Journal: News & Comment

Recommendations

Permalinks to this entry: individual page or in monthly context. For more material from my journal, visit my home page or the archive.

People sometimes ask me for advice about stuff. All sorts of stuff. Here are some of the things I recommend:

• JaguarPC has been my web host since 2002. Initially, I signed up with Aletia Hosting (via Alistair), which Jaguar bought out—and that was good, because while Aletia was sometimes unreliable, Jaguar has been rock solid for me. Their pricing is insanely low: if you sign up for a year, you get 5 GB of storage and 75 GB a month of data transfers (no, those aren't typos) for under $100 USD per year, or less than $8 USD a month. Plus, on the rare occasions I've needed to contact them through their online support ticket system, I usually get a response within minutes, even at crazy late hours of the night. Sometimes it requires a bit of technical knowledge to do everything you want, but JaguarPC is reliable, has good service, and it's cheap. And no, I don't get a kickback if you sign up (at least I don't think so—but if they ask who referred you, mention penmachine.com!).
  
  
• Jones Soda's Sugar Free Wild Black Cherry is the best diet pop I know of, although Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Cherry Coke (not available in Canada!) tie for second.
  
  
• If you have a Mac, install and use QuickSilver to launch applications and do other stuff. It's free. Every other computer will feel wrong once you get used to it. Look at the documentation to see how powerful it is.
  
  
• Unless you have a specific reason for a particular, single usage in an individual place in a document—one which you can justify logically in writing to picky editors like me—use the serial comma ("pens, pencils, and erasers" rather than "pens, pencils and erasers"), and don't put two spaces after the ends of sentences when you type. No arguing. Just trust me.
  
  
• I'm no style maven, but even I know that you have to be rather astoundingly hip to be able to pull off huge eyeglasses. If you have bad vision like me, they'll distort your face horribly, and you won't see any better, usually because large frames have to sit farther from your face, and so don't cover any more of your field of vision than tiny John Lennon specs that sit high up your nose. So even if you're old, get some smaller, more fashionable frames and you'll look better.

That's all for today.

 |