The Scrips National Spelling Bee finals are tonight. Forty-one contestants will duke it out for the top prize.
The winning words for the last 10 champions. Impressive. (I’ve never heard or read a single one of these words before!)
logorrhea
demarche
succedaneum
prospicience
pococurante
autochthonous
appoggiatura
Ursprache
serrefine
guerdon
Visit the website and test your spelling prowess.
Other than forcing yourself to knuckle down or promising yourself a future treat, how do you inspire yourself to continue when your motivation lags?
I’m suffering from an appalling lack of enthusiasm at the moment, with a ton of work on my plate.
Can you share any inspiration or encouragement?
As I’ve said before, I’m not big on the lack of standardized categories for website content.
Like most, I’ve gotten used to searching Google for things. Although I’m not anti-Google, most of my searches are done reluctantly and with a sigh at the knowledge of all the dreck I’ll have to sort through. These days, sadly, it’s almost the only way to find something online.
Then…there is an outage. Here’s a great article on the single point of failure for finding content on the web.
It seems there is no one who accurately defines the generations we are always hearing about in the news. Especially firm start and end dates. When one is making such broad generalizations about a millions of people, it must be hard to know if a new generation started exactly at 11:23 am on a particular morning in a particular year.
Yet there is no consensus of even a year, let alone a day or time, for the end of the baby boom generation and the beginning of generation X. As someone who falls into both generations depending on who is defining it, I find this troublesome. I’m either a really young baby boomer or the eldest cohort of generation X. Not that I spend a lot of time stewing about this. It’s just interesting that demographic categories so many people treat so seriously are actually so fuzzy.
For a few months now, I’ve felt a vague unease. A sense of dread that I am missing out on the next big thing, to my detriment. Usually, I do miss out on these things and only adopt a technology or product about the time it becomes mainstream and those in the vanguard have moved on to the next next big thing. And I’m okay with that.
With Twitter, however, there’s been a lot of pressure (intended or not) from those around me–join the Twitterati or suffer the consequences. It may be right for some people, but I don’t see it being right for me. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that over the past few weeks, I missed some of my regular Tues/Thurs posts. Swamped with work (good thing) and just not enough time or energy to pull my mind away to write a post.
So I can’t imagine stopping my work every day, every few hours, every few minutes to figure out a short post to write, or find a link to include. Am I missing out? Maybe. But I’m also making sure I have time to do the things people would be expecting me to tell them about.
The term social media has always been a curious one to me. And this article about Twitter is a good reminder that there is an entire different way to be social than by typing 140 characters several times a day: Has Twitter replaced sex?
I sit here, awaiting several return phone calls I know I’ll never get.
One from a client who is in arrears. One from a vendor for whom I have a project, and the money to pay her. And several from local organizations I’ve requested information from, for an existing project that would give them at least minor publicity.
There are as many reasons not to return someone’s legitimate (non-spam) phone call (or email) as there are stories in the naked city. And only a few good reasons to do it. Among them: good customer relations and basic courtesy.
(Sigh)