Jason Thibeault's Blog: From My Pen, page 72

The Meaning of Language

After a recent email/blog exchange regarding erroneous emails, I really got to thinking about what bothered me so much about this: the language of the message that he sent.

Hi,

My name is Jason Thibeault, and I’m from Nova Scotia, Canada. Your co-captain Jason Thibeault (whom I’m assuming to be related to you by blood or by marriage) believes he owns jthibeault@gmail.com and has evidently been registering me for a number of things including scholastic events and this Polar Ice website. Could yo...

Facepalm: So You’re Mad About Something You Saw on the Internet…

If that’s the case, you might make use of this helpful, colorful flowchart. Posters are available.

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H. Caldwell Tanner and Rosscott Nover have created So You’re Mad About Something on the Internet…, a comic flowchart about how to deal with Internet arguments. It’s a follow up to their previous comic flowchart “So you found something cool on the Internet…” encouraging attribution of work found online. Posters are available for both charts.

To Be Connected or Not To Be Connected…

If HP is any sign of things to come, it won’t be long until everything is network-aware:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/peripherals/231001590

In a recent press conference, HP indicated that they were moving to make their printers “web enabled and cloud aware:”

We decided that above a certain price point, every printer will be connected to the Web. It will be cloud-aware, and it will have an email address.

I believe that HP’s move to provide this service is not only a move to generat...

How-To: Managing Your Online Rep

We all have one, whether we like it or not. Some of it’s good, some of it’s bad, but the interaction we have with others in the public sphere can be used by prospective employers and others.

The New Web posted a great piece on tips/techniques you can use to manage this online reputation:

http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/07/15/5-basic-things-you-should-be-doing-to-manage-your-online-reputation/

In summary:

Understand. Know that you have an online reputation and actively seek to manage it.
Lis...

Particle Flipping

In the world of physics, this would be a huge deal:

http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/06/16/2359246/Indication-of-Neutrino-Transformation-Observed

I have long believed (for no reason other than it seems logical) that if particles are composed of strings (and you really have buy into string theory to think this) and that those strings are constantly resonating, then perhaps it is the frequency of the resonation that gives the matter its characteristics. So an electron is an electron because o...

Fiction is a Process of Imagination, Not Real Life.

All writers hear the phrase, “write what you know” throughout their career. Whether from editors or friends or creative writing teachers, it seems to fly in the face of “fiction.” Perhaps this phrase was born out of the literary fiction movement in which literature is meant to reflect the human condition (highly imaginative fiction, such as sci-fi or fantasy, often gets left out of this classification although one could argue that authors like LeGuin write “literary science fiction”).

The Atla...

Are You Ready to Start Sending Tweeeeeeeeeets?

Well, that’s exactly what you will start sending if twitter decides to increase its character count to 280.

The link below is a great write-up from Slate on why this wouldn’t be a bad thing:

http://www.slate.com/id/2299539/

I disagree. Twitter is successful because it forces people to think carefully about what they say. It’s not like Facebook status messages where you can cram as much as you want, droning on mindlessly about your days adventures or feelings. In the age-old saying, “if it ain’t...

Forward Look: The Future of Retail

In the sometime near future (I don’t want to suppose I have a crystal ball to be able to predict when), the way we interact with retail will be fundamentally different. Not only will we get targeted, highly-relevant deals sent to our phone in many of the stores we shop, but our shopping patterns within the store will continue to refine the experience eventually creating for us a very personalized experienced. I say this because of five trends I see and how they are converging:

Better mobile lo...

A Shift in Tech Startup Mentality

There’s an interesting post on ReadWriteStart from Chris Shipley (she runs the DEMO conference; I launched a company there several years ago, GoWare) on a “startup” bubble:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2011/07/3-myths-of-the-startup-bubble.php

After reading the article, I was immediately struck by the need to term this a “bubble” when, in fact, I think we are seeing an evolution of tech startups. It’s a new class of startup that I will call “burners.” Their main goal: build a company quick...

Got 100 Seconds? Watch 100 Years of Dance, Fashion, and Music.

Westgate is getting ready to open Westfield Stratford City, the largest shopping center in Europe, this September. To commemorate, they produced a short piece (100 seconds) that showcase 100 years of East London’s dance, fashion, and music. Even if you can’t relate, it’s just pretty cool to watch!