gRadio

Spell-check can be dangerous to your continued employment

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 17:47:49 GMT

The offending line, since corrected online, read: '"They fine guys $5,000 for having their pants out of their shiats, but he gets away with that?" said one coach.' Fer shnizzle, dawg.

Note to self: Eliminate 'sh*t' from the spell check before posting an article
(CBS SportsLine)

This isn't the worst offense I have seen with someone not paying close attention while spell-checking. I remember a stray 'h' appearing near the description of the bride's dress, in the bridal announcements of a newspaper where I grew up. So the line no longer read "The bride wore...", but instead indicated the bride worked in the world's oldest profession.

There was a fair bit of editors' yelling that day (a friend worked part-time at the paper), and the paper's owner ordered that a list of words be removed from the spelling dictionaries -- his argument was good: Why were those words in there in the first place, since they were not part of the style guide? A properly revised version of the announcement ran the following week.

Conversant get more templates

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 04:47:35 GMT

Macrobyte Resources continues to make improvements to the Conversant experience.

redmonk 2.0 : services : portfolio. via Jim - Steve Ivy has been using his talents to great effect:
Macrobyte Resources approached me about designing a series of templates for their free web hosting service, Free-Conversant. The templates needed to be simple and approachable, while supporting
...

Having a number of templates available now appears to be an expectation for CMS or weblog software -- in reviews such a gap always seems to be mentioned now.

And for your mother...

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 16:12:23 GMT

So which of the many blogging tools that you've tried would you be willing to inflict on your mother, Alwin?

Mom Is Back
Actually, she never really left. She's started posting in the comments section since she got her nifty new cable modem. I expect she'll have her own site before long...

Actually, that could be a reasonable measure for software rating -- Would you feel comfortable recommending its use to your own mother (presuming you harbor no ill will toward the woman, of course...)?

Validate this!

Wed, 27 Nov 2002 16:08:10 GMT

It is good to have another tool to add to the effort of creating good websites (Yes, the code in this site is a horror -- I'm lazy).

Updated HTML and XHTML validator. The W3C has released an updated HTML and XHTML validator, which includes support for XHTML 1.1, MathML 2.0, additional character encodings, and more. You can either validate a URL, or directly upload the page to be checked.

I wonder if it will handle quoted attributes any differently from it's predecessor?

Have they won?

Tue, 26 Nov 2002 04:49:52 GMT

DaveW doesn't want to write about something big in his life, for fear of what some would do with that.

John's page linked above is an inspiration for me. My dad is very sick. He's hanging in there, and our relationship has blossomed in what may be his last days. Of course I've been writing about it and it's some of the most beautiful writing I've ever done. But can't make it public, because the public Web can be such a harsh environment. I imagine how some of the "parody" sites would deal with it. My father and his struggle, his pain, his sweetness, are too precious to expose that way, at least while he's alive.

How sad, to feel the need for self-censoring for this reason.

There are those who can and those that cannot

Mon, 25 Nov 2002 02:36:07 GMT

Fred Sampson shares a few QOTD to make a political jab (And yes, Fred, I did like the funny, too). They struck a different chord for me, though, based on a recent read, Dietrich Dorner's The Logic of Failure, which drew may attention from its mention in Joel on Software...

Bertrand Russell. "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts."

John Kenneth Galbraith. "It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."

Dietrich's book explores how poorly we tend to handle making decisions. Two commonalities that arise from his data are that those who tend to make better decisions often have more doubt about their decisions, and that poor decision makers will often concentrate on nonsense (or irrelevant details) rather than attempt to tackle the larger, more important issues. I'll have to post some more of my thoughts about this book sometime...

Hey, Dad! Watch me make it easier to identify good objectives!

Fri, 22 Nov 2002 17:47:44 GMT

David Carter-Tod shares a nice post from a training-related mailing list.

The Heydad test of objective writing.
Quote: "If, however, the trowel-trade academy wants to use simulation to teach NON-masons how to clean equipment, I think they risk failing the Heydad test. Usually this applies to objectives, but I'm sure most on the list can extend it to modes of training delivery.

Unfamiliar with the test? It's very easy. Just take your training objective, and stick in front of it the words:

"Hey, Dad, watch me while I..."

If the total statement doesn't make sense ("Hey, dad, watch me while I understand principles of brick-cleaning"), there's a reason."

Comment: Nice way of communicating how to write a good objective.

Good one there -- I'll have to share this with some of the folks around here. Now I wonder what the magic phrase that pays might be for psychomotor or affective objectives?

Doing just fine, thanks!

Thu, 21 Nov 2002 13:41:25 GMT

Just been really busy this past week. I was frantically trying to put together a conference tutorial, that I delivered yesterday afternoon. The results were good, but the process to get there was certainly trying.

More blogging later, after I beat Radio into submission -- there's something very flakey about my connection here at the hotel, and Radio keeps switching to offline mode (I'm using Andy's offline toggle script, and something keeps triggering it. Grr...).