A father learns the Postal Service website is no help in teaching a new generation of snail-mailers where the stamp goes. “Get your computer. Go to USPS.gov (turns out it’s really USPS.com).” If he saw for himself – on the screen – how to properly mail a letter, maybe he’d get it, I thought. Unfortunately, the…
I have a Yahoo account that I use when a website or a local business insists I must provide an email address. Over the years, it has gotten clogged with spam. The filter is actually pretty good, so I can always find what I need, but it’s not usually a service I check more than…
A pleasant little success story. “TEI” is the “Text Encoding Initiative,” an international effort to define and standardize the digital representation of texts. [I]n 2006 I first noticed that the TEI guidelines encouraged the use of ISO5218:2004 to assign sexuality of persons in a document (with attributes being given as 1 for male, 2 for…
Because my beginning journalism students often use the phrase “when asked about” as a default (lazy) transition when introducing quotes, I created a scenario in which President Bush apparently expresses a desire to be a cuddly bunny. In the example, a child reporter gives him two options — would he rather be a robot or…