Obviously confused, sometimes sunk

Despite the fact that  I’ve worked for a computer book publisher and a technical media organization (jobs I approached as editor and journalist, respectively), I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t always grok the bells and whistles.
But I thought I had a pretty firm handle on email, and how it works, and a [...]

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The No Internet Blues

Nor no e-mail, neither. (Triple negative there—whichever direction that ends.) 

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Pages?

I’ve had an idea in the back of my head for a while, and want to add another “page” or “tab” like the ones at the top of this page (“Home” and “About OmbudsBen”). It seems to me that when I started this blog there was a way to add more tabs like that, but [...]

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Time travel and the new Star Trek movie

Mrs. Ombud enjoyed the new Star Trek movie, and I’m glad I saw it.

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The Phone Call with StubHub

 I spoke to Ms. Norberg, of StubHub.

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Another Useless Talent Exhibited

My assistant brewer, Dave, is good at incredulity, among other things. He’s smart, a fount of the kind of quasi-useful knowledge copyeditors excel at (e.g., they are vocal cords, not chords; the word is actually supersede, not supercede, although some style manuals now accept the typo as a new “variant”), he knows a lot about movies, [...]

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A Brownie, A Canon EOS, and the Flounder

I’ve had a lot of technology over the last week or so. Sometimes, when I deal with a lot of technology, I find old tech comforting.
 

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Comcast, Thanking My “Patience”, & Switching to DirecTV

 
Ever since the economy went ka-flooey, I’ve had this suspicion that companies are more interested in customer service. Case in point, our local utility recently bailed on providing cable TV and internet service.

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Kwestions of a Digi Qlutz

I’m looking at my new Canon EOS XTi. I’ve stopped procrastinating about buying a digital SLR camera and have only just begun procrastinating on figuring out how to use it.
 
It has all kinds of mysterious little logos and symbols. Both on the body of the camera and in the diagram explaining the LCD screen. It comes [...]

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Comics, Superheroes, & Neoteny

Superheroes were different when I was a kid. They mostly lived in comic books. Superman later became a TV show, but the special effects were so hokey you could practically see the strings propeling him in flight around the stage. We didn’t mind. We were kids. It was understood that childhood imagination, pretending, was part of the [...]

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