Lately, I’ve been looking into figuring out the ins and outs of credit card payment processing for two projects. One is our Yosemite vacation rental and the other is an ecommerce website for a friend who sells ultralight hiking gear. It can be dizzying with all the options and many pitfalls along the way. A [...]

I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I have come to prefer Chrome as my favorite browser, but there was no Roboform integration, and I just can’t survive without Roboform (a password manager, but also a way to manage all sorts of sensitive information and keep it encrypted). As of April 14, Roboform [...]

A minor usability problem on an after-purchase survey leaves your correspondant less than happy. And that’s bad for the merchant. So a shopping experience that was a 9 or 10 out of 10, remains so, but the good feeling for the merchant is subtly damaged by poor interface design on the part of the third-party customer survey service they use. A shame.

Most people in academia learn a style of writing that is great for precision, but terrible for persuasion, and those habits are deadly when it comes time procure grants, fellowships and jobs.

After hating on iTunes player for a long time, but being locked into sometimes using it, I’m free thanks to cancelling my Audible subscription and switching to eMusic. I know, we’re all supposed to love Apple and iTunes and every product they create. I don’t. Here’s why.

Google Maps for our area is utterly and completely unreliable, but still manages to violate the privacy of a private citizen. How can it be this bad.

For a few days, my offline Gmail was refusing to synch up with the server. Every time I would try, I would instantly get an ! in the synch status and it would say “Synchronization has stopped unexpectedly”. Well, yeah. I had figured that part out.
I’m sure there are lots of reasons for this, but [...]

Even if you don’t achieve huge success, conducting interviews and listening more carefully to the way you and others speak will be enlightening. I’m just getting started on interviews, but already I feel it’s changing the way I speak or at least making me aware of some annoying habits in my speech.

ChaCha answers questions on anything and everything. Even annual bowling deaths. Sometimes they don’t check their sources so well though. I sure wouldn’t take health advice off ChaCha!

How do you promote your book with Twitter? It’s not necessarily obvious, especially for those of us who are writers and scholars first and foremost. But publishers aren’t doing much for new authors anymore, so you have to do it yourself.