Top 5 Favorite Fruit
I’m not counting tomatoes as a fruit, sorry.
1) Plums (just had one, so good)
2) Grapes (green only)
3) Watermelon
4) Strawberries
5) Oranges
Oranges barely edge bananas for 5th place because I love orange juice.
Archive for August, 2004
Tough choices from Microsoft
Funny article about Microsoft’s missteps in international markets includes this gem:
Microsoft has also managed to upset women and entire countries. A Spanish-language version of Windows XP, destined for Latin American markets, asked users to select their gender between “not specified,” “male” or “bitch,” because of an unfortunate error in translation.
Here’s the full story at CNET.
Scan this!
Is there a worse invention in recent years than the self-scanning checkout line at grocery stores? I don’t think so. They don’t speed things up. They aren’t convenient. They expect you to be every bit as skilled as the trained checkout person — and not just when scanning the item originally, but also in fixing something if it scans the wrong way. (And do I even need to mention that they take jobs away from the economy?)
The first time I tried one of these lines, I had about six items with me — “Sure, this can’t take too long.” Well, the tomatoes didn’t have a scan code on them. The bread scanned at the wrong price. The gal assigned to monitor us daring self-scanners was, of course, busy with other customers having the same problems I was. And in the end, it took about 8 minutes more than it would’ve taken in a regular line.
And this a step in the right direction?
The Internet ain’t so scary!
Here’s a nice change of pace…. Despite what you see and read about online scams, the FTC says the Internet is not the biggest source of fraud. What is? Print advertising! According to the FTC survey, 33% of scams came from ads in newspapers, magazines, direct mail, etc. The next biggest source is telemarketing at 17%, and the Internet is third at 14%. Rounding out the list of fraud and scam sources is TV and radio advertising at 11%. So the Internet isn’t that big, scary place a lot of people make it out to be.
