Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss!

Gene Ziegler wrote a poem titled, “A Grandchild’s Guide to Using Grandpa’s Computer.”

In celebration of Dr. Seuss’ 107th birthday today we are posting this, sure it would have brought a smile to his face.

Here’s an easy game to play.
Here’s an easy thing to say….

If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port,
and the bus is interrupted as a very last resort,
and the address of the memory makes your floppy disk abort
then the socket packet pocket has an error to report!

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash,
and the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash,
and your data is corrupted cause the index doesn’t hash,
then your situation’s hopeless, and your system’s gunna crash.

You can’t say this? What a shame, sir!
We’ll find you another game, sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house
says the network is connected to the button on your mouse,
but your packets want to tunnel on another protocol,
that’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall,
and your screen is all distorted by the side-effects of gauss,
so your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse,
then you may as well reboot and go out with a bang,
cause as sure as I’m a poet, the sucker’s gunna hang!

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk,
and the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risc,
then you have to flash your memory
and you’ll want to RAM your ROM.
quickly turn off your computer and be sure to tell your mom!

Posted with permission. For the entire poem, along with others, please visit:

http://www.geneziegler.com/clocktower/DrSeuss.html

What Did You Say?

WARNING: iPod Earbuds Are Known To Cause Permanent Hearing Loss

Listening to music on the radio is about antiquated today as using a payphone. Modern music lovers now carry thousands of songs around with them in their iPod and listen while driving, working, exercising, completing chores, etc. Problem is, the earbuds that come with the iPods (and similar products) let in a lot of ambient noise. That means users crank up the volume to drown out whatever is going on in the background.

The volume on an iPod can be raised to 115 decibels (db) which is the equivalent of standing next to a moving subway train and only 5 db short of an ambulance siren. The average individual can tolerate up to eight hours of sound at 85 db before suffering hearing damage. For every 5 db over 85, the exposure time before irreversible damage gets cut in half, say audiologists.

Because so many earbud users have suffered hearing damage, Apple was taken to court, but a federal appeals court exonerated the company, noting that Apple puts warnings on its packaging and iTunes site and offers instructions on how to set volume limits on iPods.

To hear music at a reasonable volume, users can purchase headphones with in-ear monitors (IEM) that reduce noise. You can also have an audiologist make custom earbuds for you to ensure a perfect fit and reduce background noise. They cost about $400 but will save your hearing.

How To Quickly Add Facebook And LinkedIn Contacts To Outlook

With social media becoming a widely spread way of finding and connecting with customers, prospects and business partners, it’s about time someone came up with a way to pull all these contacts together in one spot.

Xobni is an Outlook plug-in that pulls contact information from several sources, including LinkedIn profiles, Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce, Hoovers and Yahoo mail. It also organizes your e-mails into threaded conversations and makes searching for documents and e-mails much easier.

If there is a phone number, address or company name in an e-mail, that person’s information profile will be automatically populated. It’s the same thing if one of your contact’s e-mail addresses matches a profile on Facebook, Yahoo or LinkedIn. Company information is automatically pulled from Hoovers.

Another cool feature is the contact statistics, which gives you a graph showing what times people tend to send you e-mail so you can quickly identify the most likely times you’ll be able to reach that person. Additionally, it ranks that person with regards to the number of e-mails exchanged and displays the balance between sent and received e-mails. Xobni Actions supplies you with quick templates for asking a contact for their phone number or to schedule a meeting. Icons for LinkedIn, Facebook, and Hoovers allow you to quickly pull information from these sites including Facebook updates.

While there is a free version you can download, the paid version only costs $30 and gives you advanced search capabilities.

Writing For The Computer Screen

With so many people reading documents online, a new challenge has presented itself for anyone trying to use electronic communications: making your documents reader-friendly for SCREEN reading.

Reading material on a computer screen is much different than reading printed material. Instead of reading physical matter, we are reading light when looking at a computer screen. That means you blink less and are unable to easily adjust text size by moving a document closer to, or further away from, your eyes. These factors contribute to an online reader scanning a page, and searching for phrases and words to match what they are looking for. Because of this, writers need to capture a reader’s attention immediately, increasing the need for headlines on pages and subheads to break up longer paragraphs. Here are some other tips for making your web pages more reader-friendly.

* Use Arial or Verdana fonts because they are the easiest to read.
* Make sure you use 12 point text or larger; smaller text makes a page very unfriendly to a user.
* Use black text on a white background if you want people to read your document. Many designers like to use light gray fonts which prevent users from easily reading your document.
* Don’t put graphics behind text; again, this makes it difficult for users to read your information and will cause them to skip over your page.
* Don’t clutter up your page with lots of flash or graphics. These distract the reader from the text.