‘Blog’ picked as word of the year
The BBC reports that “the term ‘blog’ has been chosen as the top word of 2004 by a US dictionary publisher. Merriam-Webster said ‘blog’ headed the list of most looked-up terms on its site during the last twelve months.”
How to say ‘No’ politely
I get sent a lot of email attachments — many of them in Microsoft Word format. I’ve been wondering for some time how to tell my correspondents that this is unacceptable to me (I am, after all, one of the founders of Living without Microsoft!), and have finally got round to drafting a piece of boilerplate text that I can send back. My starting point was a web page written by Richard Stallman which contains some draft text. It didn’t seem exactly appropriate, so I modified it a bit to read like this:
Thanks for writing. However the attachment to your message is in Microsoft Word format, a secret proprietary format that I avoid whenever possible. If you send me plain text, rtf, HTML, or PDF, then I will read it.
Distributing documents in Word (or Excel) format could be bad for your correspondents because they can carry viruses (see http://www.symantec.com/avcenter/macro.html). Sending Word attachments could be bad for you, because a Word document normally includes hidden information about the author, enabling those in the know to pry into his or her activities. For example, text that you think you deleted may still be embarrassingly present. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/3154479.stm for a celebrated instance of this.
But above all, sending people Word documents puts pressure on them to use Microsoft software and helps to deny them any other choice. In effect, you become a buttress of the Microsoft monopoly and reduce the incentive for people to explore alternatives. Can I respectfully ask that you reconsider the use of Word format for communication with other people?
The trick is to be polite while being firm, and to avoid being sanctimonious. The aim is to make people think, not to put their backs up. I’m not convinced that this draft manages that. Hmmm…
The art of conversation
Overheard at Stanford:
Girl: “I’ve had three nervous breakdowns and they’re not that bad.” Nervous breakdowns? “[You know,] to the point where you can’t stop crying for days.”
Heavily made-up girl: (in an indignant tone) “You know, everyone is always bashing Western civilization.”
[From Aaron Schwartz’s Blog.]
I don’t believe it!
Meet the smartest three-month-old in the world.
Not my photograph, alas, but one taken by a proud parent and sent on by understandably proud grandparents. What I love about it is her expression of intrigued astonishment — like that of a retired colonel reading an article about body-piercing.
Stuff happens…
… as Donald Rumsfeld famously said. Who’d have thought that David Blunkett, the Home Secretary (that’s Minister of the Interior to non-UK readers) would have a glamorous mistress (who also happens to be the publisher of a right-wing magazine)? I always thought of Blunkett as the kind of serious chap who, when not devising measures for curtailing civil liberties in the interests of “law and order”, read the works of St Thomas Aquinas. It just goes to show that, as my dear Ma used to say, one cannot judge a book by its cover.
Mr Blunkett has now fallen out with his inamorata and is involved in a dispute over (i) paternity rights and (ii) whether he used his influence improperly to secure a visa for her nanny. Item (i) is meat and drink to the British tabloid press, while (ii) is of great interest to the chattering classes. Accordingly, his extra-curricular activities tend to dominate the news agenda, much to the dismay of his boss, Tony Blair, who had fashioned an entire electoral strategy around Blunkett and his tough, no-nonsense, law ‘n order agenda.
It all reminds me of something that Harold Macmillan, Britain’s most entertaining post-war Prime Minister, once said. A journalist asked Mac what he feared most. “Events, dear boy, events”, he replied.
Hot Cakes
Wonder which one is Charlie?
Microsoft discovers Blogging
Late — as usual. Microsofties are going to be offered their own toy blogging service. It’s got a cute name — “MSN Spaces”. Alas, it’s a bit wimpy for real men — for example Scoble (who works for Microsoft) has posted a useful initial critique on his Blog. He’s sticking to Radio Userland, it seems.
A salutary tale for PDA users
“At the Computer Human Interaction 2004 conference in April, Starner presented a study that he and his students conducted at Georgia Tech’s Student Center. The researchers asked 138 passing subjects — mostly students — what they used to keep track of their appointments: their memory, scraps of paper, a day planner, or personal digital assistant of some kind. After the initial question, the respondents were asked to schedule a meeting the following Monday. Then, the researchers watched.
With the exception of people who claimed to keep everything in their head, roughly half of the people who said they used one method for tracking their activities actually used a different method to schedule the follow-up meeting.
The most inconsistent were the 44 day planner users. Only 14 actually opened their planner to write down their appointment. The rest either scribbled a note or committed the meeting to memory. However, they were hardly alone in their actions. Of the 22 people who claimed that they used scraps of paper, nine didn’t bother making note of the meeting. Even the technologically inclined didn’t fare well. Six of the 14 PDA users said their device took to long to get ready, and instead opted for other, simpler methods.
The takeaway, Starner says, is that ease of use permeates every interaction we have with wearable and mobile technologies. The easiest solution for remembering, if also the least efficient, remains memory.” [From Tech Review.]
The Iraq problem in a nutshell
From a report in today’s New York Times:
“As military officials here prepare to start letting the first residents return to Falluja, possibly as soon as mid-December, they face an unusual challenge: how to win back the confidence of the people whose city they have just destroyed.”
iPod — the Walkman de nos jours?
“In a 10 page research note released to clients this morning, Merrill Lynch analyst, Steve Milunovich, once again raised his estimates for Apple’s December quarter and 2005 fiscal year by $0.02 and $0.07, respectively. Milunovich also raised Apple’s 12-month price objective to $78.
[…]
The most interesting segment of Milunovich’s report deals with the iPod adoption rate as compared to the early adoption rate of Sony’s Walkman. ‘iPods are being adopted faster than Sony Walkmans were back in the early 1980s,’ the report claims. A graph accompanying the report reveals that after nearly 2.5 years, iPod shipments are approximately 1 million units ahead of the Walkmen’s pace after being on the market for the same period of time.” [From Apple Insider.]
Ah, that first Walkman… Which reminds me — I was an early adopter then too. (Rummages in drawer.) And I still have it! (Photographs it proudly.)
Still in working order too. It had one really neat feature — two headphones sockets so that you could share your music with a (very good) friend using the ‘Hot Line’ button.
Funny thing was: that feature disappeared quickly from subsequent models. We had a theory that the Catholic church objected to it on the grounds that it might encourage couples to listen in bed!