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The Good Advice Committee had to answer an interesting question this week: Is it OK to email someone you are interested in dating, even if that person didn't give you his/her address personally? The committee members outlined a couple scenarios where this would be OK, and some that would be totally off limits.
The final decision was close, but in the end, the committee voted no, 3-2. Click here to read their opinions.
QUESTION
Is it OK to email someone you are interested in dating, even if that person didn't give you his/her address personally?
AMANDA: NO
My opinion is no, unless you want to look like a stalker. The obvious response to the email will be, "So, how did you get my address?" And what will the reply to that be? "Oh, I decided to look at member directories at every email service I could think of to try to find out how to contact you." Talk about scaring someone off!
Sometimes, technical manuals are hard to read and understand. Occasionally, they may even include pictographs that are supposed to help the user better understand the instructions. But what happens when even the pictographs make no freakin' sense?
Perform a Google news search on "olympic gymnastics controversy" and you'll notice 1,230 articles (at least, at this point) pertaining to what seems to be evolving into a silly event.
I don't want to take away the athleticism of the participants. They do things that not even the best breakdancer, which is what I want to be when I grow up, cannot do. But the reward for their efforts is a couple of judges apparently randomly giving out scores. One time, I think I saw the South Korean judge with a Scantron, trying to create a flag pattern with his scoring.
Have you ever seen an advertisement and wondered how truthful it was? For example, does the leading toothpaste really fight cavities, gum disease and world poverty? Is your favorite politician's opponent actually planning to raise taxes while lowering tooth decay?
While I admit to being a little hesitant at reading such a grandiose PDF as presented from The technological society by Jacques Ellul, I found a bounty of words and phrases (some that I agreed with, some that I didn't) of which I made note. I'll try to make comments about as many as possible, although an entire Internet might not be enough room to give my thoughts about this text.
Google recently announced a new product available for a number of cell phone devices called Google Latitude. The program allows you to see other people, assuming they have opted into the system, on a Google-generated map.
The Crawfordsville Journal Review recently featured my book, The Developers in its weekend ETC edition. The article is no longer available on the newspaper's website, so here's the full version.
'The Developers' compacts romance, humor with computer technology
By Mel Robertson | mel@jrpress.com | 05/27/05
A humorous, fictional novel of five "quasi-qeek" Web developers who attempt to link a small Michigan community together through the virtual world conveys a romantic-filled comedy mixed with computer technology.
Great book that runs the gamut of synthetic biology
The term "natural" used to be substantially easier to apply to basic items like fruit and animals. It is both exhilarating and frightening to consider "improving" genetic material, but humans have a knack for putting their marks on everything imaginable.