want to make into a subheading and click on the Demote arrow on the Outlining toolbar. It marks down the selected text in relation to the one above it.

Similarly, you can take a subheading one level up by clicking the Promote button on the Outlining toolbar.

5. Using the demote button, a multi-level outline can thus be created in a flash. The lowest level of the outline is the body text. For instance, body text can be written as ideas for dialog or sentences that you want to include under the subheadings. For body text, create a heading or a subheading and then click the double headed arrow (Demote to Body Text). The Promote to Heading 1 on the other side does the exact reverse.

Want To Improve The Look Of Your Outline?

Click on the Home tab and then the Styles panel. For instance, if you want to change the appearance of the main headings, right click on Heading 1 and click Modify to set your own formatting style.

Main topics are formatted in Heading 1, subtopics in Heading 2, and so it continues. You can choose to keep the style by adding it to the Quick Style list.

To change the look of the entire outline, click on Change Styles and pick one from the available Style Sets.

Take A Printout

While brainstorming, it often helps to stand back and look at the ideas from a distance. A printout helps to keep the outlines close at hand. In MS Word, printing outlines works just like a normal print job, but with one tiny difference. You can collapse or expand the headings and subheadings to set the print view you want. After that, it’s all the same.

Or Use It In PowerPoint Too

Outlines can be easily exported to PowerPoint. Each main heading level goes as the heading of a separate slide. The easier way is to save the outline document and then open it from PowerPoint’s New Slide – Slides from Outline.

The second way is to use the Send to PowerPoint command which can be accessed from Word Options – Customize – All Commands and placed in the Quick Access Toolbar.

The internet has lots of benefits but on the other hand, it has its downsides that we all love to hate. The most common one is pop-up ads but if you have young kids who like to surf the net, then as a parent, you will want to protect them from porn sites and any other sites you deem undesirable for such young impressionable minds – such as the Teletubbies.

Well you may not know that it is relatively easy to set up your own internet filter to stop certain websites and pop-up windows from being accessed and shown on your computer – and it already resides on your Windows operating system in the form of the Hosts file. Just adding a line to the file can stop a website or a pop-up window in its tracks.

The Hosts file is located at Windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. The file has no file format so when you double-click on it, you’ll be asked how you want to open it. Just choose Notepad to open the file as a text file. If you are not so experienced in dealing with the Hosts file, you may want to make a backup of this file before you start altering anything.

When it is opened, this is what you will see :

The first thing you have to notice is the line 127.0.0.1 local host at the bottom. That’s your computer.

To block a website from your browser is very easy. Say you suddenly develop an overwhelming hatred for Google and you want to banish them to the internet graveyard. Time to give it the Hosts file treatment!

On the bottom line of the file (underneath 127.0.0.1 local host), just type :127.0.0.1 www.google.com

Save it and close the file. But there are three things to make sure of to ensure this works properly :

Make sure that the file is still called “hosts” (without a file format at the end such as “hosts.txt”). If Windows attempts to assign a file format to the file, remove it.
Do NOT add “http” at the start of the URL. Doing so makes the entry invalid. Just “www” is enough.
You will probably have to re-start your browser for the changes to start working and in some cases, it may take a minute or two for the URL to be blocked.
Now try to access the site in question. You’ll see that you now get a blank page. Totally inaccessible. Every attempt to access the URL just gets automatically bounced back to you with the blank page.

If you suddenly decide you’re madly in love with Google again, just open up the Hosts document again and delete the line you just inputted. Save and close the file, then re-start the browser. Google will suddenly become available again.

So how does this stop block-up ads? Well when the ad comes up on your screen, take a note of the URL that it is coming from and add it to your Hosts file. Save and close then go back to the website in question. You’ll suddenly find that pop-up ad doesn’t appear anymore!

Now you’re probably saying that with pop-up blockers being standard in browsers these days, what’s the point of this? But pop-up blockers are not 100% perfect. I know of one website that overpowers the pop-up blocker and loads up pop-up windows without any resistance from Firefox or the Google toolbar pop-up blocker. So sometimes you need a little more than your browser to stop those nasty critters.

If you do a Google search, you’ll find people who have compiled lists of malicious URL’s that you can add to your Hosts list. This includes pop-up ads, spyware, trojan horses and porn. But I prefer to just add to the Hosts file myself on a site-by-site basis. Creators of these URL lists can get a bit carried away with privacy and end up giving us URL’s that can block sites we may consider legitimate. So I think it’s best to do it yourself.

So if you have essential sites constantly popping ads up at you or if you want to filter out naughty sites from your kids, the Hosts file is a fairly simple way of doing it.

We may never know why runaway Toyotas suddenly seem to be everywhere. The scariest possibility, however, is that faulty computers are driving some victims to their deaths with frightening randomness. Suspicions that an elusive software glitch in computer-controlled throttles is to blame, combined with powerful images and harrowing tales, has tapped into our primal, science-fiction fueled fear of killer computers.

Whatever the ultimate cause of Toyota's troubles, the possibility of a "ghost in the machine" has consumers wondering about the wisdom of trusting their lives to computers -- machines they know are apt to hiccup and fail. Old-fashioned mechanical linkage between gas pedal and throttle somehow seems safer than the new "drive-by-wire" technology, and this new understanding of just how much of a car's activity is computer-controlled begs the question of whether we've been too fast to trade mechanical for digital.

Or perhaps the Toyota incidents are a signal that we’ve passed some tipping point in the relationship of man to machine? Some experts are wondering if our cars have become so automated and easy to use that drivers are now too detached, unaware of the inherent risks in motoring down a highway at 70 or 80 mph and unprepared to regain control if something goes wrong.

Computers fail in unpredictable ways. What's worse, they seem to fix themselves unpredictably, too. Anyone who's experienced a surprise computer crash, followed by a reboot that seems to magically resolve the problem, understands this maddening element of 21st Century life. Perhaps an IT worker at your office will ask you to reproduce the problem -- but often you can't. So your helper shrugs and smiles and slinks away, and you go back to your tasks, left to wonder when the ghost in your machine may reappear.

It's one thing to lose a document to such a ghost, but quite another to risk your life with one.

Toyota steadfastly maintains it has no ghosts. Still, millions of Americans are now aware of so-called "drive-by-wire" technology that until now they'd been blissfully ignorant of. And they are becoming aware that more by-wire technologies -- brake-by-wire, turn-by-wire, etc. -- will soon put only zeros and ones between them and a potentially deadly accident.

"We are talking about this all the time now,” said Jake Fisher, senior automotive engineer for Consumer Reports. “There is a lot of feeling that having no mechanical linkage sets up a situation where the electronics could go haywire and you couldn't control the car.”

While that may be true, it's a little late for the debate. The first drive-by-wire car was introduced back in 1988, and Toyota began converting all its models to electronic throttles in 2002. The vast majority of new cars sold in the U.S. today uses drive-by-wire. And when new federal regulations requiring a safety tool called electronic stability control kick in during 2012, all cars will employ it.

Computers as scapegoat?

Bill Visnick, senior editor at Edmunds.com, thinks that computers are right now being used as a scapegoat in the Toyota incidents.

"For people looking for an explanation, it seems like a handy one,” Visnick said. “You know, 'Those darn things! Computers control everything nowadays.' People complain that technology has taken over our lives. Well, I'm not ready to go there just yet."

He thinks electronic throttles -- which perform without incident millions of times each day -- will ultimately be exonerated by investigators, but public concerns will force the auto industry to take a new look at its digital conversions.

"This will only increase the discussion about what's an appropriate level of electronic control for devices we use in our cars that are tied to our safety," he said.

Industrial design guru Donald Norman, a professor at Northwestern University, a former Apple Inc. designer and author of “Design of Future Things,” is more skeptical of the throttles and the expanded role of electronics in cars.

"Every company has software problems," said Norman.

The number of possible interactions is huge in a car with dozens of computers on board, so it's impossible for Toyota to be sure its cars are 100 percent clean of software bugs, he said.

"No professional software person ever says that. They say there are 'no known bugs' in the software," said Norman.

Furthermore, because unintended acceleration incidents are rare, finding any potential bugs is even harder. "But just because it can't be reproduced in a lab doesn't make it any less serious," he said.

Safer in the past?

Concerns about random computer errors are justified, Fisher said, but it's important to know that mechanical linkages also fail at random intervals.

"A cable could get kinked, the springs could get stuck, the springs could break. A stuck-open throttle could happen with a mechanical failure, and did happen," he said. Meanwhile, he noted, airplane passengers trust their lives to fly-by-wire technology every day, since commercial airliners have long since traded mechanical for digital controls.

That may be, but the idea that a crazed computer could one day send you hurtling madly down a highway at breakneck speed is enough to give one pause about new technologies. Still, the conversion to digital will be hard to stop, or even slow. Already, designers are well on their way to creating computer-controlled automobiles that will literally drive themselves around town.

But even if electronics aren’t ultimately shown to have been to blame for Toyota's surprise acceleration problem, Norman said, the publicity has brought to light a serious problem with today's heavily-digital cars: We're only half-way to our destination.

"There’s nothing wrong with automation,” he said. “Many automated features are very safe; you never have to think about them, like fuel injection. … The problem with automation is when it's really half-automation."

For example, he said, new features in some luxury cars offer help with staying in lane, with avoiding collisions and with maintaining a constant speed. But none of them is fool-proof, and some might be actually make driving more dangerous by lulling drivers into a false sense of security.

"The automation that's a problem is automation that's not quite there yet, that works fine until it doesn't work,” he said. “....These tools are not really good enough to fully protect you, but they kind of work so you start relying on them, but then they fail and you are dead."

The false sense of security is easily observed during bad weather, each time a four-wheel-drive SUV careens past you down a wet or frozen road at reckless speed. Even though 4WD offers little help with stopping, many drivers seem to feel invincible when driving in storms.

"You see them driving without snow tires, they don't have a sense of the road surface, and when it comes time to stop, they are the first ones to spin off the road," Fisher said.

This is a slight variation of what is sometimes called the Peltzman Effect. In the 1970s, economist Sam Peltzman claimed that car safety devices could be counterproductive because they actually encouraged reckless driving. While some of his claims have been discredited, it's hard to argue that today's drivers aren’t more detached than ever from the physical act of driving. That, in turn, can contribute to unsafe behaviors. Some cars make it possible to drive 90 mph while feeling as comfortable as sitting in a living room chair.

Ease of operation=hard to control

This detachment may be playing a role in the Toyota unintended acceleration tragedies, Fisher said. For example, he said, drivers who pilot manual transmission cars are intimately aware of how to disengage their transmissions from the car's drive train by shifting into neutral, something they do dozens of times each day. But many automatic transmission drivers have never once put their car's gear box into the neutral position and have trouble performing that task in life-threatening crises.

Newer luxury cars have even more automation and ease-of-use features. The car most associated with the acceleration problem, the Lexus ES350, is particularly automated, Fisher said. It boasts push-button starting and a neutral position that's out of the driver's normal operation range.

"It's a very isolating vehicle, he said. “That makes it incredibly easy to operate, but some things, like putting the car in neutral, are not obvious."

Norman disagrees with the detachment premise, and instead blames a lack of standardization in the new feature implementation.

"It's really a design issue," he said. "Every automobile has different ways of handling these things. ... We've all experienced a situation where you are in a new car and you want to blow the horn but you can’t find it. It's the same with the on-off switch."

LONDON - A 41-year-old millionaire businessman who nearly died in a car crash eight years ago is leaving behind his exquisite 16th-century farmhouse and lavish lifestyle to move to a mud hut in Uganda and start a children's charity.

Jon Pedley plans to sell his telecommunications businesses, a $1.5 million Essex farmhouse with a 1-acre garden and his furniture to raise cash for African orphans, the U.K. Daily Mail reported Wednesday.

His charity, Uganda Vision, will send troubled British children to Uganda where they will help locals orphaned by AIDS and poverty.

The self-made tycoon has a troubled past that includes a criminal record, alcoholism and affairs. He says a serious car crash in 2002 in which he almost died led him to find God.

"I've lived an incredibly selfish existence," Pedley, of Finchingfield, Essex, was quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. "I've been convicted of crime, slept rough, been an alcoholic, had affairs, and damaged people's lives including my own. I've always put the pursuit of money in front of everything else."

In college, Pedley said, he began smoking and drinking and stealing from shops and his parents. After leaving school, he received a suspended jail sentence for fraud and theft after scams including selling the furniture at a rented flat, the Daily Mail reported.

Pedley married, continued to drink heavily, cheated on and later divorced his wife.

In 2002, he had been drinking when he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a van. He was in a coma for six weeks.

After making a full recovery he said he found religion and gave up alcohol.

'I'm now teetotaler and I try to live my life in a way that pleases God,' he told the Daily Mail.

Even if the "Underwear Bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had exploded his device on Christmas day, 2009, the Airbus A330 would have survived, according to an experiment conducted by a BBC documentary team.

And while the person sitting next to Abdulmutallab probably would have died, the worst injury most passengers would have suffered would have been ruptured eardrums.

"What we tried to do was simulate, as far as we could, what might have happened over Detroit," said explosives expert John Wyatt, who was part of the BBC experiment. "We used the same type of explosive and the same amount and put it in the same position as the bomber."

"The supports adjacent to the seat lost five or six rivets and the metal bowed out, but the structure didn't fail," said Captain J. Joseph, an aviation expert also featured in the BBC documentary, which is also airing on Discovery Channel this week. "The actual aircraft would have remained intact."

On Dec. 25, 2009 Abdulmutallab boarded Northwest Airlines Flight 253, flying from Amsterdam to Detroit. Sewn into Abdulmutallab's underwear was about 80 grams of pentaerythirtol tetranitrate, or PETN, a powerful explosive.

As the Airbus A330 was about to touch down in Detroit, Abdulmutallab allegedly removed a syringe and tried to ignite the PETN and blow up the aircraft. Instead of a powerful explosion, however, Abdulmutallab created a small fire, which was extinguished. The would-be bomber was subdued by other passengers and crew members on the flight.

Using a decommissioned Boeing 747, Joseph, Wyatt and the BBC team set about recreating the conditions of last year's attempted bombing.

They placed about 80 grams of PETN's base material, pentaerythritol, near the 747's fuselage where Abdulmutallab was seated. Eighty grams of pentaerythritol contains about the same explosive power as a hand grenade, but lacks the the hot, sharp metal fragments of an actual grenade that cause so much damage. The BBC set up cameras and Wyatt set off the explosives.

In the BBC documentary, entitled "How Safe Are Our Skies," the controlled detonation of the explosives lasted a scant 0.94 milliseconds, but the results were clear to cameras. Shock waves rippled through the exterior aluminum skin of the aircraft like fat water drops of water hitting the surface of a smooth pond.

The metal was permanently bowed out, and a handful of rivets were punched out, but no gaping holes appeared. The pressurized air inside the cabin would have slowly leaked out of the missing rivets, said Joseph, a non- life-threatening situation. The amount of explosives was "nowhere near enough" to bring down the plane, concluded Wyatt and Joseph.

The aircraft would have survived, but some of the passengers would not have. The alleged would-be bomber and the person seated next to him would both have likely died, said Wyatt.

The passengers sitting in front of and behind the terrorist would probably have been protected from serious bodily injury the the aircraft's metal seats. Most passengers on the plane would have suffered ruptured eardrums as the shock wave created by the bomb traveled through the plane's cabin.

The BBC also used a decommissioned Boeing 747 and not a newer Airbus A330 for the test. An actual test would be necessary to prove this, but Wyatt and Joseph think that the newer plane, which was made with lighter and stronger composite materials instead of aluminum, would have performed even better.

The newest commercial passenger jet, the Boeing 747 or Dreamliner, which has even more composite materials, would likely perform even better, said Wyatt, although he doesn't know for sure.