Here’s a new way to waste time practice your Scrabble(R) skills: Scrabble Zone, found at Merriam-Webster Online. You don’t actually connect the words the way you do on a Scrabble board, just make a word as fast as possible with the tiles given. Premium squares show up in random spots to challenge your skills. The [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2009
Survivor: Offline
Could you do without your computer and your online life for a week? It’s an experiment I conducted last week, after dropping off my laptop for repairs and going skiing at Mont Tremblant, Quebec. My main clients knew I was away and all my projects were up to date. While at the resort, I didn’t [...]
Die, buzzwords, die
This week, a Toronto newspaper ran a story with a headline containing a buzzword that is one of my most detested — “win-win” — so it’s obvious the battle against meaningless phrases must continue. On our side, we have sites that make fun of buzzwords, like these: Web Economy Bullshit Generator shows lists of verbs, [...]
Comforts of home, office version
Today is Doing Business in Your Bathrobe Day, the 7th annual celebration of the freedom of home business ownership. Today’s the day to make the bathrobe your power suit, or so says Kristie Tamsevicius, whose blog offers “mom-geared work-at-home tips.” (I found Kristie T. via the “Publicity Hound” Joan Stewart‘s Tips of the Week, an [...]
Glory file as a word cloud
They’re everywhere these days: illustrating a newspaper article, highlighting a book’s content, offering a glimpse into a web site. Word clouds are great visual signals for what’s inside. Make your own with Wordle, a fun toy created by Jonathan Feinberg at IBM Research. Wordle generates word clouds, either from text you’ve cut and pasted or [...]
Posted in The Red Jacket Diaries blog Tagged Freelance writing, General nonsense, Wordnerdery, Words 2 Comments
Are the ads worth it?
The discussion over Super Bowl ads continues days after they aired. Of course, we Canadians are sheltered and can’t see the ads during the event itself, but they are a still a hot topic of conversation. (The game? What game? Oh, yeah, the football game, we did see that, too.) It took me until Monday [...]
More fun words
Some interesting words I’ve run across lately: Wrapsimonious: “Joe recycles nothing, so when he carefully removes the paper from his gift, he’s just being wrapsimonious so he won’t have to purchase any.” (From Verbotomy) Clickstream: The path taken through a web site. Thinute: “A brief minute when I was two pounds thinner than usual.” (From [...]
