Do your homework, iqProsoft.com

Recently I was re-reading the Writer's Yearbook 2010 issue of Writer's Digest magazine, and saw an ad for a word-processing program targeted for professional writers. In trying to distinguish the program from both open-source programs like Open Office, and from online writing solutions like Blogspot, they made a wild leap of disconnected logic, as thus:

Unlike Open Source, iQ Word is an installed program in your computer. No link to the Internet is required.

Once more, for the class:

• Open Source has nothing to do with the program's installation. Open Source simply means the program's source code is made public so that anyone with knowledge of the program's operation can fix bugs, add features, and so on.
• Installation, in this context, refers to whether a program places files in the Windows or Windows/System directories, or if it makes changes to the Windows Registry. OpenOffice.org is a suite of open source programs, but it is fully installed in your computer, if you install the full program. There is also the no-install version -- one that does NOT create files in the Windows or System directories, or make changes to the registry -- that can be kept on a USB drive or a CD for use in whatever computer one comes across;
• Blogger, WordPress.com, Google Docs, and other online writing systems require an online connection.

It's been a long time...

...and I've had lots going on. But this one bit, I had to share today. It's now official: you can now find any piece of information that might remotely interest somebody on the Internet. You might not even have to look for it; it might leap out at you.

Microsoft is launching what it's promoting as a "new" Web search tool, Bing.com. It' s really just a relabel of its Live Search. In an article I got in my email from About.com, Jen Hubley compared the responses that Bing and Google provided to the query "what should I do?" She said that the third result in Google's list was an explanation of what she should do "when my eyeballs fall out of their sockets," which I took to be her usual exaggeration.

But just to be sure I did a Google search on the same phrase, and the fifth result in my search was an article on Slate.com titled "My Eyeball Just Fell Out of Its Socket: What should I do?"

No joke. Here's the URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2137959/ The article details an incident where Villanova basketball star Allan Ray had his eyeball literally poked out of its socket by an opposing player in a game. But apparently it doesn't have to happen as violently as all that.

Or, if you would like to check out the search yourself, just Google "what should I do." Here's the URL to my search results page, which may actually turn up different results this time: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22what+should+I+do%22

Possible demerit to the value of Google search: this was third in Jen's search results, and fifth in mine, but the incident happened three years ago - the article is dated March 2006.

THIS IS NOT SPAM!!

Just a pre-emptive note should those stupid Google anti-spam bots decide to attack this blog, like they did to my fiction blog. There is NOTHING even remotely spammy about any of my blogs or my fiction, but until somebody at Google gets around to checking it out for themselves, there's nothing I can do.

Nor is there anything I can do to prevent such an attack here, but this is for whoever checks out the blog after such an attack -- and yes, if Google's robots lock my blog for no good reason, I call it an attack.

Big Brother? No, more like Big Nanny

Towards a Nanny Internet -- "Are we moving towards a Nanny Internet? Between network neutrality, laws requiring dating sites to perform background checks and ISPs to rat out their users, laws banning anonymous posting, and cyberbullying legislation, one might argue that the Nanny Internet is shaping up nicely. Or not."

Google Ice Cream

I've been saying for years that I live on the wrong coast. I should be out on the West Coast, preferably California, where (if I find the right place) I can throw out my winter clothes, and maybe even my allergy medicine. But now I find that even if I did move to the West Coast I'd probably be working for the wrong company. Google has specially-made ice-cream sandwiches that are only served in their company cafeteria.

*sigh*