You know how people take screen shots of someone’s tweet and then post it? Is there a name for those?
If not, I think they should be called “bird macros” or something. Damn you Twitter!
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Gabe wrote a post about his recent experiences with Office Suite software. I left a comment there, but thought I should expand on it here.
Here’s the comment I left:
I am very close to being 100% happy with NeoOffice (which is an offshoot of OpenOffice, for Mac OS X.)
I do not compare it to MS Office the way you might. For me, it is free and open source. This means I can install it on the 10+ Macs that I manage for $0 (in reality, I donated money to NeoOffice because I do find it valuable, and want it to flourish. Still, $25 for unlimited copies?) Anyway, the only features I care about is that it can open all those damn MS Office file formats. That’s it. For all I know, it completely sucks in every other respect. I don’t care. To me, it’s pretty much a viewer/converter. I do use it for simple document creation, but I could use other tools for that as well. It even handles Microsoft formats the the Mac version of Office can’t handle!
Sometimes innovation is found in just being an alternative.
Honestly, I’m coming at it from an entirely different direction that Gabe, so I’m in no way trying to discount his opinion, I’m just pointing out that different people have different needs. For the last 10 years I’ve been building web sites for clients, and sometimes those clients send me Word documents, from which I need to wrestle out the text. Believe me, try as you might to ask people to send you plain text files, or even RTF files, they just don’t get it. That’s fine. Today you can send me a Microsoft Word document, and I can open it, and get that precious text out of it. And I can install the software that does it on as many machines as I want, and not have to worry about license keys working, or buying more copies, or having to pay for upgrades, or any of that crap.
Years ago I was really excited about open source software that came out that dealt with things I did every day, text editing, web serving, graphics work, etc. But an office suite? It sounded like a movie with a cruel twist: “You get to work on open source software! By the way, it’s an office suite!” So the real innovation to me is the disruption in the status quo, being the alternative, the “here, this is free, it’s not perfect but may fit your needs just fine” compared to the polished commercial product filled with restrictions and hoop-jumping.
Big thanks goes out to the NeoOffice guys, as well as the OpenOffice folks, and all that contribute to open source software.
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Nothing Happened
This song is titled “Nothing Happened” and it was done entirely in Logic, not at all in GarageBand. I still have a bit to learn when using Logic. (Most of the time I record in Logic and do everything else in GarageBand.) You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.
You can grab it from Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)
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Bake Sale
This song is best describe as weird intro with a funky drumbeat and chop-chop guitar. I did not play bass on this one, just used a loop. (There were only full cakes at the bake sale.) You should be able to hear it right on this page, using the embedded player below.
You can grab it from Ourmedia or the Internet Archive, and it’s got a Creative Commons Attribution License. (If you need something else, get in touch with me.)
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My typo, I fixed it for you!
I am going to propose a new rule for IM communication. Ok, not so much a rule as a suggestion: Only correct typos that drastically change the meaning of the message, or that a reasonably logical person might misunderstand.
Supposedly your mind can recognize errors in text and correct for them. So let’s use that.
Here’s an example, if you are chatting with someone and they say:
them [12:44]: OMG, I am so hungry, I'm gonna go grab luncg them [12:44]: lunch you: [12:45]: get a burrito!
Ok, you see how he (the “them” guy) corrected himself, and typed “lunch” after they typed the word “luncg”? I think it may be unnecessary to do so. I got enough context clues from the time (12:44) and the mention of being hungry to know they meant “lunch” and not “luncg” (Unless “Luncg” is someone they work with, which could be bad.)
So that’s my idea for today. I’m sure you’ve come across countless examples of this happening. Just think how much time you would save by not fixing a simple typo unless clarification was required.