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 object is to use all 64 letters before the time runs out, while getting as many points as you can. Each time the clock runs out, your total score and that of the highest scoring word are displayed.

Tell me that’s not addictive to word nerds!

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 check e-mail, write a post, read other blogs, Google anything or update my Facebook or LinkedIn profiles. Instead, I skied, went zip-lining (aka acrobranche, where you fly or walk various planks, barrels and wobbly bridges from tree to tree), soaked in the hot tub, ate some terrific meals. Pretty good replacements, right?

I was a little antsy about not checking e-mail, mostly because I subscribe to a lot of e-newsletters and mailing lists and knew my in-box would be filling up. But I did not check in until day 6 (on the family computer), when we got home. I got my own computer back on day 7 and made sure all was working properly before shutting down for another entire day.

Now that I know it can be done, I hope to be a little more disciplined about e-mail while still being responsive. Of course, an active offline life is the best incentive to get off the computer. And with that, I’m off to walk the dog.

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, adjectives and nouns that it will randomly mix for you to come up with gems like “exploit mission-critical metrics” and “utilize scalable web-readiness.”

Bullshit Generator for the Web 2.0 TM (in beta) doesn’t show you the lists, just randomly mixes them up to come up with phrases like “harness long-tail communities” and “aggregate user-contributed feeds.”

BuzzPhraser TM says it builds phrases with “TechnoLatin, a non-language that replaces plain English nouns with vague but precise-sounding substitutes. In TechnoLatin, a disk drive is a ‘data management solution.’ A phone is a ‘telecommunications device.’” You choose how many nouns, adjectives and adverbs to spin together, to come up with phrases like “globally strategic initiative proposition” and “routine platform radish.”

BuzzWhack doesn’t let you generate your own meaningless phrases, but it shows and defines many that are in circulation. It also has some great words, like anticipointment (the feeling you get when a product or event doesn’t live up to its own hype) and hamsterize (to use manual labor in lieu of technology).

What are your most hated buzzwords? What horrible examples have you seen lately? Leave me a comment! In the meantime, I’m taking a break from blogging this week at a ski hill, which I hope will be the kind of place where buzzwords fear to tread.

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 ezine featuring tips, tricks and tools for generating free publicity, via Donna Papacosta.)

I don’t normally work in my bathrobe; I have it on now over my clothes just to get in the appropriate spirit. But the point is, I COULD.

That’s probably the best thing about working in a home office. I don’t mean being able to work in a bathrobe. I mean having the flexibility to choose to work the way you work best and the way that brings balance to your life. Here’s what I mean:

• Most days, I keep regular work hours. Deadlines keep me focused, but when things are a little quieter, I don’t feel guilty taking a longer lunch break to run errands.
• When my two sons were small, I could help in their classrooms once in a while, go on a field trip or attend a special event during the day, making up the work hours at night or on a weekend. I was home at the beginning and end of the school day and there in case of emergency.
• We have a dog (something the boys lobbied for years ago) because I’m home most days. We keep each other company and we get out for walks during the day, which benefits us both.

I’ve read that just having a measure of control over your day helps ease a stressful job. It’s not that you’re doing any less; but when you know you have some flexibility, you don’t have to waste time worrying.

Wearing a bathrobe while you’re not worrying is just icing on the cake.

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 the URL to a site with a feed, like a blog. Toss the words in the Wordle blender and it serves up a lovely graphic. Play with colour, fonts and layouts until you get what you want. Print a copy and do anything you want with it (make a transfer and put it on a T-shirt, for instance), or post it to the gallery to show others. Ones I saw in the gallery included Wordles made of speeches, names, the text in a chapter and attributes.

Here’s an idea for freelancers: Turn your testimonials (AKA your glory file) into a great visual snapshot you can hang on your wall. Copy your testimonials (you do collect them, don’t you?) into a Word document; strip out a lot of the extra words to leave the strong words of praise; add your own name in a few extra times (to make it come out larger than the other words, since size is a function of how many times the word appears). Copy and paste into the Wordle “create” space. Play around with fonts and layout until you find something pleasing. Print it out and bask in glory-at-a-glance.

Or with Valentine’s Day coming up, you might want to paste all the words that describe your sweetie — gorgeous, kind, funny, smart, etc. — with his/her name for a personal and unusual gift.

Try it out!

(Thanks to Ann Wylie’s Writing Tips e-newsletter for pointing me to Wordle.)

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 night to catch up with a few of them, yesterday to see others. Is it just me or did you find the ads were less than stellar this year?

Ones I liked:

• The Budweiser Clydesdales series, Fetch (bringing back the Dalmatian that acted as horse trainer last year), Circus and Generations. Cute, although not a real strong tie to beer.
• Cheetos’ Spoiled Girl getting swarmed by pigeons.
• Monster.com’s Double Take, with the moose head on one side of the wall and the other end on the other side.
• Pedigree’s Crazy Pets; was that a warthog in the back seat, hanging his head out of the car window?
• H&R Block, especially the part where Death tries to get his parking validated.

Alec Baldwin for Hulu was kind of amusing, in his quirky 30 Rock way. SoBe and PepSuber were just weird. GoDaddy followed its usual distasteful (to women, anyway) track.  And CareerBuilder’s repetition was just annoying.

What did you think?

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 Flawed Mom)

And two that sent me to the dictionary:

Crepuscular: Of twilight.

Gyre: I thought C.S. Lewis made this up in Jabberwocky (‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves/Did gyre and gimble in the wabe), but it means whirl or gyrate.