Thursday, January 28, 2010

Couple of Quick Notes

- Lest you think Mike Bloomberg is a pioneer in banning incredibly stupid things, New York - as well as much of the country - once banned pinball. Yes, pinball. In fact, pinball was illegal in much of the country through the '70s, and it was (technically) illegal for kids in Nashville, TN to play pinball until 2004. Kinda makes you look at Tommy a hell of a lot differently, huh?

- Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig, whose First Amendment credentials are generally beyond reproach, criticizes the Citizens United decision. His argument is that the case compares to Rust v. Sullivan, the 1991 case that allowed the government to restrict doctors who receive government funds from discussing abortion. Corporations receive a government benefit in reduced legal liability for shareholders - therefore they are subject to government regulations on speech. And remember my post on the comparison between Morse and Citizens United? Lessig also points out the hypocrisy between the decisions in Rust and Citizens United, noting that Court conservatives were okay with restricting speech they didn't like and allowing speech they considered benign.

That might be worth noting for conservatives - if you support Citizens United, it's awful tough to continue to support either Rust or Morse without trying to claim that corporations actually have more free speech rights than individuals...

- I'm in the process of re-uploading the images for the last two posts. Stay tuned. Anyone know how to save an Excel chart as a JPG?

2 comments:

Mike said...

You could blow up the chart to full screen, do a Ctrl-Alt-PrintScreen to capture your entire monitor, and then save it that way.

-Dave said...

Excel to JPG - my process:
1) Copy the Chart (Ctrl +C)
2) Open Word
3) Choose Paste Special
4) Paste the image as an enhanced metafile (essentially, as a picture).
5) Copy the image out of Word.
6) Open Paint
7) Paste in the image. It helps if you have Paint set to a 1x1 pixel size to start, as then the resulting image will be exactly the size of the pasted content.
8) Save the image as a JPG.

You might be able to go from Excel to Pain, but by default Excel wants to paste a "chart object" with essentially the whole spreadsheet inserted. By bouncing it through Word, you strip that away.

Doing a Screenshot (Alt+Print Screen / Ctrl+Print Screen -- one captures your whole screen, one just the active window, and I can never recall which is which) and pasting directly into paint is also an option. If doing this, I ususally then highlight what I want, cut it, and paste into a new document so I get a properly sized image).