New financial terms

Thanks to Kathy D for forwarding this list to me. No doubt it is fairly viral on the internet…

• CEO – Chief Embezzlement Officer
• CFO – Corporate Fraud Officer
• BULL MARKET – A random market movement causing investors to mistake themselves for financial geniuses.
• BEAR MARKET – a 6-to-18-month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry, and the husband gets no sex.
• VALUE INVESTING – The art of buying low and selling lower.
• P/E RATIO – The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.
• BROKER – What my financial planner has made me.
• STANDARD & POOR – My life in a nutshell.
• STOCK ANALYST – Idiot who just downgraded my stock.
• STOCK SPLIT – When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.
• MARKET CORRECTION – The day after you buy stocks.
• CASH FLOW – The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet.
• YAHOO! – What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share.
• WINDOWS – What you jump out of when you’re the sucker who bought Yahoo! at $240 per share.
• INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR – Past year investor who’s now locked up in a nuthouse.
• PROFIT – Archaic word no longer in use.
• LIQUIDITY – When you check your stock portfolio and pee your pants…

Finally…

If you had purchased $1000 in shares of Delta Airlines one year ago, you would have $49 today. If you had purchased $1000 in shares of AIG one year ago, you would have $33 today. If you had purchased $1000 in shares of Lehman Brothers one year ago, you would have $0.00 today. But… if you had purchased $1000 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the aluminum cans for recycling, you would have received $214. Based on the above, the best current investment plan is to drink heavily and recycle! It’s called the 401-Keg.

A short history of cookbooks

I subscribe to the belief that recipes or cookbooks were some of the earliest technical writing available.

The basics of technical writing are contained in most modern recipes:

• prerequisites (‘what do I need to know/do before I can start’)
• equipment and ingredients (‘what do I need to complete the task’)
• method (‘how do I do the task’), and
• conditions (‘what temperature, how long will the task take, how many will be able to use the output of the task’).

So I was pleased to find a short history of cookbooks on the Economist’s website: Pluck a Flamingo: What cookbooks really teach us. In it, the author contends that the first Western cookbook appeared in ancient Roman time, some 1600 years ago.

That’s a long history for technical writing ;-)

[Link last checked March 2009]

About footnotes and endnotes

Do you write academic, research, or scientific papers? Confused about footnotes and endnotes, where to use them, and how to format them? Then take a look at this article from the University of Virginia’s Writing Center. They also have an article on the various citation styles.

Full URLs:

• http://www.wc.engl.virginia.edu/wiki/index.php/Footnotes_and_Endnotes
• http://www.wc.engl.virginia.edu/wiki/index.php/Citation

Convert one video format to another

Problem

I downloaded some TED Talk videos from the internet. They were in MPEG-4 format, with an MP4 file extension. According to the Creative website, my Creative Zen Vision:M MP3 player should have no problem with this format. So I copied one over to the Videos folder on the Zen Vision:M and tried to open it. It came back with a message that the file format was not supported.

I noticed that there were some default AVI format videos in the Videos folder, so I thought I could convert these videos into AVI. I decided to see what software I had on my computer that could convert a video from one format to another, and then to test that the conversion worked and could play on my player.

Solution

I tried a couple of pieces of software I already had — Windows Movie Maker, Adobe Captivate, Audacity (yes, I was clutching at straws by now…). None did this sort of conversion — at least not that I could find in the Help.

Off to the internet… I remembered some audio conversion software I’d tested once before and vaguely recalled that the company made all sorts of conversion software. Funnily enough, I even remembered the name of the audio conversion software — Switch. So armed with that information, Google came up trumps with the name of the company (NCH Software) and its website (http://www.nchsoftware.com/index.html) and from there I was on my way.

I downloaded the free (lite) version of Prism, their video conversion software and tested it on one of the TED Talk videos. Prism is a very small piece of software and takes no time at all to download and install.

My initial test was to convert a 32 MB MPEG-4 file to AVI. I kept all the default settings and got a result — but it was over 1 GB in size! This was not a viable option.

Next I tried converting into MPG format — this time the file size was  more than double the original, but was nowhere near as big as 1 GB. I tweaked some of the settings too — for a tiny screen on an MP3 player and with ear buds and listening to a speech not a concert, I really didn’t need full quality sound. Tweaking the settings dropped the file size a little more.

I loaded up my test file onto my MP3 player and it worked! The sound is fine, the video is fine. The file sizes are still quite large, but I’ll be deleting these off the player once I’ve finished watching them, so for me it’s only a temporary thing.

I was impressed with Prism’s conversion speed, download size, and ability to convert all sorts of video formats into all sorts of other video formats — and this is just the free version. Prism Plus, the professional version with more conversion format options (but not MPEG-2), retails at US$39; if you want MPEG-2 conversion capabilities you pay a little more (US$57). And NCH seem to have deals on fairly regularly, so you may get the software for even less.

Get a degree under false pretences

I’ve heard of people buying pre-packaged College-level essays etc. to get their degree, but this is the first time I’ve seen someone advertise for someone to write their essay for them, for payment. I saw this as part of my Google Alerts for ‘technical writing’.

Ad for someone to write essays

So, if a Gen Y (or later) person applies for a job, how does the employer/recruiter know if they earned their degree or not? You could check with the issuing institution, but that only confirms they got credit for what they submitted, not that they wrote it. While many universities and colleges now use software to detect plagiarism, this ad clearly states that the assignments (NOTE: multiple assignments!) must not be plagiarized. In other words, the person advertising for a writer wants to get a degree without doing the learning and the work that demonstrates that learning. There’s something seriously wrong with that.

Vista: Setting TXT file association for EditPlus

I use EditPlus as my text editor. I needed to associate TXT files with EditPlus so that they also opened in EditPlus. But this is not quite so simple in Vista, until you know how!

1. Click the Start button and find EditPlus — do not open it.
2. Right-click on EditPlus and select Run as Administrator.
3. Click Continue if asked about permissions.
4. Go to Tools > Preferences on the EditPlus menu.
5. Under File, select Settings & Syntax.
6. Select Text in the list of File types.
7. Select the Associate with Explorer check box.
8. Click OK.

Still young, white and male

…though not quite so young as 2007’s A List Apart Survey for People Who Make Websites.

The results for the 2008 survey are now available: http://aneventapart.com/alasurvey2008/00.html. This time the survey had specific questions for freelancers. Some 30,000 people from around the world took part in the 2008 survey, and the results are very comprehensive.

For the 2007 survey results I said:

The web is run by young (almost 70% were under 32), white (84%) males (83%)! There are more people developing websites who are under 21 (nearly 7%), than those over 51 (combined total of 4%).

My summary of the 2008 survey is:

The web is run by young (almost 53% were under 30), white (85%) males (84%). Seventy five percent of the 18 years old or under self-report a job title that indicates they are developing websites (Designer, Developer, Web Designer, Web Director, Web Producer, Web Master), only 46% of 45 to 64 year olds have these job titles, and 57% of those over 65 have these titles. Females made up only 16% of the total sample, but comprised 48% of the sample reporting themselves as ‘Writer/Editor’.

Fonts: Reading PDFs and ebooks on screen

When I flew to the US recently for the WritersUA Conference in Seattle, I spent a LOT of time on planes, and hanging around in airports and hotel rooms. As I don’t sleep on a fight — even a 14 hour one — I need something to occupy my time. I’m not a big movie fan so I usually only watch one or two of the 40+ typically on offer, and maybe a TV episode or two. That takes care of about 6 hours. Likewise, I rarely read much fiction these days and rarely buy physical books or borrow them from the library any more.

Prior to leaving, I created a folder of all those PDFs I’ve been meaning to read and podcasts I’ve been meaning to listen to. On this latest trip, I mostly listened to podcasts while driving to/from the airport (it’s a 3+ hour drive, so I can usually knock off a few!). On the plane and when I didn’t have internet access, I read some of the PDFs.

And this is what I found: serif fonts are much harder for me to read on screen than sans serif fonts.

I was zooming the PDF text up to 125% or 150% so that I could sit back comfortably to read it on my laptop. Even at that zoom factor, the thin stokes of fonts like those in the Times and similar font families got lost against the white background. One factor for this lack of readability could have been that I had the brightness on my laptop turned down a lot so that the light from the screen didn’t disturb those around me too much. But it wasn’t just the thin strokes — the serifs also affected the readability as they added ‘noise’ to the text.

This is by no way a scientific study ;-), just a personal observation after reading some 500+ PDF pages on screen over many hours.

I guess the take-away from this is to consider how your reader will be reading the PDF or ebook you create. Do you expect them to print it out or read it online? If online, have you considered how the brightness settings and zoom factors may affect readability of the font you have chosen? You may not know or be able to find out the answers to these questions, but consider them when you are creating a PDF or ebook.

[Link last checked April 2009]

Think you know your sentence structure?

Then take this multiple choice questionnaire from The Economist (British). It’s only 12 questions and should take less than 5 minutes. I got 8 out of 12… ‘Needs work’.

[Link last checked April 2009]

Etiquette for commenting on blog posts

I have a pretty good readership for this blog — those who comment are invariably polite. But some blogs, forums, YouTube comments etc. are far from polite. A couple of people (at least) have ‘written’ some etiquette ‘rules’ for commenting on blog posts:

• Grammar Girl’s How to write a great blog comment
• Yo comments are whack! video on YouTube

[Links last checked April 2009]