Clipmarks & A Legion Of Dedicated Clippers Take The Net By Storm

Posted on May 31, 2008
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Instead of linking to entire web pages, Clipmarks lets you clip news from multiple webpages exactly what you want others to see. Digitalsistere, a new up and coming ‘clipmarks Rockstar‘ specializes in clips that are at times hilarious…often bizarre…always entertaining. Instead of coffee for a ‘first jolt of the morning’, this clipper is more of a slap in the face.

Equipped For Social Media

Clipmarks also gives each user a widget for their clips that can be embedded on MySpace, your blog or just about anywhere else. You can also use our Facebook application to share what you clip with your friends. Lastly, there’s a great community over at clipmarks.com where people share and discuss interesting things they clip from the web.

Clipmarks CEO, Eric Goldstein, was a lawyer who was fed up with cutting and pasting citations into a Word file only to discover that the 100 page mess became unreadable and unusable. He and his team launched a first iteration of the product, which Marshall looked at months ago, but the latest version is considerably more fully-featured and quite interesting.

The product is a Mozilla/Firefox or IE plugin that brings up an interactive clipping menu. When you scroll over text, Clipmarks highlights it and allows you to clip it to an email, to a blog — many CMSes are supported including Wordpress and Blogger — to print, or just save. The clips are stored on the Clipmarks server and can be “popped” to the front page to share with other readers.

These popped stories allow voting and there is a running tally of popular stories on the homepage. Goldstein mentioned that there is no way to vote against a story so stories can only rise in the ranks or peter out, not be demoted by nefarious popularity gamers.

Europeans All Speaking One Language?

Posted on April 6, 2008
Filed Under Humor, Travel | Leave a Comment

I came across this post in Rick Steves travel blog and had to share it here. It’s about all of Europe being destined to share the same language, and though he says it’s been circulated in emails, I hadn’t seen it yet.

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five-year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English.”

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c.” Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favor of “k.” This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f.” This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the fourth yer, people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v.”

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Quitting Smoking Again – Week 10: A New Year

Posted on January 3, 2008
Filed Under Healthy Living, Humor, Quit Smoking | Leave a Comment

What’s really cool at this new year is I’ve now got about 10 weeks – 2 ½ months worth of success behind my goal of being a non-smoker by 2008. I can’t say my New Years resolution was to quit smoking, but having blown that resolution so many times before, I’m definitely feeling good at having finally succeeded.

I’m also feeling really good physically. My energy level is way higher, and the chest pains and tightness seem to be a thing of the past. It’s been at least a month since I felt any.

quit smokingAt this point I’ve got every expectation of remaining a non-smoker for life. That may sound over-confident after just 10 weeks, but another significant milestone is that I really don’t think about “not smoking” that much anymore.

Oh sure once in a while, but mostly not. And yes I will on occasion be edgy or even irritable, but those times are fewer and less pronounced. Again, my family has been great and most supportive. They’ve figured out what “irrational irritability” looks like and pretty much just ignore me when it happens.

And that’s a good thing – actually the best thing to do with anyone quitting smoking is to be outwardly supportive, but mostly ignore them. When I first quit, these times would happen maybe every other day on average, and now it’s like every other week. They’re always short-lived, and nothing serious, just weird.

On a more philosophical note, I’ve started to wonder if smokers are really just closet grouches who’ve hidden the fact by staying sedated with nicotine. Having smoked since my teens, it’s near impossible to know what’s normal, but I suspect maybe I’ve always been grouchy, and never really knew just how much.

Of course everyone appears grouchy when they quit smoking, it’s a well-documented fact. But suppose that all us smokers are really just curmudgeons who’ve been sedated all this time. Now when we quit, the world will see the real us.

Hmmm….

Next quit smoking post: Week 16
Previous quit smoking post: Week 6

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