You have to have a Facebook account, though. More

The humble lucite commemorative deal toy is the latest American export. More

Hiring managers, attenzione. (And those of you with dusty resumes, take a gander). More

You know those antiquated leather “portfolio” things that certain cheesy businessmen in their 50s tend to schlepp around the city? You know, they’re usually stuffed with like a Hertz Gold Club card and some kind of overpriced pen…?

Well leave it to the brand geniuses over at Lenovo to take what is an otherwise sleek and largely functional machine and transform it into a poop-colored schlock-fest.

Ladies and gentlemen … I present to you, the most elite computing product EVER — the ThinkPad Reserve.

For $5000 USD (and sorry those of you outside of the UK, France, UAE, China, Hong Kong and Canada???) you can pre-reserve a Reserve.

What that gets you is 24-hour non-automated, live customer service; 4-hour on-site service around the world; and everyone who sees you holding that thing assuming you’re in sales.

As they say, always be closing

I know many of you are avid Doostangers, but for those that also use LinkedIn — a new feature I noticed recently. You can now see who’s viewed your profile in a semi-anonymous form (see below). Clicking on “See who has viewed your profile” doesn’t tell you names, but titles and companies, which depending on how you’ve described yourself can be just as revealing as your name. Note you can turn this off. TechCrunch reports that the feature was enabled in mid-May…

• I wouldn’t fear the blinking red light
• I’d always be late
• Breakout-derivative games, i.e. Brickbreaker, would have passed away quietly decades ago. And I would have not learned cheats to said games either…
• Staring at a screen would only consume 90% of my waking hours instead of 99%
• I would never, ever, wake up to the sound of NNnnnnnrngggghhhhhhh-clack (Blackberry falling off), again
• I would only be suffering from mouse-scroll related carpal tunnel
• Possibility of vacation longer than 1 day = nil
• It would be much harder to “look busy” on demand
• I would realize how boring my dinner companions are

More

Suggest if you want to scare your coworkers

• Names of hot coworkers
• Lord of the Ring characters or Tolkien placenames (same goes for Star Wars, Star Trek, Harry Potter)
• Countries people are scared of
• Project Hitler
• Colors (lavender)
• Smurf names (Project Papa Smurf)

Obscure takes on overused categories

• Obsolete greek letters, (i.e. Digamma, Qoppa)
• Associating companies with comparable Sororities/fraternities (Lamda, Lamda, Lamda; Delta Zeta)
• Forget Greek/Roman deities. Krishna anyone?
• European cities spelled backwards (Nodnol, Sirap, Trufknarf — great for healthcare projects) More

After reading the WSJ article about Humanized, a company that makes software that drastically cuts down on mouse use, we decided to give Enso Launcher a spin.

What, you say you already don’t use a mouse at all? Well, good for you, you BSD. Not I. Some programs, I find, just really work better with a mouse. And I still tend to use a mouse to switch between programs, maximize/minimize (yes, I know there are shortcuts).

More

Are you ready for 1 MILLION ROWS, 16,000 columns?

Are you ready for the Ribbon?

Are you ready for smaller spreadsheet file sizes???

What about better, easier pivot tables?

Then you might be ready for Excel 2007.

Well, it sounds like from the articles I’ve been reading on Office 2007 (and Excel 2007) that the program is much better when it comes to data representation and formatting. I tried to give it a test drive but got fed up with the sign up process.

Anyway, the chart and pivot table functionality is supposed to be much improved, but as Heavy Excel Users know the big question is will the keyboard shortcuts remain the same?

More

• Looking to move abroad? Citigroup and Credit Suisse are building out their prime brokerage services in Asia. (Bloomberg)
• Why not to take that job offer from that VC newbie. “The venture business is becoming more like the movie business where a small number of hits are generating the majority of the return,” George Zachary, partner at Charles River Ventures. (NYT) More

Prompted by a recent WSJ article on Google’s online software ambitions, I signed up for Google Docs & Spreadsheets to give the so-called low-end Office a test run.

Being web-based, Google Spreadsheets has one advantage over PC-based Office documents right off the bat, which is that you can collaborate on documents, which is definitely a huge weakness with Excel.

As any Excel user has experienced, when you try to open a spreadsheet that someone else has already opened, the options are usually to open a Read Only version, or to open a Read Only version (and be notified when the user exits), both of which suck, as options go. Of course there’s the equally annoying working in two different copies simultaneously, which inevitably leads to headaches later on.

So what’s a professional Excel user to do?
More

As devoted BBallers know, we’re into helping our readers out. Some may call this service journalism; I’m not even sure what we do even deserves to be called that. Let’s just call them pointers.

In any case, we’ve written about where to start for planning business dinners for large groups here, but we didn’t begin to scratch the surface on what to do once you get there. More

Bring a wine gift to your business meeting to leave your associate with a lasting impression.

More from the analyst training guide.

Favorite tips include the cell phone comment More

SHORTCUT:
Alt + F1

PURPOSE:
Voila: instachart!

FURTHER EXPLANATION:
Instantly creates a chart in a new tab (default option is thankfully not within the same sheet) of the values you have selected. If anyone knows how to change the default from a bar chart to something else, let us know…