Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
The Yellow Pages arrived on my porch a couple of weeks ago. At first I wasn’t sure what brick of paper was blocking the top of my stairs as I thought the Yellow Pages had gone the way of the telephone booth. But no. Someone within the Yellow Pages organization still thinks a physical directory …
Apparently hand writing is on its last legs (or more correctly, its last arms). Specifically, cursive writing is currently in the academic cross hairs, although block printing is probably not too far behind. Much like we no longer teach long division or the dreaded times tables because their efficacy has been eclipsed by calculators and …
As you may know, I was recently away on vacation in Russia. What you don’t know is how many photos I took. Want to hazard a guess? Whatever you guessed I’m guessing you are wrong. I took none. Zero. Zippo. Not a single view of St. Basil’s church, or the church of Dimitri of the …
There are many things that people who should know better say with complete confidence that turn out later to be completely false. I think this started with the caveman who stated emphatically that there would never be a faster mode of travel than your own two feet and continued on with falsehoods perpetuated by new …
Those of you who are well acquainted with my technology dyslexia will be very surprised by my most recent acquisition: I am now the proud owner of an e-reader. The method to my madness was to have a mechanism to deliver enough English language books to meet my reading needs during a two week vacation …
Apparently January is a great time to look for a job. Now that the holidays are over and there are no days off on the immediate horizon, it’s time to knuckle down and get some work done. This is when the slackers become blindingly obvious as there is no veil of general workplace levity to …
Apparently there is a Star Trek movie coming out shortly. I think it is another ‘youthful’ Kirk, Spock etc. plot line. Truthfully, I find most things about Star Trek dumb, so in fact this is a small sample of some of the particularly stupid stuff. There are no hair stylists in space. Or perhaps there …
I pretty much never forget a face (or names for that matter, although matching the right name to the face can be a problem). You might think this is a great skill to have, but it is both a blessing and a curse. Here’s why: 1. I waste a lot of time trying to figure …
Online job boards are an essential evil of looking for a job today. You also need to run the gauntlet of badly designed HR software (Taleo, my finger is pointing squarely at you) that does not let you submit your beautifully formatted Guerrilla resume. Good thing the internet also lets you track down the name …
I have already talked about my typing proficiency, which has stood me in good stead now that we pretty much all type for a living. But it just occurred to me that we don’t think much about the evolution from typewriter to computer keyboard and why we need all those extra keys. And anyhow, why …