What do people really want to hear about – 9 things

1. Aspirations and beliefs
2. David vs Goliath
3. Avalanche about to roll
4. Contrasting perspective
5. Anxieties
6. Personalities and personal stories
7. How to stories and advice
8. Glitz and glam
9. Seasonal/event related

Lois Kelly is the author of Beyond Buzz: The Next Generation of Word-of-Mouth Marketing

Just joking

Did you know that the ability to understand a joke is one of the signs of being human.

This is why humor, in a way, is a sort of Turing test for humans. One of the surest ways to figure out that someone comes from a totally different background, culture, generation, whatever, is to make a joke … and then realize they’re staring at you with a completely blank expression.

The article talked about the difficulty programmers have making a computer understand humour. One group have developed an AI program that understands knock knock jokes. But, these are the simplest jokes there are. And even that sounded like a mammoth project.

So perhaps to redefine Descartes,

“I laugh, therefore I am human.”

Linux flavours

I was just thinking about the different operating systems that I am using at the moment.

• I have a friends laptop at the moment that I have installed Knoppix 5.1. I used this because Ubuntu needed too much RAM. This laptop has only 256 meg of RAM. I found that Knoppix has given new life to this computer. It did have Windows XP installed but it was so slow that it was unuseable. The only problem I have had is in getting the wireless working with the WPA security. But I believe it is solveable.
• The kids computer has Fedora 7 installed. I used this distro because I had problems installing Ubuntu because of driver issues. I am using the Gnome desktop so it has a familiar feel. My wife also uses this computer and she is a complete newbie who really doesn't get technology. Yet she is using this for web browsing and email very competently.
• I have an old Compaq laptop that is running Gentoo. This is using a KDE desktop. It works. This laptop is about 8 years old and can still do most of the functions that I need it to do. I think it is running a Pentium 4.
• I have a server set up that is using Ubuntu. Again it works well doesn't need the latest processor or a huge amount of RAM to operate. It is functioning very well in its new role and I have plans to use it as a web server in the near future.

Linux is great. For most of the basic functions it does everything very competently. And, once you get the hang of it it is easy to add stuff that you need as you go along. It is also a great conserver of resources. Want to get a bit more life out of that old computer then linux may be the answer for you.

Free language learning

I never ceased to be amazed at the resources that are available on the web. I just came across this one. How to learn a foreign language.

Mango is a great too to be able to pick up some of the basics of a foreign language. Remember those tapes that you could buy years ago. They were very expensive. I was going to learn Japanese. I think my 7 year old daughter has surpassed me now.