#149 - Today's Writing Exercise

Motto: Seriously.
I'm sorry if my "write every day" goal has given you guys too much to read. I'm trying to keep each Column pretty focused, to keep from the fatigue that comes when somebody drones on.

I hate it when people drone on about meaningless crap; and you're like "aggh! get to the point already!".

Drone:
noun
(1) A low, continuous humming sound.
(2) A person who does no useful work and lives off others
(3) A remote-controlled pilotless aircraft or missile
(4) Male bee in a colony of social bees, which does no work but can fertilize the queen
(5) To speak tediously in a dull and monotonous tone

It's interesting how words can come to mean different things. What does a mating bee have to do with a pilotless missile? Or a continuous humming sound, for that matter? We reuse words in some of the strangest ways.

Iron = chemical element #26
Iron = to smooth out
Iron = golf club falling between the woods and putter

Homonyms are dumb. Why can't we just make up new words for two of those three definitions?

From now on:

Chemical element #26 = "Iron"
To smooth out = "Chuv"
Golf club = "Dongley"

 That will make the sentence "I used my 9 dongley to chuv a situation with my iron-fisted bookkeeper" much easier to understand.

 This column was posted to allieviate the stretch of "meaningful", "for-purpose", or "serious" posts. Just to solidify this post's lack of seriousness, here's the picture to go out on:

Now that I've used my Chromebook for purpose, instead of just using it to try to get to know it, I've gotten to know it much better. See the Top 5.
Top 5: Additional Thoughts about Working on a Chromebook
5. I haven't yet run into a situation where I've said "oh man, I need my actual computer to do this." It helps that I already pretty much live in the browser and in the cloud.
4. I use the "home" and "end" keys a lot more than I expected I would. The Chromebook has no such keys. It will take a while to get used to Ctrl+Alt+Up/Down.
3. It looks nice. It feels nice. I got my second Chromebook in the mail for comparison, I'm sending it back immediately. The Toshiba Chromebook is worth the extra $80. Using it doesn't feel like a compromise.
2. Three finger swipe from left to right to scroll between open tabs in the Chrome browser. This allows you to seamlessly switch back and forth between two things way easier than the Ctrl+Tab key combo. Did you know you can hit Ctrl+Tab to switch between tabs in Chrome? Try it. Ctrl+Shift+Tab lets you go backwards. It's much easier to do the 3 finger swipe, though.
1. Window arrangement is done intelligently. For example: if you're working on two things side-by-side, you can click the line between them to resize both of them simultaneously.

Quote:
“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo”
- An example of reusing words gone overboard. This is a grammatically correct sentence that means "Buffalo (New York) bison that other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison". See here for more information. -

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

#258 - Feature: Notetaking Platform Anxiety

Image
Motto: Writing for Me, by Me Melissa is going back to grad school, she's taking her Mac Air & iPad with her & utilizing Microsoft OneNote. While she was setting up her notetaking environment, I started thinking about how I would architect my "idealized system for handling graduate school". Fair warning, this is a bit of an epic. A system for succeeding in higher education is defined in several broad categories: What would I physically bring with me to class? How would I take notes that are relevant immediately and in the future? How do I manage time & tasks? Answering these questions is the purpose of this Column. I'm going to do so both "in general" and given my specific (more interesting to me, but less interesting in general) case. 1. What would I physically bring with me to class? Obviously I would bring with me a bag. I'd probably just keep my current messenger bag for simplicity sake. Anything could work. In all
Read more

#22 - It's my party and I'll cry to get attention.

Image
Motto: Two days ago, I was 23. Then I was 24. I aged one year in a day. Yesterday was my birthday. A few friends of mine helped another friend of mine move from Lawrence to Kansas City. The trip up there was hot and windy and stressful. We lost a pillow out of the back of the truck ( not entirely my fault), but otherwise had no casualties. The rest of this story will be told in bullet-point fashion: We relaxed in the air conditioner. We ate Minsky's pizza. We held the first meeting of my secret society that has been held in probably a year. Nobody knows that but me. We threw marshmallows into each other's mouths. We eventually built a slingshot and started using it instead of throwing them. We walked around a really nice apartment building. We were denied access to the pool or the movie theater room on account of them being previously engaged. We got lost (mildly lost) driving around looking for a convenience store.  We saw what is apparently "the bad part o
Read more

#42 - Life, The Universe, and Everything

Image
Motto: Don't Panic. BSOD My current computer is crashing on a multiple-times-per-day basis now. It's a little over 4 years old and has been needing to be put to rest for a while. Given that I know technology and what-not, I've decided I am going to build my next computer myself. Seems obvious now, I don't know why I didn't think of it before. It's going to be built specifically to suit my needs. This essentially means I'm going to build a computer specifically for video editing. There will be more on this at a later date... I have a couple of Nexus devices I want to get before the computer time ever comes. Having a job and money is so much better than college was it's not even funny. Whoever said "college is the best time in your life" must have not went through an engineering program. Don't get me wrong, college as great... but would I rather be doing that than what I'm doing now? No fricken way. Most negative words seem to st
Read more