[fa] = Former Acronym

I propose any organization that adopts their acronym as their official name add the lower case letters fa in square brackets to the end of their name so the rest of us do not waste time trying to find out the actual name of the organization. The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development is now just ASCD, but if they do not tell us, how will we know. Call it ASCD[fa] and all is clear. In reading the name aloud, the [fa] is silent. Now if you will excuse me, I am hungry and am going out for some KFC[fa].

Too Late

At the bottom of the e-mail is this statement:
This communication contains confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, reading, copying, disclosing or any other use of the contents of this e-mail is strictly prohibited.
Shouldn't that have been at the top?

Spend a while Googling awhile

The phrase is, "it took him a while to." Google Docs suggests I should change it to, "it took him awhile to." That seems wrong, so I Google the phrase "it took him awhile to." Google Search suggests I should change it to "it took him a while to." Google Docs and Google Search need to get together sometime for a chat.

Magnitude of Error

Yesterday I was reading a Scientific American article that said there were 1089 neutrinos in the universe. I was pretty sure that figure was low, so had a look at their HTML code. Sure enough, they had used <super> instead of <sup> as the tag to indicate a superscript. I sent them an e-mail suggesting the correction. They sent a message back thanking me and telling me they had made the correction. The article now tells us there are 10⁸⁹ neutrinos in the universe. I feel that the magnitude of this correction more than makes up for my lousy chemistry lab results when the lab teaching assistant told me I had produced the largest error in the history of the lab.

FanBox is a scam

You will receive message. It will say that someone you know (their actual name) has posted a question for you, or a photo for you to see. You click the link and are asked to enter the password for your e-mail account. If you do, FanBox will send messages to all your friends telling them that their friend (your name) has posted a question for them, or a photo for them to see. And on it goes. The real fun is that FanBox steals your portfolio photo from other websites and posts it on their website. Thus, I have never created a FanBox account, but I have one anyway, with my photo on it, so my friends will be fooled into thinking I am on FanBox and will fall for the scam themselves. So remember, NEVER type a password for anything into FanBox.

Justify Text in GIMP 2.8

Windows --> Docable Dialogs --> Tool Options

Is this information in the manual? Who knows? GIMP is a wonderful program, and also insane. The manual is beautiful and useless.

Microsoft Office Save Undo Fix

Problem: Microsoft put the Save and Undo buttons one pixel apart on the Quick Access toolbar. Thus, you go to save your work and accidentally Undo the last thing you did, in which case you have to hit the Redo button before you save. Or you go to Undo a terrible mistake and accidentally Save, in which case you curse forever the idiots who designed the Quick Access toolbar and take to drink. Well, actually you can still do an Undo after you have done a save, so all is not lost. But still, if there were ever two tiny buttons that should have space between them it is Save and Undo.

And you can put that space there. Just right-click one of those buttons and select Customize Quick Access Toolbar. In the resulting dialog add a few separators between Save and Undo. I find five produces an aesthetically pleasing spacer. You have to do this for each of your Office programs, but unlike so many useful Microsoft workarounds, this one carries over from one document to the next. Do it once for Word 2010 and you never need to do it again. Would that all Microsoft design flaws were so easy to repair.