The Darwin awards for 2009 have been announced. ‘Nuff said.
Categories
Month: January 2010
I recently started using Readability (a Firefox extension) to read certain web pages. It does an excellent job in capturing the main text area on many a page (but it does not work on many, such as Friendfeed.com, which auto-update constantly). You can format the text in various ways for easy readability (apt name) and once you discover you want to keep it for future reference you can put it in Evernote by the Firefox bookmarklet.
Today I started using yet another such tool I was reading about in Lifehacker: Instapaper. For some reason I had checked it out in the summer and forgot all about it. I suspect it was because I wanted Evernote to be the default place for all my notes. But today I am seeing that instapaper can be a first-pass place for interesting sites, and items I read there are archived online automatically for me or I can grab them and stick them into Evernote in the same way as with Readability. But Instapaper has a big advantage over Readability for browsers (like Chrome) that have (on the Mac, for now) no extension capability: it is a bookmarklet and a site and it can be accessed, therefore, with any browser.So on we go: better tools, more reading online. Now to moderate that and find only the good things to read!
This item from Robert Lanham in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency is a hilarious parody of college syllabi except when it hits close to the bone and starts hurting, which it does right now, as I just finished today a totally revamped syllabus for my undergraduate mathematical economics course for the coming semester. Writing for Nonreaders. Really. Here is a quote from the “course description” to induce you to read the whole thing, which I enjoyed (humor and hurt together) immensely:
Instant messaging. Twittering. Facebook updates. These 21st-century literary genres are defining a new “Lost Generation” of minimalists who would much rather watch Lost on their iPhones than toil over long-winded articles and short stories. Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.