See the Inner Workings of the Mouse – Its worth it

Anyone ever wondered what makes your mouse move? You might think a slight movement of the hand generates the necessary velocity for the laser to shift and therefore react and cause the appropriate action on the screen. WELL SIR, you’d be wrong. If you dare to know the truth, make the jump.

Link – 1-click

George Orwell on Modern Writing

“Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug…[thus] it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not thinking.”

Aptly named “Politics and the English Language;” George Orwell defines the essence of what writing has become and how it should be tamed. He explains that grammar and syntax come second to the meaning and are often unimportant if one’s meaning is clear.

“What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning.”

Published in 1946, it seems somewhat difficult that I just recently heard about this and even more so that it is so spot on. Save yourself from the flowery and verbose rhetoric that happens to spill from the mouths of our Politicians and practice rhetorical heresy with a few simple rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

In addition Orwell lends his knowledge to say that “a scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions:”

1. What am I trying to say?
2. What words will express it?
3. What images or idiom will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Now I can only leave you with the hope that I have made a point. If not perhaps you will need further insight. – “Politics and the English Language”

Feed Your Pig

Are you in debt? Or the better question would be are you trying to recover from being in debt? The easiest answer to that question would be to stop spending money that you DON’T HAVE. Although, however you found yourself in your given situation it is time to find relief. Feed the Pig is a simple calculator to help you establish a plan to pay off your credit card. Put in your current balance, interest rate and pay off goal (in months) and the pig spits out a dollar amount needed to reach your goal.

Results Summary
Current balance	$2,000
Current monthly payment	$125
Monthly charges	$100
Major purchase 1	$0 in 0 month(s)
Major purchase 2	$0 in 0 month(s)
Annual fee	$35
Interest rate (APR)	17.50%
Payment required to meet goal of 24 months is $203.56.
Keeping your monthly payment at $125 will take more than 360 months.

In addition Feed the Pig also offers a Lunch Savings calculator that allows you to see your projected spending if you opt for Wendys #3 everyday over the much more thrifty bag lunch.

Link – Squeal

QUE?

Again I find myself restless, looking for more information than I could possibly comprehend in any single sitting. Fortunately for me, and you I might add, I have reached the end of the rainbow, outwitted the leprechaun and have now posted the booty.

Smashing Magazine has complied a list that has a plethora of information presented graphically to stimulate even the slowest of your friends. So please take a look and immerse yourself in the world wide web.

Over the next few days I will go through all of them individually and let you know which ones would be on my list.

Link – Smashing Magazine

Tutorials Anyone??

Do you have trouble finding good tutorials sites for your favorite artistic or coding programs? Never fear because The Learn List has you covered by offering help for major apps like Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Dreamweaver as well as language help with CSS. With a simple set up all you need to do is click on the icon that represents the program that you need help with and you have a list of tutorials sites at your disposal.

Make the Jump – The Learn List