If I were a schoolteacher and some dopey teen put an emoticon or dared put an ‘LOL’ in any written assignment given, here’s the mark he or she would receive from me:

F

I don’t care if what was turned in was the most masterfully written thing on the face of the planet. If there was so much a hint of netspeak present, it’s insta-fail.

Is it true that turned-in written assignments contain netspeak from time to time? Unfortunately the answer to that is yes.

Very sad.

It is absolutely NOT the responsibility of the teacher to “translate” netspeak from a turned-in written assignment. If you happen to be a schoolteacher and see netspeak on anything turned in, FAIL it and make them do it again until they get it right.

I can understand seeing emoticons, LOLs, etc. on the internet because, well.. it’s the internet. But on written assignments? NO, NO, NO.. wrong. Wrong in so many ways..

Verizon (for those unaware) is a humongous telecommunications company with a very large presence in the United States. It’s more or less guaranteed that anyone you talk to in the US knows what Verizon is and what they do.

Verizon’s infrastructure is also humongous (obviously). This means they can offer anything to do with telecommunications. So, if you’re the type that uses one company for everything, Verizon can usually do it.

When I first moved to Florida two years ago I decided to go all-Verizon. Why? Because it was easy and they had the lowest price. Furthermore you can combine everything using their “One-Bill” service to make managing services easy.

Or so it would seem. Continued

Ever heard of Twitter? If you’re a blogger or somebody in tune with social media, you probably have. If you’re one of PCMech’s computer-focused readers, then your answer probably lies somewhere between “No” and “Yeah, but it sounds stupid as hell”.

Granted, Twitter will probably seem like a colossal waste of time to most users of the Internet. After all, something that is based on the question “What are you doing?” just BEGS for answers like “Sitting here having a pizza”. And, quite frankly, who needs to know?

But, I count myself as a user of Twitter. I’m not a die-hard user, but I do use it. My reasoning?

Continued

Some have found Adobe Reader to be annoying, bloated, and just a plain pain in the rear. There are alternatives like FoxIt, but if you want to abolish PDF readers all together and still be able to look at the occasional PDF, here’s a nifty service called PDFMENOT.

This service allows you to either view PDFs that are linked somewhere on the web, or upload a PDF from your computer. While this service does fine with standard text and image PDFs, you may run into issues with highly interactive PDFs.

The Thunderbird development community aims to releases the first alpha release of Thunderbird 3.0 next month.

According to a story on Ars Technica, Thunderbird is slated to use Gecko 1.9, the new rendering engine found in Firefox 3.0. The email client will also receive a visual overhaul to improve usability. David Ascher from Mozilla says in his blog:

We’ve started defining what Thunderbird 3 will be, because we think that there is enough consensus to make some of the first decisions on the most important changes to tackle first. Specifically, Thunderbird 3 will build on the great base that is Thunderbird 2 (and the work already performed in trunk by the current and past contributors), and add some key features, such as:

• integrated calendaring (building on the great work done by the Mozilla Calendar team and their Lightning add-on to Thunderbird),
• better search facilities,
• easier configuration,
• and a set of other user interface improvements.

What each of those means in practice will be worked out in public, on blogs, mailing lists, and newsgroups, as transparently as possible.

Ascher also says it is time for Thunderbird development to catch up to Firefox. Good to hear.

While TinyURLs can sometimes be handy and short and pretty to pass around and post in your blog, they also effectively hide the original URL.  What this means, is that sometimes, people can hide all sorts of URLs behind it, including those you may not really want to visit.

Here are two ways you can unmask those URLs.

The first way is to bookmark this link (right click on the link, bookmark link or add to favorites):

<a href=”javascript:Embiggen={”runNow”:true}; var s=document.createElement(”script”); s.type=”text/javascript”; s.src=”http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/embiggen/embiggen.js”; document.getElementsByTagName(”head”)[0].appendChild(s); void(0);”>Embiggen</a>

Whenever you visit a page that has TinyURLs on it, click the bookmarked link, and it will replace all the TinyURLs with their actual URLs.  You can visit the author’s site for this tool here: http://ghill.customer.netspace.net.au/embiggen/

The second way is go directly to the TinyURL site and click the “enable previews” link: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?disable=1

You can also bookmark the enable link directly: http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?enable=1

You will have to have cookies enabled for this to work.  Basically, what it does is visit the TinyURL website when you click on a TinyURL, show you what the actual link looks like, and at which time, you can choose whether or not you really want to visit the link.

Back in the days of olde (i.e. late 90s) web browsers were distinctively different in the way they worked as far as user commands were concerned. Today all of them act more or less identical to each other. I personally feel this is good because when going from one browser to the next there’s not too much of a learning curve, if any at all.

My favorite shortcuts are the ones that require the absolute least amount of effort to do, such as single-key functions or double-clicking a mouse in a certain spot.

I’ll be going over a few (but not all) of these shortcuts in the "big three" web browsers: Internet Explorer 7 (IE7), Firefox 2 (FF2) and Opera 9.26 (OP9).

Keystroke: CTRL+T
Function: Open new tab
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Keystroke: CTRL+W
Function: Close currently selected tab
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Keystroke for only one tab open: CTRL+W
Function: Closes browser
Works in: IE7 FF2

Keystroke: F5
Function: Refresh/Reload web page
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Keystroke: F6
Function: Go to address (URL) bar
Works in: IE7 FF2

Keystroke: / (forward slash)
Function: Quick-find text in current web page
Works in: FF2 OP9

Keystroke: Home
Function: Go to top of current web page
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Keystroke: End
Function: Go to bottom of current web page
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Keystroke: CTRL+(number of tab)
Function: Go to specific tab by order of load (CTRL+1, CTRL+2, etc.)
Works in: IE7 FF2

Mouse: Double-click in blank area of tab bar
Function: Opens new blank tab
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

Mouse+Keyboard: ALT+Scroll
Function: Scroll by line
Works in: FF2

Mouse+Keyboard: SHIFT+Scroll (up or down)
Function: Go back/forward thru web page history
Works in: IE7 FF2 OP9

As you can see, most functions are more or less identical across all browsers. The two that are almost identical to each other are IE and FF. There’s very little FF can do that IE can’t.

Opera, while a great browser, seems to be the only one that falls behind in the shortcut department. F6 has been "go to address" bar pretty much ever since web browsers were invented, yet Opera doesn’t do it. Yes, I know you can do a CTRL+L for the same function but it shouldn’t take two keys when you can do it in just one. A nitpick? Yes, obviously. But hey, I notice these things, what can I say..