Category: Office Tech

In a weird way I got lucky.  Fifteen months ago, two things happened:

• an inattentive driver smacked into the back of my ICE car, totaling it (and thankfully not injuring anybody), and
• a client of my firm that had left some bills unpaid for a very long time happened to pay its bills rather unexpectedly.

I then paid cash for an electric vehicle. Continue reading “Time to switch to an EV”

To make something more lively or interesting, stylish, or appealing, as by a small change or addition.  The word is usually used in a phrase like “zhuzh it up”.  Continue reading “An excellent word: zhuzh”

Around five years ago, our firm migrated nearly all of our telephone services to a company called VoIP.ms.  Not once have we regretted it, and again and again we have seen reasons to feel good about this choice.  Today we see this company once again setting an example.  Here is what they have done:

At VoIP.ms we are deeply touched by the situation impacting the Ukrainian people. As a token of solidarity, effective today, VoIP.ms will be absorbing all costs for call termination to Ukraine until at least March 31^st, 2022. Our goal with this small action is to show our support for those directly and indirectly affected by the situation taking place in the country, with the aim that not only we can help to keep communication alive to the region but most importantly to also spark a bit of hope in these very difficult times.

Hello folks.  Can you tell me, please, your opinion about whether or not I need extra light for my lecture cam?  Continue reading “Extra light? No extra light?”

What’s wrong with this sentence in this January 14, 2022 news story? 

The $180 million solar farm will produce enough energy to supply the equivalent of more than 36,000 average households in the state annually, and it will provide around $54 million to local landowners.

Just like sentences that I blogged about on December 4, 2021, this sentence has a mistake that jumps off the page. Actually, two mistakes that jump off the page. Continue reading “Yet more innumeracy in the popular press”

Here is a new blog.  See https://www.starlink-user.com/ .

It turns out that the rolling electrical blackouts in the mountains of Colorado on December 30, which were a consequence of the devastating Marshall wildfire in Boulder Country, Colorado, were about the gas company avoiding having to relight pilot lights!  

If there is anything that the gas company hates doing, it is having to send out workers to go from door to door to relight everybody’s pilot lights.   Continue reading “What the rolling electrical blackouts in the mountains of Colorado on December 30th were all about”

I imagine that most readers have been closely following the launch of the Webb telescope and the successful deployment of its solar panels.  As we all know, it is headed toward a particular place in space called the Earth-Sun Second Lagrange Point, shorthanded as L2.  I was intrigued to learn that L2 is actually a crowded place.  Continue reading “L2 is crowded”

Life is filled with reasons to be gobsmacked.  We all read recently of the death of Michael Nesmith, one of the members of The Monkees, at the age of 78.  He left many marks on Western culture.  I personally think that of the many strong marks he left on Western culture, the strongest were:

• He was one of the producers of Repo Man, a film that became a cult classic and influenced many directors and actors thereafter.
• He wrote the song Different Drum which launched and then enabled the career of Linda Ronstadt.

But what gobsmacked me was to learn that Michael Nesmith’s mother was the inventor of Liquid Paper.  By now in the year 2021 we are sort of accustomed, or maybe even resigned, to learning over and over again that somebody who was female accomplished something back in the days when many members of society seemed to assume that only males could accomplish things.  But it was his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper, which inspired all of the later typewriter correction fluid products.  Of course nowadays because of word processors and computer printers, we have a whole generation of today’s youth who maybe have no reason to know that there was even a problem for which a typewriter correction fluid product might be the solution.   

Typewriter correction fluid played an important part of my professional life for decades.  In the early days of my law firm, we went though many bottles of typewriter correction fluid.

You can read about Bette Nesmith Graham in this Wikipedia article.

 

A smart watch is a watch that connects by bluetooth to your smart phone, and does lots of smart things.  It was not so long ago that your usual smart watch cost many hundreds of dollars.  Recently I saw that there are lots and lots of relatively inexpensive smart watches on the market.  I decided to give one of them a try.  I was astonished to find how many features a person can get, and how clever the watch can be, for a quite modest purchase price.  Continue reading “Inexpensive yet clever smart watches”