Comments Off on Reset! (Shaking the Etch-a-Sketch) 
What does it mean, to want to “reset,” to “restart” some part of our lives? This week’s news headlines, about the “Etch-a-Sketch” comment made by a Mitt Romney campaign advisor, echo a personal dilemma for me.
I’m at a crossroads in my career, trying to choose a direction for my next few years, but I feel weighed down by many of the professional decisions I’ve made over the past 15 years Read more »
Comments Off on Beware: Focus Group & Survey Scams I’ve never participated in a focus group, but recently I’ve seen a surge in ads (on Craigslist and other employment sites) promising $50, $100, or more to participate in a focus group. Unfortunately, most of these ads are scams.
Amazon has intentionally “crippled” its Kindle and Cloud Reader software for non-Kindle devices: the software doesn’t allow consumers to organize books in any way. As a result, enthusiastic readers who opt to acquire many dozens or hundreds of ebooks quickly find their collections to be completely unmanageable.
Comments Off on To-Do List Web App: HiTask.com This week, I’ve started using HiTask.com to manage my “to-do lists.” It’s a “web application,” which I can use from my desktop computer, laptop, or smart phone.
Comments Off on Facebook Blocks Complaints About Its Own Misleading Ads Facebook’s advertising system has always had one nice feature for consumers: if you mouse over the right margin of any ad, an “X” appears, and if you click on the “X” you can ask not to see that ad in the future. In addition, you can “report” your reason, designating whether you simply find the ad “uninteresting,” or you can flag the ad as “misleading” or “sexually explicit” (among other options).
But Facebook has exempted its own ads from this “opt-out” system, and has deliberately prevented users from complaining about misleading ads by Facebook itself.
Comments Off on Word Choice: Indexes or Indices, Forums or Fora? I’ve recently encountered the problem of “which version of a word to use,” in my writing in this blog and elsewhere. This issue arises often with the plural forms of two words: “index” and “forum.”
Comments Off on Word: “Ideation” (connotation) “Ideation.” When I saw this word on a slide during the Salesforce.com keynote presentation at cloudforce/cloudstock, it just seemed absurd. I was right, sort of.
Comments Off on I Want a Tablet, But… I’ve been shopping for a new portable computing solution for several months, but I’m experiencing lots of frustration. Basically, I’m finding that every option available includes only a subset of the features and capabilities I desire.
Today, I was ready to buy a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet. But when I went to Best Buy today to make my purchase, I made some discoveries that changed my mind.
Comments Off on That Didn’t Sound Right… Earlier this month, I found myself jarred while listening to an NPR “Talk of the Nation” segment honoring the legacy of poet Langston Hughes. Host Neal Conan said, “Langston Hughes would have been 110 yesterday; he died in 1967.” (transcript).
That didn’t sound right, but it took me a few minutes to figure out why: that phrase, “[a deceased person] would have been [an age],” implies both the untimeliness of the death, and the plausibility of survival to the current day. Neither element seemed satisfied in this particular situation.
Instead, Mr. Conan should have said, “Langston Hughes was born 110 years ago yesterday.”
Comments Off on Apologies What’s an apology? Today, I was baffled by Rick Santorum’s comments this morning on Meet the Press: Read more »
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