Writing
Remember writing papers and essays with word and page requirements? Did you try to beat the system by not contracting words (using “is not” instead of “isn’t” to increase your word count) or not getting to the point in your writing? Your essay would probably be about the same, but more readable had you written it like you weren’t Forest Gump.
The result? A generation of people who don’t know english and think verbose, lengthy writing means they’re smart. They say things like:
- From that perspective (or standpoint)
- As to
- Concerns (as in I have some concerns as to how the meeting ended).
If you work in an office have you noticed how everyone has issues or concerns? They never call them what they really are: problems.
No one really talks like that - so don’t.
Reading
In 8th grade I had to read The Hobbit. If you’re reading this you’re probably somewhere on the nerd-meter and you may like that kind of stuff. I didn’t.
So if you hate a book that you have to read for school you trudge through it, or get the gist from Cliff Notes (or Wikipedia these days). And what did you learn? You learned to hate reading because you just plain didn’t like reading some books.
If you do read for recreation you give the book 50 pages. If by page 51 it hasn’t really done it for you, move on.
You don’t have to keep doing something you don’t actually want to do.
Exercise
This is where you learn where you are on the food chain.
If you’re like me you probably weren’t great at sports. And since school gym class is like the Nick Jr. version of a day in prison (always watching your back if you’re the weak one) you probably learned to hate exercising…plus locker-room showers.
Public transportation
School busses suck even when you aren’t the driver.
Photos used under a Creative Commons license and in order of appearance by:
Posted in other.
Tagged with education, school.
By Dan
– June 25, 2009
Eh. Not for me.
The investigations become tedious. I didn’t care about any of the characters. I didn’t care about why people needed to get killed or any kind of twist ending. Some people really liked this game, but I stopped halfway through Memory Block 4.
Got tired of having to find those lookout points to fill up my map. Seems like a lot of the game is about keeping you interested in being chased, climbing on to buildings and then jumping off of them. Diving off high ledges into a bail of hay wasn’t enough to keep me interested.
Screenshot by z-x
Posted in videogames.
Tagged with game, videogame, xbox360.
By Dan
– June 20, 2009
Wired interviews eMusic CEO Danny Stein about their recent price increases and the addition of Sony’s back catalog.
Wired.com: What do you have to say to longtime subscribers who are so upset about prices going up?
Stein: We knew it was going to be tough breaking the news about the price increase, so we’ve been listening to all the reactions. We appreciate that our users have such a strong connection to eMusic and are very passionate and vigorous music fans. As I said at the top of this call, the price change is something that all of our labels have been asking for, for a long time, and it’s really a necessary move for us to maintain a viable business. Not only that, but to support the independent label community and their artists, through royalties. We still offer one of the best values for digital music. We’re about 50 percent cheaper than iTunes and Amazon. And we hope those people will stick with us and see what we do with the Sony catalog and all the other labels that we may get in the future. We hope that they’ll give it a shot and stay.
Many eMusic subscribers are upset about their announced price increases that more than double the price per track they got before. However, surely there are subscribers that saw the writing on the wall with 24¢ tracks and labels like Epitaph pulling out.
50¢ for a track isn’t that bad, but it still stings when you’ve been getting them for less than half that.
Posted in business.
Tagged with emusic, mp3, music.
By Dan
– June 15, 2009
Seth Godin posted a rant about the college textbook industry.
As far as I can tell, assigning a textbook to your college class is academic malpractice…This industry deserves to die. It has extracted too much time and too much money and wasted too much potential. We can do better. A lot better.
This is why I think Seth Godin is the authority when it comes to marketing and growing your audience.
If there’s one good thing that results from the Kindle I hope it’s that it changes the way college textbooks are used.
Also note that the textbook he mentions in his post is not part of the Personal MBA It doesn’t appear that any standard business textbook is a part of this list.
Posted in business.
Tagged with college, textbooks.
By Dan
– June 14, 2009
Ranking hats by bestsellers on Amazon, it’s kind of amusing that the creepiest, most likely to see during a bank heist is number 9.
Posted in web.
Tagged with amazon, clothes, hats.
By Dan
– June 8, 2009
From Macworld:
While keeping the same sub-$1,000 price tag and the same white polycarbonate shell, Apple has quietly bumped the speed of the laptop’s Core 2 Duo processors from 2GHz to 2.13GHz and increased the hard drive capacity from 120GB to 160GB. The white MacBook now includes faster 800MHz DDR2 memory than its last iteration, which used 667MHz DDR2 RAM. These updates amount to not only a better performing entry-level MacBook, but also a system that’s faster than the 2.0GHz aluminum unibody MacBook that Apple sells for $300 more.
I’ve been holding off buying a Macbook because I think the unibodies will get a bump next week at Macworld. I’d like it even more if they put firewire back into the 13-inch models, but I don’t think that will happen.
It would be good for me because of my recent G5 problems. The cost of buying a Macbook Pro and keeping my current Firewire audio interface is just about the same as buying a regular Macbook AND a new USB interface. No matter what model, upgrading the drive would probably be the first thing I’d do - which is why I’d prefer a new model Macbook Pro over the old ones, which are a pain to upgrade.
Or I could just get the white Macbooks, but they just don’t *feel* right to me.
Posted in apple.
Tagged with hardware, macbook, macs.
By Dan
– June 6, 2009
I like to think that I have a pretty good handle on email. I practice Inbox Zero, I organize email depending on what action I need to do with it, and generally don’t leave the office with anything in the Inbox. We use Exchange there, so I use Entourage at work.
At home and elsewhere, I’m all about Gmail these days.
It’s weird, because most of the time I prefer desktop apps to their web equivalents. Google Docs is alright, but I do most of my writing in Textedit (it doesn’t go into Word until I need to style it). This site runs on Wordpress, but I do nearly all my writing in Marsedit. For RSS reading I went back and forth between Google Reader and NetNewsWire, settling on NetNewsWire. And for many years, Mail.app was my email client of choice.
But I noticed that many of my friends used Gmail exclusively. So earlier this year I removed Mail.app from my dock and decided to use Gmail for the next month.
I do not miss Mail.app.
Don’t get me wrong, Mail.app is fine - but it always had a few problems. For starters it just doesn’t get along with attachments. Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’ve attached the file you want or if you’ve downloaded the file that’s been sent to you. Other than that it’s probably the best looking email client on a desktop for how email used to be.
Yet, Gmail has more benefits. I don’t have to worry about backing up email. Searching in Gmail works faster than with Mail.app and Spotlight. Gmail keyboard shortcuts allow me to archive and star/flag email faster than I could in Mail.app.
I hit the Gmail turning point - the point where you realize that all email should work like this and you don’t want to go back to the old way, when I saw that I got to Inbox Zero faster with Gmail than anything else I’ve used.
If you’re frustrated with your email client, try just giving up and using Gmail for a while. You can use Google Notifier to fill in the gaps with mailto links. It’s also a little liberating to not have your email client open all the time.
Plus, attachments work way better in Gmail than Mail.app.
Photo by RichieC
Posted in software.
Tagged with email, entourage, gmail, google, mail.app, webapps.
By Dan
– June 4, 2009
Sony is coming to eMusic, and eMusic will raise prices.
This is the first I’m reading about the price increase. I haven’t received an email about my plan changing - I’m on an annual plan so I’m not sure they can do much until I resubscribe in the fall.
Today eMusic will announce that Sony is adding its back catalog of songs to eMusic’s library. The bad news is that eMusic also plans to slightly raise prices and/or drop the number of downloads per month. Even if it works out to between 50-60 cents per track, though, that’s still far less than iTunes Music Store or Amazon, and probably the cheapest way to grab music from Sony artists without resorting to piracy.
Having been grandfathered in to eMusic’s 90 downloads per month plan at $20 (which is a really sweet deal) I suppose I should’ve known that it wouldn’t last forever.
Posted in business, music.
Tagged with emusic, mp3, music, sony.
By Dan
– June 1, 2009
I plan on switching hosts this weekend, so bear with me.
Photo by Flickr user ilja
Edit
Everything went alright. Even rocking a new theme.
Posted in admin.
By Dan
– May 30, 2009
Colin Wheeler writes about GTD and how, along with OmniFocus, it enabled him to completely turn his grades around.
After I got on with this system of GTD and OmniFocus I went back to school full time again at a different and better school IMHO. For my parents they were still anxious given my past performance academically, but I wanted to go full force and get my school over with as I thought going part time would take far too long and just be dragging my program out. This time no letter came home saying I was failing my classes. At the end of the term I got my grades back 5 A’s. Both my parents were stunned at this, my mom asked me what I did different and I explained to her about Getting Things Done. She still doesn’t believe that GTD is the reason I did a 180, but it is.
Of course, GTD doesn’t turn anyone into a genius, but even being a genius doesn’t mean you can get your work done on time. The bar isn’t as high as many people think it is. In most cases all you really need to do is stay on top of due dates to blow people away, especially when they’re already used to disappointment.
Will that get you a job at NASA? Probably not, but it does contribute to your reputation of being a dependable person. I wish I used this system back when I was in school.
Posted in apple, software.
Tagged with gtd, omnifocus.
By Dan
– May 24, 2009
