One day, I found myself at the car races. And like the geek that I was, I of course had a book on me. It was Lynne Truss’s fabulous book “Eats, Shoots & Leaves“, and one of my friends was intrigued with the title. “What’s it about?” she asked. “Punctuation,” I said. She made a face and said, “How boring that must be.”

So I hit her.

OK, I’m kidding. I didn’t really hit her. I just smiled understandingly and went back to my book. After all, if everybody were interested in every topic in existence, it would be a very homogenized and boring world we’d be living in.

While not everyone can relate to Truss’s passion for the semicolon, the Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is a podcast for everyone. After all, good communication skills make us all better lawyers, programmers, architects and nurses. Read more

Don’t get me wrong. I love my iPod. I could never get through half an hour on the treadmill without it. And when you’re in a cab and something heinous like the latest remake of an Air Supply song is playing on the radio, you can just whip out your mp3 player and block out the offending song with some Led Zeppelin. What I mean is, you don’t need an iPod to listen to or watch podcasts.

The podcast is a rather unfortunately named. After all, like I said, one does not need an iPod to listen to it, nor is it technically a broadcast. I think this is the reason why not many non-iPod-owning people take advantage of the wealth of information and entertainment available out there in the internets in the form of podcasts.

Really, all you need is a computer with internet connection. You’ll need an aggregator (a client software or Web application which collects podcasts in a single location for easy listening) , but a lot of them, like iTunes and Juice, are available for free. Once you have downloaded your podcasts, you can listen to them on your computer, or burn them into a disc as an audio CD and listen to them on your home or car stereo.

So what kinds of content are available out there? Nearly everything, as a matter of fact. To keep things simple, let’s concentrate on the free stuff. Read more

A few days ago, I received an e-mail about a job opening from one of my mailing lists. The company description wasn’t a lot of help in the way of indicating what particular products the company was dealing with, although it did mention a preference for applicants who were knowledgeable in wireless applications. Which is why, while reading the list of skill requirements, I was puzzled to see Warcraft, CounterStrike and Ragnarok (of course, like many grammatically-challenged job ads, it didn’t say whether the applicant should be able to play these games, or just own copies). Then further below, I saw “Jedi mind trick skills”.

WTF?
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