The Mag: Planes, Bikinis, Accidents, MS-Word Shortcuts etc?

[andrepieterse]

I feel uncomfortable receiving pictures of woman in bikinis in my Microflight mag. That's not what I am subscribing to.

I am not averse to woman in bikini's. I can subscribe to a woman in bikini mags for that, or check out some photos on internet.

When writing an article about flying or aircraft there are many pictures of beautiful and sexy aircraft we can use.

A picture of a girl in a bikini seem out of place alongside an article about airplane stuff.

Regards

[Dusty Eagle]

It seems some of the guys want to see girls in an aviation magazine, and the girls want to see aviation articles.

Well, please both. Do a monthly write up on a female pilots within our ranks.
That should fill a few pages.

[DarkHelmet]

I am also against the pics of scantily clad woman in our aviation mag. I am torridly busy with work and the "Pink Lady" is not getting all the attention she deserves!

Content is king though! Thanks for your glorious efforts to try and spice things up Alan! Your efforts are noted and thanks so much for putting this together for every edition!

A Suggestion: We have a wide selection of skills in our community, Tailspin, Morph, Triker and myself (to name a few) are in IT. Would an off topic tips page be beneficial?

For instance:

Useful tips to make your life easier:

IT - Did you know these shortcuts?


Select with a difference

​There are three ways to select TEXT is MS Word.

1. Use the arrow keys while holding SHIFT;
2. Using the mouse and click + drag; or
3. Hold in Alt before you click and drag with the mouse.

The third option is convenient to select blocks of text and/or spaces without selecting entire lines of text!

Elusive Characters

​MS word has some hidden talents when it comes to special accent characters. One can learn the ascii table to insert special characters, but there is an easy way to do it:

Press Ctrl and the key that most closely resembles the accent needed.
Release the two keys pressed in Step 1.
Press the character you want to place the accent on, and the accented character will appear., Press Ctrl+that character and then the letter you wish to apply the character to. For example: to place a on an e, press Ctrl+Shift+6 release the keys and type e.

Ctrl + ` (Accent), the letter àèìòùÀÈÌÒÙ
Ctrl +’ (Apostrophe), the letter áéíóúýÁÉÍÓÚÝ
Ctrl + Shift + (Caret), the letter âêîôûÂÊÎÔÛ
Ctrl + Shift + ~ (Tilde), the letter ãñõÃÑÕ
Ctrl + Shift +: (Colon), the letter äëïöüÿÄËÏÖÜÙ
Ctrl + Shift +@, a or A å, Å
Ctrl + Shift + &, a or A æ, Æ
Ctrl + , (Comma), c or C ç, Ç
Ctrl + / and o or O ø, Ø
Ctrl + Shift + ? ¿

[Boet]

Ek weet julle ouens bedoel dit goed, maar as ek DIT wil kyk, loop koop ek vir my n Loslyf. Ons wil VLIEGTUIE sien asb. Kerels, stuur vir die man fotos van VLIEGTUIE. Thanks for the magazine, otherwise I like it. My wife reads it too, but she gave the lates one a bit of a "frown".

[alanmack]

MS Word - my word! Once upon a time I was competent on MS - I think it was back in 1982 that I did the launch of MS Symphony! We had three people in different cities working on a spreadsheet at the same time with "headset" modems strapped to landline telephone handsets! More recently it took me about a year to convert to Apple and as time goes by I remember less and less of MS - so - do I know the short cuts? Nope! Remember when FAX was a novelty - I had the second fax in the country - the 1st was in Cape Town ( at a friends office) and we faxed each other on set days when all the mates including heavy weight business CEO's came to see the paper arrive! My 1st PC had 2k of RAM! I could offer a history column on IT too but sadly, I think that it is all fun but off topic - as you suggested.

Thus far the poll represents the comment of about 0.006% of the membership. 2% have sent me e-mails in favour - so lets see what develops - it is a serious question to me and so I will be guided by the response that I get - many e-mail me and please do if you prefer > nemo@webo.co.za ie if you would prefer to not go public with your opinion then send an e-mail.

I have other policies
> Bad photos - not everyone has an EOS 2 etc so I help them out.
> Some of our lady pilots enjoy/request just a tad of photoshop "youth gel." A few years ago I took a photo of a lady and her husband threatened to do all sorts of bad things to me if I published a bad photo of his spouse - anyway we took about 10 yrs off and not only did I get approval to use the pic but I kept getting invites for a couple of years to take more pics as I had the best camera he had ever seen!
> Another policy - No gory accident photo's - you will be surprised that on this topic I get input so I put the overview info on the website. We have to deliver this message but where? I'm considering adding some toned down content on this in the next mag to see the reaction. It has been a really very, very bad month. E-mail would be good but some 400 member pilots have no e-mail address.
> I believe that the mag should be a coffee table mag - not a newspaper with hard bad news that gets thrown away - lots of photo's and very little of - we went from A to B and then on day 3 we had breakfast here etc
> The cover - with people in the shot.
> Content - if your feet are off the ground when you do it - it qualifies ( MS - nope)
> There are others - see the policy on the website.

Fly safe

[Gadget]

I buy it for the articles, honestly.

Keep up the great work.

[AndyG]

Could you also get Keith Kirsten to write a column on gardening tips

[vernon11]

Alan.
I have no problem with any of the content you put in the mag. Maybe its because I am getting on in years. Who knows. Thanks for a fantastic Mag.
Vernon.

[Joninmoz]

I enjoy the magazine and look forward to receiving it in the mail, but I must agree that the "kaalgat" girls spoil it a bit for me. I agree with Boet - we want to see more aeries!

[Boet]

How about we send in pictures of our HOMEBUILTS, with a short story about it? There are lots of nice little aeries out there, that we all would like to see and read about, I am sure!

[alanmack]

Here's what I find interesting
- the vote in favour is over huge - but by private e-mail and telephone
- the no's - I have only 1 e-mailed no and this forum's responses

So, the no's are public and the yes vote is from lads who would rather not be seen to vote in favour.

Next I have in the past consistently used the fashion photos to get attention /beg - YES BEG ON MY KNEES - for content - not one person has mentioned this so it seems - the no's do not look at the pages and the yes's do not see the text!!!! There have been suggestions/promises re sending me pictures - one received - please send them to nemo@webo.co.za

All in - it seems that the objective has not been met? The call is for each member to send in a one page story once in four years - have you sent yours?

Fly safe

[Mogas]

Alan I applaud your efforts in gathering content for the mag and using your initiative. Without guys like you we simply would not have the magazine.
For me the problem is supplying pictures of suitable quality, we all take "happy snappys" and I for one have lots of those. These are not up to standard for the magazine as far as definition goes.
I am not a boffin when it comes to taking photos and I suspect there are many more like myself.
Please could you post some guidelines here regarding minimum standards for magazine photo submissions, in layman's terms if possible.
Keep up the good work and I for one promise to try to send some content your way.
Mogas

[alanmack]

Let me put it this way - these days any modern camera - even the cell phone cameras take pictures of suitable quality. If the size is not good enough for print we can use it on the website. The problems that we experience come from people trying to take a low resolution picture and then saving it as a bigger picture or they play with the contrast, brightness etc to brighten the picture with an entry level package - all this does is create a large bad picture. Try sending me the picture - as is - and let us do the work on editing the picture. If you want we can make you younger, add make-up, give you a shave, add backgrounds, combine pictures etc - the idea is not to fox anyone but to make the pictures more entertaining - have a look at the line up of magazines in say the CNA - I bet none of the covers are as-is original pictures. We cannot do the impossible but we can salvage enough to end up with an acceptable picture for our "membership mag" - the members are very forgiving - they know that pictures are not styled in "Hollywood" settings - so - please just send a couple of paragraphs and any pictures. 90% of the time we will be able to use the content.

Hooray - I've finished the next mag this evening - I think it's a cracker - thanks to all those who responded when I .......... to them to get input!

[Coyote]

Ok here is my 5c worth, keep the babes in the mag and if it offends you then make sure that you send in content to replace the bikini clad babes. So - more content received, less sexy chicks !!!
Maybe that will motivate readers to start sending in content.

[vernon11]

Ok here is my 5c worth, keep the babes in the mag and if it offends you then make sure that you send in content to replace the bikini clad babes. So - more content received, less sexy chicks !!!
Maybe that will motivate readers to start sending in content.

"Yebo"