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Whether you look to Miss Manners, the Cybercouth Tiger, Mother, or some other manners maven, they will all say that being polite will make people more receptive to your message. So, how can we hone our electronic communication skills to this degree? Let’s take a look at a few of the most egregious e-mail etiquette errors and discuss how certain situations should be handled. (more…)
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We have a special guest joining us this week, Ms. DigITal Entity. She is a computer chip with an extensive memory and a unique ability to communicate. We’ve all encountered situations where we wish we knew what our computers were thinking; well, DigIT, as she is known to her many friends and family, provides that insight.
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With the rise of smartphones comes the luxury of accessing our e-mail wherever we roam. These days, it seems that no matter where you go, you’re likely to hear the tap-tap-tapping of fingers across mini QWERTY keyboards and virtual keypads as people all around you type out those all-important e-mail messages.
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There’s a joke by the late comedian Mitch Hedberg in which he recounts a transaction that he feels did not require any documentation: he got a receipt when buying a donut. As Mitch had stated in his trademark deadpan:
“I’ll just give you the money and you give me the donut…end of transaction. We do not need to bring ink and paper into this.”
This scenario might seem a bit ludicrous, even for those who prefer to document everything almost religiously. But with the increase in activity on social networking sites, the minutiae of everyone’s daily lives seems much more prevalent now than it was several years ago. (more…)
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Welcome back to the podcast! This week’s edition: Lovely Spam, Wonderful Spam!
In the world of geek, there are few things more humorous than a sketch by the famous British comedy team Monty Python. One of my favorites is the Spam sketch, in which a man and his wife go out to breakfast and nearly every item on the menu contains Spam. Most items contain Spam multiple times, such as “Spam, bacon, sausage, and Spam.”
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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s edition…
“My Keys are in the Freezer” OR “Lost and Found”
We have all had one at some point in our lives – you know the interesting little morning argument with your spouse about why he or she moved your keys. Darn her incessant tidiness! Why did I marry someone who is so clean and neat?
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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s edition: “Inventing the Wheel was a One-Time Deal”
If you hang around any business office long enough, you’re likely to hear workers uttering the same banal buzzwords or expressions (more…)
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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s edition: “The Cybercouth Tiger Returns.”
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from our friend and loyal listener, the Cybercouth Tiger. Today he joins us with more tips for how you can observe common courtesy when communicating at light speed.
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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s episode: “Tag ‘em and Flag ‘em – Following Up, Outlook Style!”
As a cyber pack rat, I have a lot of things that I probably should have deleted or thrown away a long time ago, but I just can’t seem to do it. My collection includes computer cables, old gadgets, files on floppy and zip disks, hundreds of unlabeled CDs, and most of all, e-mail.
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Probably one of the most baffling things I see today has to be messages sent via Twitter, SMS, or IM. Thanks to people even lazier than myself, there is now an entire generation of people who can confuse even the most skilled Native American code talkers of World War II.
It’s absolutely amazing how being limited to 140 or 160 characters can really change our spelling and sentence structure. For instance, if I wanted to invite my friend out for drinks at the House of Blues in Cleveland, Ohio, I might send a text message like, “U Wan2 meet up @ HOB L8R?” WOW! This reminds me of a game I used to play as a kid on road trips where I would try to figure out what someone’s license plate might mean if it were a sentence or phrase. (more…)