Ken’s Sandbox

When I got my new notebook, I went out of my way to avoid Vista. I’m not quite able to go to Linux yet so XP was number one on my list of “features”. Since making that decision I have read reports that Microsoft Vista runs 15% slower than XP (a billion lines of code, what do you expect), Vista is no more secure than XP (ditto), and I just ran across this article about the information Vista sends back to Microsoft. It seems that M$ is collecting more information about Vista users than even I suspected. And I suspected a lot.

A while ago an agent, who shall remain nameless, mentioned that some of the spelling in RealWorld ad copy made our agents look like a bunch of back country hicks. That may be a bit excessive but spelling and grammar when correct go pretty much unnoticed. When was the last time you read something and thought “wow, no spelling errors and what nice grammar”. However, if spelling and grammar are bad, you notice. And when you notice, you automatically wonder about the person who wrote it.

A spell checker won’t catch all of your errors. It won’t catch typos like an accidental d on the end of an. It won’t catch there for their and other grammatical errors. But if you are a bad speller like me, you need to check your spelling.

I was told RMLS uses a plug in that allows you to click a button and check the spelling. This would be nice but it is one of the things that makes their system compatible with IE only.

I was delighted when I installed Firefox 2 and discovered that it had spell checking built in (automatic for text areas and you can right click on a text input field and spell check it).

If you don’t want to use Firefox, iespell is an Internet Explorer spell checking plug in that will spell check your web input before you submit it. You can download it at http://www.iespell.com. It is free for personal use, $15 if your conscience bothers you.

So their you have it. You know longer halve any reasons to look bad in print. (hay - it passed the spell checker).

I have been meaning to write something about Google’s Picassa photo organizer since before I started my bolg. I just ran across an article http://www.hartnup.net/wordpress/picasa-2-vs-iphoto/ comparing Picassa to Apple’s iPhoto 5 and wanted to link to it so … (more…)