Does the Internet eradicate barriers or perpetuate them?

The Guardian published an interesting story this weekend about the Internet’s impact on disability. Aleks Krotoski writes that her masters’ thesis in social psychology demonstrated two ways the web benefits people with physical disabilities: First, the web...

Diary of a yak shave: Or, How to get an Excel file into Scrivener

I need to write a draft document that borrows from my previous blog posts. A sane (non-techie) person might just write the freaking document, already. But that is not the Geek Way. So I’m now in the middle of an epic yak shave: Installed a WordPress plugin that...

Singing goodbye to a Facebook “friend”

This week I participated in a fireside chat with Rochelle Grayson for Canadian Women in Communications, on The Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing. It was the scrappiest conversation I’ve ever had from a (notional) podium, probably because Rochelle and I...

Status report on the perpetual home media overhaul

Gillian Shaw’s delightful weekend story in the Vancouver Sun covered online alternatives to cable, and outed me once again as the World’s Most Committed Cross-Platform TV Consumer: And then there are the techno geeks like Vancouver’s Alexandra Samuel...

Using your e-mail signature to fight inbox overload

It’s day 5 of my vendetta on mandatory e-mail replies and I’m feeling the pain. On the one hand, I’m as committed as ever to changing the attitude that every e-mail needs a response — an attitude that is totally out-of-step with every other...

Mindful of social media

Lori Deschene of TinyBuddha has a fantastic post on 10 Mindful Ways to Use Social Media at Tricycle. It’s hard to pick just one to share but if I have to… If you propose to tweet, always ask yourself: Is it true? Is it necessary? Is it kind? Sometimes we...

Two tweaks for your e-mail vendetta auto-responder

Yesterday I set up a vacation responder as part of my e-mail vendetta. If you’re thinking of doing the same, you might note a couple of tweaks: I forward multiple e-mail addresses to a single Gmail account. But Gmail’s vacation responder doesn’t do a...