Category Archives: Miscellaneous

New Year, New Look

Welcome to the new Turbulent Sky. For all of you who’ve been following along, this is quite a face lift. Hope you like the new look. There may be some niggles and bugs that I haven’t yet fixed or discovered, so feel free to leave a comment if you find anything broken. I’ve moved the blog off from the “blog” subdomain since there’s no need to differentiate it that way and shortened the URLs of the posts by removing the date. Redirects should get any old links over to the right place. Feedburner has been updated as well so that all the RSS and Atom feeds point to the new location.

Enjoy!

Goodbye, 2008

It’s hard to believe that yet another year has gone by. They seem to go faster every year. After blogging for over a year now, what’s new for 2009?

Of course, more fixes to interesting tech problems (including a long-standing Microsoft Word data corruption bug that I think I’ve finally worked around). Also, a new theme for this blog is certainly in order. I believe I’ve finally found one that I like that also fits the blog’s name. So, I’ll be busy with that for a little bit to get things dialed in and working just right.

Meanwhile, feel free to leave comments, questions and suggestions. Here’s hoping that your digital life in 2009 is prosperous and trouble-free.

Sometimes Doing the Right Thing Just Takes a Little Nudge

Had a funny experience last night while waiting to meet with friends for dinner. Having arrived at the restaurant early, I sat on a bench outside enjoying the nice weather. A few minutes later, a lady makes an illegal U-turn and pulls into the second parking spot from the end in front of the restaurant. Unfortunately, she parks about 6″-8″ over the line into the last spot. “Way to go,” I think to myself.

After she spends a few minutes fixing her makeup, she gets out and looks at her parking handiwork. Then she takes a few steps toward the front door of the restaurant and stops. She turns around and, walking toward me, asks if I think anyone would mind that she’s taking up two parking spots.

Pretty funny question. It’s as though my agreeing with her would make it all better somehow. Anyway, I tell her that it depends if someone might get annoyed by it. She paused for a moment and then got back in her car to move it over. After she got back out, she rechecked her work and I said, “Much better!” She smiled and said something to the effect of, “some people can get annoyed” (I guess to either imply that getting annoyed by such a thing is unreasonable or that some people can get out of hand about such a little thing).

Shortly after that, someone pulled into the last parking spot. Chalk one up for the forces of good.

Top Three Grammar Pet Peeves

User-generated content is a wonderful thing. However, it does unearth a plethora of bad grammar. Even worse, poor grammar is showing up in trusted sources such as the news. I remember when English teachers would strongly recommend reading the newspaper on a regular basis to improve your grammar and writing. Sigh.

Following are three of the most common grammar errors that I see and hear. They make the top of my list because they should not happen on such a regular basis and their prevalence forces me to occasionally stop and think about whether or not they’re actually incorrect. Oh, the horror!

In the spirit of code re-use, I’m not going to rewrite what has already been written but link to resources instead.

3. Less or fewer
Can they be counted or not?

2. It’s versus its
This is a general problem of differentiating between possessives and contractions.

1. Me, myself and I
Stop using “myself” in place of “me”. It doesn’t sound more proper. It’s simply incorrect!

Why not a top-ten list? Because that’s too many to remember. Three is enough. Let’s get these fixed first.

Welcome

So, friends have convinced me to start blogging. Never thought I had that much to say but, thinking more about it, I do give a lot of advice on things, especially those having to do with technology. Thus, this blog will become my archive of what’s cool, what works, what doesn’t and how to deal with all the things that touch our digital lives, for better or worse.

Coming up next, a review of the Samsung SyncMaster 245BW 24″ widescreen LCD monitor. Stay tuned…