Gifted Typist

Private GT is off to bootcamp again this week with screaming sergeant majors ordering me to fix photos and FIX THEM NOW! I’m a low-rank recruit in Photoshop bootcamp. This follows similar grueling bootcamps in Illustrator and Dreamweaver last week. SIR, YES, SIR! By the end of it, I’ll be a first-rank private in the [...]

BTW, it’s rainy season in Costa Rica. That means a warm shower each afternoon to break up to blistering sunshine. This explains why at this moment I am sitting in a quiet air conditioned Internet cafe posting and not swimming with the menagerie of tropical fish in the warm Pacific Ocean. (I did that this morning) [...]

Yesterday, I came face to face with the open jaws of an apparently hungry crocodile. It snapped up at me while I snapped down at it with the long lens of my camera. (Pictures to follow at a later date.) These reptilian swamp creatures remind me so much of the reptilian swamp creatures I used to encounter in the singles bars of Halifax. (Although the [...]

A cat’s got her own opinion of human beings. She don’t say much, but you can tell enough to make you anxious not to hear the whole of it. Jerome K Jerome, British novelist

Besides sex, a full head of hair, sex, a fast car, sex, beer, sex, a barbecue on steroids, sex and a multi-function easy chair in front of a large-screen television with lots of sports channels on it? Does he want to be burly and hirsute? Or buffed and waxed? Does he prefer denim overalls and [...]

Departing a cold, rainy, miserable Nova Scotia was not hard. Arriving in sunny Toronto and spending a day doing the CN tower, shopping on Queen St and eating Vietnamese in China Town wasn’t bad either. But the piece de resistance was arriving in the tropical paradise of Costa Rica where the weather is beautiful, even [...]

Phew! Just taking a break after a tough few days of fighing fires here at GT. This site has been under attack by Bad Bots. The other morning I checked my stats to find more than 500 hits from the same IP address. In two hours! It’s hard work trying to track them down , [...]

And in Finland, if you can’t leave the room, then expose yourself in the window! More bad translations: Car rental brochure in Tokyo: When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor. Two signs from a Majorcan [...]

The Simpsons will air its 400th show this weekend. And all I can say is, thank God satire and critical comment are still alive in America. But GT has a dirty little secret. I have never seen The Simpsons. Well, I’ve seen one episode, dubbed into Czech while living in Prague, Czechslovakia (which no longer [...]

Here is something different, my new mini blog, The Little Typist. No, this isn’t a self-aggrandizing act to satisfy a bottomless pit of neediness. It’s a solution to my photo-display woes. The problem is that photos are greedy with the bandwidth and now that I’m running my own show (ie, GT is no longer hosted [...]

After all the belly aching about password fatigue, I’ve received a lot of information from companies offering solutions. So I tried one. And guess what?It worked. Passpack  is an online password manager. It’s still in Beta and seems to work, although I had trouble signing with Mozilla. It’s fine in Explorer. It’s fast and easy [...]

Want to solve your password problem? Then follow the directions of GT’s star commentator Dick. Do a spring clean on your brain. Dump the things you don’t need like names of people you knew in high school, friends’ kids and pets. You can even dump the birthdays and anniversaries although that might get you in [...]

Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught. – Oscar Wilde, Irish playwrite, novelist, poet and wisecracker.

The ad asks: How many Nova Scotians does it take to change a lightbulb. The ad answers: One. But that’s not quite the case, is it? The ad is sponsored by the government-funded Conserve Nova Scotia. CNS employs Heather Foley Melvin ($100,000+ per year) who got the job with no competition because she used to [...]

Some of you might recall an incident a few months back when GT was flamed by the ultra right wing British National Party or BNP, as they are known. The encounter was short-lived thankfully, but others have not been so lucky. Flamers are angry, mean-spirited people who enter discussions on blogs or forums and destroy [...]