Vocabulary is the Key to Good Expression

For most of my life, I have been interested in words and vocabulary. Along the way, I met people who also wanted to improve theirs by books and calendars offering a new word a day. Often words you don't hear every day are found in such books, such as "obsequious" and "obviate". Other times I've heard people use words and have to go look them up.

In the "computer age", there are many choices to replace books and calendars with a program that can improve your vocabulary quickly and efficiently and the most recent I've found is Vocaboly. You can try the demo version with a computer voice, but the full version has a human voice in high quality recordings. Vocaboly makes learning and retaining the meanings of words fun and efficient, using both games and tests to stimulate you. I recommend you check out the demo and see if it can help keep your vocabulary on its toes!

Laziness can be your nemesis!

2009.76: Friends don't let friends CC 100 people at a time

Image via Wikipedia

There is nothing more irritating for people who get a lot of email every day, than to get these "Look at this cat on piano video" emails from n00bs and well-meaning grannies, but enough is enough.

We all need to educate all users of email, especially those who have our addresses in the use of BCC. Not only do I not necessarily want everyone you know to know I know you, but the practice of CC in the clear opens all of us on the list to several kinds of abuse.

Ironically, there are commercially-driven people who refuse to stop the practice even when you ask them to do so.

First and foremost, you need to explain that when an email is sent out to 50 people on a CC list, if one of those people gets a virus, it often will grab all the addresses, mail copies of itself out to them AND call home adding you to the huge spammer database list.

There are many reasons not to use CC with long lists or to a group of people who do not know each other. It's a faux pas, please don't do it.

Use Spamcop.net, procmail, spamassassin and sendmail basic tools like the access file to block and report spam. Unfortunately, it's the CC that put you on the list in the first plave.

Posted via email from R's posterous

Beware these dangerous "Returned Mail" messages

I'm getting a bunch of these. At a glance, they look like legitimate returns. However, I'm not sending myself messages.

Mobile post sent by randulo using Utterli. Replies. mp3

mutineer Magazine

http://mutineermagazine.com/

Mobile post sent by randulo using Utterli. Replies. mp3

Orange Wins the Worst Service Title

What I am about to write is a list of events. Any one, maybe two of these could happen to any company. But looking at the list, Orange is the absolute worst company I have ever dealt with. Worse than the airline that cancelled our flight and didn't tell us.

Orange had a new phone line installed at our new place in mid-July. It was checked by the installer (subcontractor) and he said "the line is good, they will connect it in 2 to 10 days". When we left on vacation on July 31, it still was not connected.

We were gone six weeks. During that time, the line still wasn't connected since when I tested it on Sept 1, it still was not working. On the other hand, Orange managed to disconnect our primary regular phone. Although Orange and France Télécom like to have different logos, they still are basically the same company. So after about 5 emergency calls, where each number I called either hung up on me after a 5 step IVR or told me at my expense that I was calling the wrong number, and at about 30 cents per minute, I managed to get someone to promise to reconnect the line. Before that person, I was told to go to the store and given the address of the nearest Orange store that could help. Walking by that location a few days later, I saw that the store had moved weeks before. Good thing I didn't decide to go over there for help.

All through September and October, I called once or twice a week. I was told that any day the line would be connected. Yet, nothing and each time, I was wasting my time, employee time and my own money since the calls are charged at a premium rate.

I also tried email support - let me pause for the laugh track - where I was subscribed to a mailing list about Orange cell phone service. Too bad I already am aware of it since they send unsolicited SMS every few weeks. Email support is worthless on Orange, but then at least here in France, so is most email support.

During the last three calls I was told that the trouble was reported to a special advanced troubleshooting service. I was read a script that guaranteed a phone call or SMS back to me within three working days with a report on what was happening or a connection.

Well, after three of these calls, we finally decided to end the contract with Orange who were incapable of connecting that line for some reason. I was told to go to the Orange store. AT the store after waiting in a long line and watching people try new expensive phones, I was informed that they can't close our account. I told the woman, "the service I called sent me here and you can't close the account?". "Yes," she said, "they don't know what they're talking about."

On the verge of going postal in the store, and by the way I have never regretted not having my little Flip Video so much since there were at least 5 other furious subscribers there for various reasons, I politely but firmly told the woman behind the "services" counter that they would be taking my modem back and giving me a receipt. "Oh, I can do that." And she did.

Orange wins the incompetent title of the year. Orange is the worst company I have ever dealt with and believe me, I've dealt with many, many others including international ones like AOL and Compuserve as well as several other national operators.

There should be a law about services. I know for a fact that Cox Cable has problems, but even they were better at at least appearing to care. Employees of Orange I spoke to were all polite and apologetic, some seemed more competent than others but they all said they were powerless to help and didn't understand why the problem wasn't fixed.

Need I mention that I sent a few registered letters as well?

What happened to the "whatever it takes" philosophy? It isn't worth it for a lousy $25/month? Then charge more and give decent service. I now use a smaller operator. Although they resell the same services at a higher price, they also have a regular phone number (free call sice we have VoIP with them anyway) and they answer the phone and deal with trouble on the spot.

Orange is the most incompetent and deceptive company I've ever dealt with. I'm not trying for a writing style here, I'm trying to make sure that the fact that Orange has the worst customer service in the world, appears in every paragraph.

Trying MarsEdit

One of the cool things about having different platforms available is to be able to test software I've heard of but never actually tried. I'm checking out MarsEdit. It sure looks good on the one hand, but it really screwed up the previous article when it edited it. Let's see if it can edit its own handiwork any better.

So here I will add a new paragraph and maybe throw in an image.



Hey, that was pretty cool the way the preview works. Now to try MarsEdit witha few other services I might use.

Microforum in 20 minutes with Laconica

I was curious how long it would take to install my own microforum using Laconica of which I've spoken many, many times.

It took me about 16 minutes, but I cheated. I've installed it a few times before.

Get the latest version by grabbing the link at http://laconi.ca

Today, at the top of the list: 11/18/2008 - Laconica_0.6.2

I'm logged in via ssh and cd to the directory of the web server
cd www/mysite
wget "http://laconi.ca/laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz"
Expand the archive

tar -xvzf laconica-0.6.2.tar.gz
Symbolic link or rename this to what you like
mv laconica-0.6.2 laconica

Edit the config file

nano -w config.php.sample (save as config.php)
Create a database

mysqladmin -uroot -p create mylaconica
Initialize the database

mysql -uroot -p mylaconica
Edit the SMS carrier info

nano -w db/carrier.sql

Initialize the table for SMS carriers

mysql -uroot -p mylaconica Add the user to access the database

mysql -uroot -p

GRANT SELECT,INSERT,DELETE,UPDATE on mylaconica.* TO 'dbuser'@'localhost'

IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
Copy the htaccess file

cp htaccess.sample .htaccess
CHANGE THE ROOT of the server which is 'mublog' by default

nano -w .htaccess
Look through settings again and change anything else especially the host

nano -w config.php

If you named the database anything other than 'laconica', you need to do something like this:

ln classes/laconica.ini classes/mylaconica.ini

Browse to the site. If there's nothing there, find debug line, uncomment it and change 0 to 5:

$config['db']['debug'] = 5;
READ THE WARNING above that line. DO NOT LEAVE debug=5.


The debug level will spit everything out for you, the complaints should allow you to find the problem.

You will also probably need to chmod the avatars directory
chmod 777 avatars

It's likely you now have a working install in less that 20 minutes.


More user documentation: http://tr.im/LaconicaDoc