As a practitioner of several arcane technical and scientific arts, I do my share of using jargon; indeed, I often appreciate hyperpolysyllabicsesquipedalianism. In the proper setting, precise terminology conveys something very specific to my audiences, so I understand how useful such jargon can be. I have to scratch my head, however, when I come across such terms as “controlled flight …
Levying Blame
I was the lucky recipient of a gift laptop last week, sent quite out of the blue by an old (as in long-term) friend. What generosity! I got right to work, checking it out, making sure the delivery manifest matched the options he had purchased for me, learning Windows 7 (I still mostly dwell in the XP realm; hey! It …
Meeting the Customer’s Needs
I’m very dependent on automation in my at-the-computer work. I’m a firm believer in having the machine do as much of the work as possible, leaving my resources for other, presumably more creative tasks. To that end, I use macros to smooth my activities. Some of the macros are software, often called up by specific keystrokes, that do sequential tasks …