information age – Page 9 – don't confuse the narrator

don’t make me raise my voice!

For years there have been jokes about whether computers are male or female. (There are many variations on the theme, this link shows just one.) But has anyone ever actually tested a computer’s response to the different kinds of violencia de género (gender violence) as the Spanish insist on calling domestic violence?

Yes, computers are delicate mechanisms, and, if you physically mistreat one, it will no doubt break down eventually. But what about verbal abuse?

At last we have a – partial – answer:

You have been warned: don’t shout at your computer (or at least, don’t shout at your disk drive).

Fortunately, I think it’s still all right to make snide remarks.

taxing my patience

Buying blank cds to back up my ever-growing collection of photographs, I am reminded of university days when I studied Adam’s Smiths canons of taxation.

Every blank cd sold in Spain is subject to el canon – popularly referred to as “un impuesto por si acaso“. That pretty much describes it: a “just-in-case tax”.
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books to look cool

According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang, new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
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journalism for beginners

Yesterday I mentioned the 1939 Spectator diarist’s fear of what might happen when the newly invented cheap ball point pen got into the hands of the “inexpert and frankly incompetent”. Of course we’ve gone way beyond that now.

Now, anyone who owns a digital camera thinks he is a photographer; anyone with a computer is a journalist and anyone with a mobile phone is an on-the-spot reporter. And very few of us have any professional training in journalism.
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reader, beware

In these days of economic recession, credit crunch, financial crisis, or whatever term the media are using today, it’s logical that we should look back to the Wall Street crash of ’29 in an attempt to make comparisons and perhaps find solutions.

However, in these days of electronic media, blogs, wikis, archives and resources written by “the unwashed masses”, it’s all too easy to get confused by what’s real and what isn’t. Continue reading “reader, beware”