I Wonder If I’ve Forgotten Something…

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

Merriam-Webster has a collection of their readers’ favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary. Slashdot covered the article in the context of item #3, “woot” or, as I prefer to spell it, “w00t” (with zeros in the middle). Of course, that would be an interjection meaning “an exclamation of joy or excitement”.

Wootiness aside, my favorite is actually #5, “cognitive displaysia”:

cognitive displaysia
(n): the feeling you have before you even leave the house that you are going to forget something and not remember it until you’re on the highway

I don’t know about you, but that one happens to me all the time and especially as I’m heading off for a long trip. I mean, I’ve done silly things like packing my cell phone on a week-long trip but not its charger (d’oh). Or, just as boggling would be to forget one’s socks on a trip (which I haven’t done but I’ve run into someone who’s done that). These days, I mostly resort to making myself a list of things to pack the night before. That way, I can calmly compose the list and, when it comes time to pack, I just follow the list and I don’t have to worry about forgetting something.

A Substitute for Both “Yes” and “No”

Ashley Bischoff2 Comments

I was surfing through Answers.com and I came across an entry which I’ll get to in a moment. But first, Jeopardy-style, here’s an abbreviated version of the word’s definition (the answer) followed by the word itself (the question).

A: This word can be substituted for both Yes and No.

Q: What is “meh”?

I got a kick out that one. I mean, it's not often that one runs across a word which has two meanings — each opposite of the other. Jeopardy-ness aside, here’s the rest of the definition for meh:

“Internet and general slang or spoken, ‘meh’ usually signifies apathy or indifference. It is used to signify unwillingness to answer a question, or admitted laziness. Can be substituted for: Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t care. Whatever. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How?”

The part I struggle with — if I were to attempt to make use of the word — is that I’m not sure of its connotations. If the connotation skewed towards “lacking a preference”, that would be, erm, preferable; but, if its meaning was more along the lines of outright “disinterest”, that might lessen the general usefulness of the word.

PS Note to semantic enthusiasts: Rest assured, I used a definition list above and, yes, I coded the <dd> before the <dt> :).

Traffic Alerts on Your Cell Phone

Ashley Bischoff3 Comments

After finding myself unexpectedly stuck in traffic on my way home from work one too many times, I thought to check whether I could get traffic alerts e-mailed to me (after all, there’re websites which track traffic, so I thought there was at least a chance someone might offer an e-mail option). I did some searching but I couldn’t find anyone that had traffic alerts over e-mail.

Then it occurred to me that traffic alerts sent to my cell phone would be even better — that way, I wouldn’t even have to be near my computer to keep up-to-date on any traffic anomalies. I wasn’t very optimistic about finding much, though; sending alerts via e-mail is one thing, but having a traffic-alert service with an integrated SMS gateway on the back-end seemed like a tall order. Nonetheless, I searched anyway — and, sure enough, there is such a thing. Apparently, MSN has a free MSN Alerts service which can send traffic alerts (or other updates) to one’s phone.

The process is fairly straightforward. First, you’ll need an MS Passport account. Then, just load up the MSN Alerts page and choose the “Add Alerts” link which is on the top of that page. The only tricky part, if you can even call it that, is that the traffic alerts are under the “MSN Autos” header (though, to be fair, the subheader does say “Receive real-time local traffic incidents from MSN Carpoint”).

From there, the options are up to you. After choosing your metro area (“Dallas-Ft Worth” in my case”) you can select from what looks to be several dozen metro regions (which, on my list, starts from “Abbott”, goes through ”Euless”, and continues right through to “Wylie”). In my case, I just chose “Dallas” ;). And, from there, you also have a choice of delivery times, delivery days and traffic incident severity; I set that last one just to “High” since it was mostly the accidents that I cared about and I didn’t want to rack up too many text messages needlessly.

I’ve been using MSN Alerts for a few days now and it’s working out well. Granted, it sometimes tells me about accidents on roads on which I don’t drive — c'est la vie — but the alerts on roads which I use have saved me a few times from driving into a block of traffic. And, other than traffic alerts, some of the other alerts offered have been handy as well; I’ve also signed up for breaking news alerts (under the “MSNBC News” header) and a Dow Jones stock alert (under the “MSN Money” header). There’re also alerts for sports and so on, but those didn’t interest me enough to use up my text messages for those.

Autoblog on Speed Channel’s WRC Coverage

Ashley Bischoff12 Comments

In a post last month about how Netflix tried to recommend a pregnancy workout disc to me after I had added an autocross driving disc to my queue, I made an attempt at describing WRC (World Rally Championship racing). However, I came across an entry at Autoblog (a car blog in the Weblogs Inc family) that painted a better picture:

I personally think that the WRC is the most exciting race to watch, and the more you guys care, the more chances they’ll show it live in the US. Here are the reasons to care: It has fast drifting turns, spectacular scenery, death-defying leaps over blind crests and some dude in the passenger seat reading out the turns to a guy driving at 100mph who hasn’t seen the road before. These guys have balls, real manly ones. Oh, did I mention awesome crashes into trees? Yeah, they got that too. For those of you who want to start watching, the WRC Magazine show airs on the Speed Channel.

After reading over that, I really began to ponder whether I should sign up for DirecTV sometime (or some other television service which includes Speed Channel). Really, I’m not even sure what my options are, Speed Channel-wise. I’m pretty sure that DirecTV carries it, but might Comcast Digital Cable or Echostar carry it as well? Oh, and just to clarify a minor thinko in Autoblog’s post — the drivers have seen the roads before, during the pre-race “recce” (however, in the midst of a race, the driver steers largely on the faith of the directions blurted to him by his navigator in the passenger seat).

Foxit PDF Alternative to Adobe Reader

Ashley Bischoff13 Comments

While browsing BetaNews over the weekend, I came across Foxit PDF Reader. It’s a PDF reader and that concept may seem a bit redundant at first since Adobe has a PDF reader that works fine, eh? Well, the only problem is that the basic Acrobat Reader could read PDF documents years ago and yet Adobe needed something to put in the new versions…

So, for the last few years, Adobe has released new versions of their PDF reader, adding obscure features which only served to slow down the app for the rest of us. That's where Foxit’s PDF Reader comes in. In contrast to Adobe's PDF Reader which — at least on my system — weighs in at 70 MB (?!), Foxit PDF Reader is about 2 MB. And, it’s just a single .exe file, so there’s no complicated install, either; just unzip and go.

I must say, I was skeptical of of Foxit Reader at first. I mean, how could such a small app display the same documents that needed a 70 MB app previously? Well, I was pleasantly surprised — this thing loads almost instantaneously and it properly rendered all of the documents which I tested with it. On top of that, my mouse wheel actually works this time around (for some reason, my mouse wheel was perpetually ineffective in Adobe Reader).

The only downside to Foxit PDF Reader is that it doesn't support PDF-based forms. Sure, you can view the forms (and print them if you wanted to) but it doesn't support filling out the forms right within the PDF Reader. So, at least for those rare occurrences, it’d make sense to keep Adobe Reader tucked away somewhere. On the other hand, Foxit Reader does have a feature which is similar and, depending on the situation, may be better or worse than native form support. In what they call “typewriter” mode, you can type on top of any part of a document. So, yeah, you could fake filling out a form by placing text right on top of the form fields. More importantly, you can add your own text to any form this way — whether or not they were designed with PDF form support.

PDFs used to be a real drag; I never looked forward to having to open them. But, I can open a PDF document faster than I can open a Word document these days — and I never thought that would happen. (And if you're up for it, I’d recommend trying the 1.3 beta over the current release; I’ve not had any problems with it.)