Vista or stick with XP?

I was listening last night to a podcast with Leo LaPorte and Paul Thurrott about the upcoming Vista operating system and that enticed me to venture over to Paul’s Supersite for Windows website, where I stumbled across an interesting article suggesting that you can have a lot of Vista while still keeping XP, so there is no real need to rush out and grab Vista.

 What I’m getting at is that the Next Big Thing isn’t always a given. Sure, Windows Vista is cool, sort of, and it’s got some neat new functionality. But what would you say if I told you that the vast majority of new end user features in Windows Vista were already available to you–most of them for free, no less–in Windows XP? And that by skipping Windows Vista, at least for the time being, you’d be left with a PC that was faster, more compatible with the software and hardware you own, and just about as capable as an otherwise identical PC running Windows Vista?

There are a lot of good suggestions he makes, so take the time to click on the link above and do a bit of reading.

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Who or whom?

I love grammar stuff (ok, I’m one sick puppy), so here’s a handy tip from Grammar Girl’s web site – actually I picked this up listening to her podcast on my iPod.

OK, here’s a quick and dirty tip. Like whom, the pronoun him ends with m. When you’re trying to decide whether to use who or whom, ask yourself if the answer to the question would be he or him. That’s the trick: If you can answer the question being asked with him, then use whom, and it’s easy to remember because they both end with m. For example, if you trying to ask, “Who (or whom) do you love?” The answer would be “I love him.” Him ends with an m, so you know to use whom. But if you are trying to ask, “Who (or whom) stepped on Squiggly?” the answer would be, “He stepped on Squiggly.” There’s no m, so you know to use who. So that’s the quick and dirty trick: if you can’t remember that you use whom when you are referring to the object of the sentence, just remember that “him equals whom.”

Hopefully Grammar Girl won’t mind me ripping off a bit of her copy – maybe it will drive a few more readers her way, which is good for her and in this case, good for all you struggling grammarians (me amongst them!).

And here’s one of my own that I sometimes ponder – alright or all right? Here’s what Answers.com had to say about that:

USAGE NOTE Despite the appearance of the form alright in works of such well-known writers as Langston Hughes and James Joyce, the single word spelling has never been accepted as standard. This is peculiar, since similar fusions such as already and altogether have never raised any objections. The difference may lie in the fact that already and altogether became single words back in the Middle Ages, whereas alright has only been around for a little more than a century and was called out by language critics as a misspelling. Consequently, one who uses alright, especially in formal writing, runs the risk that readers may view it as an error or as the willful breaking of convention.

And now you know the rest of the story….. 🙂

Walked 3.38 miles and burned 383 calories using Google’s Pedometer tool.

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Bill Moyers and “Capital Crimes”

If you get the chance, visit this link and listen to Bill Moyers talk about Jack Abramoff, Tom DeLay and “Capitol Crimes”.  Disturbing to say the least.  And they don’t come much more credible than Bill Moyers.  It certainly does depict the hypocrisy that exists in Washington today.

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