Highlights since March 1st - enjoy!

1. The worst plan. Ever. Why charging tolls to drive in the city is a bad idea.
2. Cheap Eats Food for $5 per serving? It's possible even with rising prices.
3. The Death of Customer Service Good customer service is hard to come by these days. An experience worth reading.
4. Obama Wins Texas! Maybe? Sort of... Not really? A look at the Texas "primus" (primary + caucus).
5. Mac Secrets A look at exciting new software from the makers of Quicksilver.

1:03 pm | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Apple, Blog Roundup, Business, Economics, Election '08, Maryland, Northern Virginia, Pet Peeves, Politics, Technology, Traffic, Travel

I went shopping today. It was a less than pleasant experience.

Between understaffed retail stores, poor customer service from the staff members they DID bother to employ, rude customers who were convinced that they (and generally their sixteen children) were the most important people on earth, large volumes of traffic, products missing or not available and misplaced items, it represented a complete failure of the retail sector to win my heart or my mind. Continue Reading...

11:54 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Business, Northern Virginia, Pet Peeves, Traffic, Washington, DC

The Senate is currently considering the the Patent Reform Act of 2007 (presumably to be renamed to 2008), which essentially places limitations on patent litigation, most significantly in the amount of damages that can be awarded for patent infringement. Particularly, the legislation would limit damages to being calculated using a formula that would take into account the amount of importance and the part of an invention that relies on the infringed patent.
Continue Reading...

8:21 am | Comment (0) | Print | Categories: Pet Peeves, Politics

...I hear a street band playing Pachelbel's Canon in D....

...agh he's following me, too!

4:55 pm | Comment (3) | Print | Categories: Mobile Post, Pet Peeves

Ever get an e-mail from somebody that contained way more than was needed to answer the subject? That happened to me last night (actually an e-mail followed by an almost-identical Myspace message). It frustrated me, not because I was particularly upset about the e-mail, but because it contained way more information than was needed to complete the intended purpose.

When I was a senior in high school, I had a teacher who taught a lesson on saying what you mean in as few words as possible. To be succinct was her goal; she wanted us to be specific and not mince words. The lesson had an impact on my writing style and I've worked hard to employ it ever since.

Thus it is frustrating to get e-mails that are overburdened with additional and excess words that really do not fit the chosen description of the message. To get it twice is even worse, but to get it at all is pretty bad. To be succinct is an important skill that seems to be lost on my generation. Perhaps we need our own Dragnet, complete with a "just the facts, ma'am" character.

Instead we seem much more like Macbeth: tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

2:42 pm | Comment (2) | Print | Categories: Pet Peeves