Mary dropped off my dry cleaning today.
They charge 4.50$ for each tie and six-something for suit coats. I’m having two ties and a coat cleaned and it cost more to clean two ties than it did to clean an entire suit coat.
Seems a bit backwards to me.
Someone here at the Faculty of Management just bought an IBM ThinkPad T42. It’s hard to find anything cool about laptops nowadays, but this one manages to implement something.
Fingerprint security.
It has software that allows you to scan in the print of one of your fingers and then assign the scan to a user account. Then when you boot up and come to the login screen, you just scan your finger, and if it matches, it lets you in. No username to type, no password to remember.
Even better, you can assign different fingers to different accounts. You could assign your pinkie as the admin account and the index finger as the general user account. In a experiment of antiestablishmentarianism, you could even assign your middle finger to your Microsoft hackor account.
How cool is that?
Todd Dominey pointed out the oddity of E! Online‘s pseudo-logo for the Michael Jackson trial.
Is it just me or do your eyes fixate on the empty center of this Michael Jackson Trial graphic that E! has been plugging non-stop? Every time it comes on TV, my eyes nearly go cross-eyed. That space between the “L” and “J” is not just wide, but dead center in the layout, and I can barely look at it without feeling like I’m about to fall down a hole.
Personally, I think the dead-space looks like an upside down whiskey flask.
Jason bemoans the ignorance of many persons in misspelling his name. While I certainly cannot say I have experienced the same issues given that I have a single last name, I have experienced many issues with my name.
My full name is Kim Jason Joseph Benoit Siever.
By far the most common misspelling of my name is people calling me Tim, Jim, Cam or Ken when speaking with me over the phone.
Another complaint I have is when correspondence I get has only my second name as my middle initial. The other two are rarely included. If you’re not going to include the other two initials, don’t include any. I’d rather be known as Kim Siever than Kim J. Siever. In fact, when I graduated from college, they had me down as Kim Jason Siever. When I arrived at the rostrum to walk across and shake the college president’s had, I requested that the announcer repeat my first and last names only.
I abhor filling out application forms that have a very tiny space for a single middle initial. I usually just leave it blank unless I can fill it all in.
Speaking of my last time. I once worked for a company in Vancouver that needed to set up a username and password for the call taking software. They already had a Kim working there, so my boss put me in the system as Jason. It wasn’t long before everyone—call takers, dispathcers, couriers, everyone—was calling me Jason. I got tired of it, and asked my boss to change it. I told him that if I was going to be called by something other than my first name, I would rather be known as Bubba.
My third most common issue is being referred to as Ms. Kim Siever. It has become so bad, that I have changed my email signature to read Mr. Kim Siever and to have my email headers to read Mr. Kim Siever. Now I come off as pretentious. So be labeled as pretentious or be referred to as female. I have to pick.
What’s very funny is when someone phones who has both me and my wife as account holders—like the bank, for example. If my wife is talking to them, occasionally she is asked, “Is this Kim”. If they think my wife is Kim, who do they think Mary is? Actually, I get customer service and account reps always confirming “Is this Kim” when I phone them, as if they are thinking “he doesn’t sound like a girl”.
For what it’s worth, “Kim” is actually a boy’s name. Always has been. It became attached to girls when Kimberly became popular. When Kimberly was shortened, it overshadowed the less used boy’s version.
Finally, I am frequently dealing with my last name being misspelled. It has been spelled in many different ways, including the following: seaver, seiver, sievre, sevier, fiever, liever, sieber and severe. My favourite was “sykes”. Not sure where that came from.
I feel sorry for my daughter, Sinéad Aurora Fève Siever. She has many of the issues I do but with the accents. At six years old, she is already correcting people: “With a D”, “Sheh-nay-DUH”, “There’s an accent on the E”.
I enjoyed the flurry of activity that Cameron Moll inspired by asking everyone to post cropped screenshots of their current projects (version 1 and version 2). I received a lot of inspiration from what I saw.
Veerle has asked for everyone to post photos of where they work. Some of the workspaces are very cool and I covet them. I am grateful for my workspace, but I sure could use a better desk and a chair with arms. 🙂
Anyhow, I was inspired while testing out our digital camera at work to invite others to post photos of themselves. Part of me wants to put faces to all of the faceless designers out there whose work I have been admiring and blogs I have been reading. Another part of me wants to see what people look like when they do not have time to freshen up.
To start things off and hopefully discourage others from prepping themselves before posting, here’s my photo.
I haven’t cut my hair since I shaved it in the summer. My winter beard has been growing since the last week in September. My wife keeps threatening me with a haircut this week or next.
For posting your photos, please be sure the photo is 300 pixels wide and 225 pixels high. Please also host the photo on your own webspace. You can use regular XHTML to post your photo.
Oh, and if anyone is shocked at my ad-lib photo, you can find a prepped me over here.
(Thanks to Jonathan Hollin for the hat tip.)
Last week was like Christmas in my office. I received an iMac and Windows XP.
For those who might be thinking, “How did he get XP on an iMacâ€, I am talking about two different machines.
The Faculty of Management bought a bunch of IBMs this year and I received one of them. They came with windows XP. I have been waiting for awhile to be able to use this OS and I am very impressed.
For my double pleasure it also came with Office 2003. There are not too many changes in most of the Office suite apps; although I do like the new Reading View in Microsoft Word. The most impressive changes were in Outlook. The Reading Pane and the collapsible menus are a hit with me. I only wish I can make my IMAP folder the default inbox. That would make my job a lot easier.
A member of our faculty, for whatever reason, decided to bring back his iMac. Since it is still fairly new, our department didn’t want to get rid of it. At the same time they didn’t want to have to provide support for a single Mac. It was decided that I would get it and I could take care of myself.
It was set up on Friday, and I am pretty stoked about it. Despite what Jon thinks, it’s not because I have converted to a Mac. It is because I get to test my sites on more platform/browser combinations. As well, it allows me to keep my Mac skills up to date.
A pleasant week as far as technology gifts go.
