Heed these words well, for you never know who may be knocking at your door — be very careful when you get strange visitors that claim to be there for your benefit but really have their own profit in mind. The following is something that happened to my family recently that woke us up to this reality.
Continue reading → Beware of Strangers Knocking on Your Door
The life of a teacher is a difficult one. Many people think that they have it easy — school ends at three, they have the whole summer off, and who can beat that for a job? What the people who think this way do not take into consideration is that the teacher, leaving the school at three, then has a stack of homework to grade and tests to score and lessons to plan. The lessons that a teacher plans for their classes every week has to not only cover the material that the school requires but ideally engages the children in the classroom and keeps their attention.
I love a good short story. When you are standing on the train and there is a man staring you down and you want to do something until you get to your station yet don’t want to only read part of a novel or work of non-fiction, a good short story that takes you from Kew Gardens Union Turnpike to Lexington Avenue 63rd street (that’s twenty five minutes on a good day) and fills you with a sense of accomplishment that really hits the spot. The problem has long been where to get new short stories. There are, of course, anthologies and literary magazines that that bring you fantastic short stories, but there are also many of them. When you spend twenty-five dollars on an anthology and go story by story only to find five interesting stories, you have effectively spent five dollars per interesting story.
Continue reading → How the Kindle Brought Back the Popularity of Short Stories
The naming of products can be a funny and tricky thing. There is the often repeated and yet false story about how the Chevrolet Nova failed to sell well in Latin America because the name means that the car does not go in Spanish. Even the naming of web sites, thanks to the lack of spaces in the url, can turn an innocuous store like Pen Island into the less than innocuous Penisland. A place to find out Who Represents actors suddenly seems like it could really be about Whore Presents when you don’t parse the name of the site correctly.
Continue reading → Questioning the Memeing of the Kindle Fire
I use Google search a lot to help me sort through my day. I find Google especially helpful when I’m looking to link an article published in one of 14 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network. I can usually remember a few keywords from a previously published article I want to find, but I can’t always recall the blog in which I published the article. Google can usually suss that out for me without much interactive prodding. Yesterday, when I was invoking The Google, I did a search for “david w boles books” and I was surprised there were 141,000 available search results and also that there was an Advertisement at the top of the returns for “Books By David W. Boles” with my hotlinked name.
Continue reading → Books by David W. Boles: Rewarding the Thief and Punishing Honest Labor
I remember when I first read about the Gutenberg Project and the many free books that they were giving away. People volunteer for tasks ranging from recording audio versions of the public domain books, entering the text from scans of the books as well as proofreading the books.
Is Dr. Seuss in danger of becoming irrelevant in our children’s reading lives? Have we finally forsaken the craven image for the sanctified word?
Continue reading → Banning Picture Books: Is Dr. Seuss Doomed?
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