Without an Apostrophe

Well, I’ve made it to the end of the Blogathon, writing a new post every day for the month of May.

Though, part of me does wonder just how much of a victory it really is. I mean, I’ve worked for daily newspapers, writing constantly isn’t particularly new.

On the other hand, this time around, there was no assignment editor telling me what was going on today and to get cracking. No real threat if I didn’t make it.

I guess most importantly, I forced myself to find time to write something every day even though there was no per-word rate to speak of.

I guess with most situations, the real value I feel to blogging is getting faster at putting together something coherent. At least, I hope it was all coherent.

So Wired magazine has an iPad app, but not everyone is impressed. Interfacelab asks Is This Really the Future of Magazines?

And on the topic of Wired, the current issue has a fascinating article about biobanks and the sad state they are in.

Then The Onion takes on Facebook privacy.

So, here’s another application that has become a must have for me: DropBox.

It creates a DropBox directory and putting files will automatically upload them to a remote server.

Now, there are more than enough online services that do this – what makes DropBox so special?

If you install it on another computer and enter your account info, it will automatically synchronize all those files. So, if I make any changes to a document on my laptop, those changes will be there on my desktop computer as soon as it connect to the Internet.

Now, sure, for an article draft I could just use Google Docs, but with DropBox I can use whatever word processor I choose and the files will be there on any computer I want to access them from.

Plus, saving important files to the directory on my hard drive is easier than remember to do regular back-ups (though, those should be done anyway.)

For free customers, DropBox offers 2 gigabytes of storage space but If you sign up for the service through this referral link, you’ll get an extra 250 megabytes of storage space (and so will I!)

Last week, Google celebrated the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man by making the game playable from the main search page.

Well, time management software maker RescueTime crunched the numbers.

According to the company’s calculations, users spent a combined 4,819,352 hours on Google’s search page on May 23rd.

Now, assuming the average Google user’s time worth $25/h, that comes out to $120,483,800 in lost productivity.

All that said, calculations like this to tend to annoy me since they assume every single one of those people would have been doing something productive instead of playing Pac-Man.

Still some fun stats, though.

Ah, Craigslist rants and raves.

While it is frequently a great window into human stupidity, there are some true gems in there that end up in the “Best Of” section.

Today I’d like to highlight a rant in February written by someone whose been unemployed for the past two years in response to his Alma Matter’s request for donations.

While this is about American universities, I think the sentiment echoes that of a shocking amount of people who’ve been through higher education no matter where they live.