Tippecanoe

The problem with being the family photographer is that I'm never in any of the pictures.

I ran across two sites today discussing grammer. The first points out four ways to use commas and one for the semicolon. It's interesting that the author uses examples of the usage rule to illustrate the rule. Neat.

The other is a little smarmy, but it does a good job of calling out common mistakes.

• How to Puctuate a Sentence (Lifehack.org)
• 10 Flagrant Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Stupid (zdnet.co.uk)

When I visit Burger King, I usually use the drive-thru, and I always order the sausage, egg, and cheese Croissanwich. And every time, the voice answers back "a sausage croissant?" After a couple of times, I quit answering "Yes" and just continued with my order.

This last time, I was taking my daughter out for breakfast so we dined in. I asked the loser kid (you know that a 20 something working at BK at 8:30 AM on a weekday isn't a college student - it's his career) behind the counter for my usual. Instead of the expected response, he said "You know it's actually a croissant."

I looked at him for a second, and then I went off. "Oh my god! Did you just correct me? Did you just correct a customer? Don't you think I can read the menu? What does it say? Turn around and look! It says CROISSANWICH, not croissant! Some suit at corporate spent a lot of time and money coming up with that name, and 20 lawyers worked to copyright it, and you are correcting me? It's just a croissant? If I want a Whopper, do I just order a fucking bun? Manager! Can I get the manager here? Get this zit covered kid away from me and my food, and get me a god damn croissanwich!"

Well, that's what I wanted to say. But, because my daughter was with me (and to avoid the inevitable spit in the food), I just said "Oh, the sign says croissanwich. You may want to correct it", and I went on with the order.

For a long time, I used Bloglines to read blogs and news feeds, but I switched to NewsGator back in the spring. I liked the interface better - especially the fact that an article wasn't marked read as soon as I looked at the list. It was tough when I got behind on something and there were 40 or 50 articles to catch up on. I had to read them all at one sitting or risk losing them.

NewsGator never automatically marked anything read, which I liked. I would read the article and mark it manually. However, it wouldn't save articles until I got to them; it would only show the articles currently in the feed. For example, Techmeme only lists their last eight articles in their feed, but they may push out 20-30 a day. Whenever I checked that feed, it always contained 8 articles - the last eight posted. I missed untold numbers of postings. Their support team said that they were going to fix it, but nothing happened for months.

Yesterday, I switched to Google Reader. They made some improvements over the earlier version I tried a while ago, and so far I'm quite happy with it. It is the best of both worlds in that it remembers all of the articles until I get to them, plus it doesn't mark the whole list read (unless you want it to). Also, it will mark a single article as read when I click the heading to read it.

I'll see how it goes.


UPDATE:

I forgot to mention that I had a real tough time getting the OPML file containing all of my feeds out of NewsGator. First, I had problems saving it. Then, when I tried to import into Google, I was told that there was a file error. Turns out NG had included a body tag pair in the file. I removed those and the import ran. However, for some reason it only loaded the first 45 feeds. I found that a character in the 46th feed entry had been changed to a box. Windows displays this character when the code points to an unprintable one. It could have been anything, even an ASCII 00. Anyway, I fixed it and tried again. It got farther down the list, but stopped again on another box character. I found eight more before all feeds were loaded. Google did a good job of reading the categories, so I didn't have to mark anything.

I've been a user of Real Jukebox since it came out in the late 90s, and I've never been able to find a replacement that I liked. RJ is not compatible with newer versions of Real Player, so I have always had trouble with installation and with the playing of newer formatted Real files.

All that has changed since I discovered Media Monkey. This program, currently on version 2.5.4.978 does most of the things RJ would do, plus a few more modern features. I've switched, and I highly recommend it.

For years I have heard and pronounced the word niche rhyming with the name for a female dog. Lately, I've heard it used sounding like the mid 20th century replacement for using the lord's name in vain - geesh. I'm now starting to wonder which is correct for a US speaker.

So, which is it?

Nitch

or

Neesh

Leave your vote in the comments.

As for me, I'm going to try to make my speech a little more urban and use "Nee-otch"

The dental assistant turned to the dwarf with the toothache and said, "When you come back next week, you won't need to wear this vest."

...later...

The plane in which I was a passenger was taxing very fast, skidding and spinning around the turns trying to get to the takeoff point quickly. After a 180, I turned to the other passengers and squealed, "He's doing doughnuts!" They all smiled condescendingly.