unbound @ seema.org

Monday, July 21, 2008

 
Grammar Lady

The woeful misuse of the apostrophe drives me absolutely bonkers. It's nails on a chalkboard to me to see someone write you're when they really mean your or vice versa. Who's versus whose is another good one, but I cut people some slack on that one because it's way more confusing than the previous example. More recently, I don't like the practice of adding an apostrophe to make dates plural such 1960's; I always think that something ought to belong to 1960 when I see that. Also, abbreviations with random apostrophes -- such as SAT's instead of SATs. Since so many people do these things with apostrophes, I decided to do a bit of research and find out what the actual rules are.

Turns out, I'm mostly right. The apostrophe for dates and plural abbreviations can be accepted in some places by some people, but the more proper way is to omit the apostrophe in cases of plural abbreviations and dates unless there's the potential to cause some confusion such as multiple A's -- so it's A's, not As or if there is punctuation (ex: periods) within the abbreviation. A good write-up on the rules are here. Here's another post on the same subject. And there's apparently an Apostrophe Protection Society, complete with examples of apostrophe abuse.

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| 9:37 PM |

Sunday, April 06, 2008

 
Techity

I've been aggravated with SeaMonkey ever since I upgraded from the last legit version of Mozilla. First, there was the minor issue of it erasing/losing all of my email (5-6 years worth!) and since then, it's been slow as rocks and just not as stable a client as Mozilla. I miss Mozilla :-(.

My latest problem concerns email -- namely email sent via SMTP. The email downloads from my web server just fine, but when I respond and go to click "send", I get two error messages. Eventually I'm able to send the email by jumping through a couple of hoops, namely going back into account settings, switching between "Default" and "AT&T" SMTP servers (which is stupid, because in this case, they are one and the same) and then making sure no other email window is open. Once this is done, I can sometimes hit send and actually have the email go.

I've been checking all of my settings and passwords and ports, and I still haven't figured out what the issue is. I don't know whether the culprit is AT&T -- though they eventually let me send the email -- or SeaMonkey, or some combination of both. I'd like to like the blame for the whole mess on SeaMonkey's doorstep though. The fact if I shut down all email except the one I want to send tells me that it is most probably a software issue rather than AT&T being difficult. I'm trying to test another SMTP server, but that's causing me another load of problems.

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| 8:14 AM |

Thursday, January 03, 2008

 
Musiclicious

I'm loading up my brand new iPod with music, mostly songs from my own CD collection. This is exciting because it means I can actually listen to more than 80 minutes of music at a time without having to change a CD. I still remember how exciting it was to discover the world of 90-minute cassette tapes and how revolutionary that seemed compared to the 60-minute tapes. It's amazing to me just how much more the iPod holds yet it's a fraction of the size of my Walkman. Apple says I should be able to get about 240 songs on the thing, and it can play for 12 hours straight. Plus, it's a shuffle, so it means I'll rarely ever know which song is coming up next. Sometimes knowing what song is coming next is awfully boring. Anyway, I'm excited. By tomorrow I should have about 70 songs on my iPod, and that's nearly 4 hours of enjoyment. Priceless.

Link: Interesting article on a goof in the WaPo re ripping owned CDs for use on computers etc

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| 6:33 PM |

Sunday, November 04, 2007

 
Out of practice

I finally got around to upgrading my browser so I'm now blogging at you from SeaMonkey. But I also am so out of practice that I forgot to back-up my files. Okay, maybe not so much 'forgot' as relied on Mozilla's past track record of not writing over my files. Well, note to the wise: BACK UP YOUR FILES. I have lost every email sent to the Top Sekrit address since 2001 ::sniff:: including email addresses. Which means, if you've emailed me very recently and I didn't email you back, well, chances are you won't be seeing a response to that email. I'm actually more concerned about the email addresses since there are some people whose email I don't know by heart and not sure how I'm going to deal with those.

On the plug side, as related to last night's blog entry, I did lose some of those emails that I wanted desperately to delete and forget about, but couldn't, and now as fate has it...

If anyone has any idea of where my email might have disappeared to during the installation process, I'd love your input.

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| 8:37 AM |

Monday, October 08, 2007

 
Woe!

I'm blogging at you from IE because Mozilla crashed this evening and while I was trying to resurrect the browser made out of awesome, I was stunned to learn that the Mozilla suite's last release was in 2006 and ::sniff:: has now been entirely replaced by Thunderbird and Firefox. It's sad because I've been Mozilla-ing forever and I'm wary of these new!improved animals. Maybe in a couple of weeks, I'll switch over. It's not good to run around with old software...

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| 8:56 PM |

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