I may be typing a comment in someone’s blog, or adding a tag to something I am bookmarking in Delicious, or any one of many places I may type that doesn’t immediately put a red line under the type to tell me that maybe I am spelling something incorrectly.

In the Google searchbox next to where the URL sits, just type in the word you suspect you may not know how to spell, and bingo, up (or down) comes a list of what you are very probably looking for. You could always hit the word and read more to check, but usually that is not necessary.

Spellchecker always at your fingertips.

I am using Safari as my browser of choice, but Firefox has the same facility. Who knows what IE does – (small dig in passing).

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Joseph Heller: ‘Something Happened’

by David Bennett on June 28, 2009

This is a classic in the best sense of the word, from the man who wrote Catch 22.

I read Something Happened (Heller’s second novel) some years ago and I read it again a few weeks ago.

It took me a while to read it this time, partly because the sentences resonated that much more with experiences I’ve had, and partly because the picture it paints of what human beings are hit me so hard I had to keep stopping to let it subside.

There’s hardly a word wrong in the book. Every sentence is truthful to what that character might say or do or think.

On the surface it is a story of a man who works in corporate America and who either hates or fears everyone around him. He wishes he were somewhere else doing something different, but he doesn’t know what he would do and he suspects he would take himself with him and be no better anywhere else.

He two-times his wife, argues unnecessarily with his children and plans his moves at work, all the time losing himself more and more.

Beneath that is a man who love is so painful that it hurts him to experience life.

And something happens.

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Obituaries

June 26, 2009

When I read the obituaries, I was thinking of when the newspaper is folded and put away.

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Why Usability Testing

June 24, 2009

The reason for doing usability testing is supposedly well known, but sites still screw up, so perhaps the reason for doing it is not clear to everyone.
The point of usability testing is to get the site seen through the eyes of someone who is not familiar with it.
You can do a lot worse than [...]

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The Look of Love

June 24, 2009

Just listening to the soundtrack from the film Bombay Wedding – the music from when the man who is in charge of putting the wedding together is struck by a woman who helps out in the house.
He is a ‘nothing is serious’ man and seeing her rocks him to his core.
Nothing will be the [...]

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Common Business Challenges

June 24, 2009

What is the single biggest issue that a business like yours faces right now?
Getting people to come to our site and to come with the right frame of mind, which ideally is that they come already believing they should be coming to our site. We are entirely web-based, so numbers give us a crack at [...]

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Why The World Was Formed

June 8, 2009

I’ve just started reading The Rough Guide To The Universe and yesterday I got a notification of a new post on one of the blogs to which I subscribe. The post was about prayer and meditation and the poster mentioned that she did not believe in God but that she meditated.
I commented that I had [...]

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