Richard Farrar’s Blog

I’ll find a photo later…

Procrastination gets a lot of bad press. It’s generally seen as a negative trait, as we’re constantly told not to procrastinate and made to feel guilty if we do. However, as with most things in life, things aren’t always that black and white. Perhaps there are positives to procrastination.

Should we really listen to those bearded psychologist types who like to wear ladies’ underwear; the sort who constantly try to make us feel guilty about procrastination? We all do it, so being made to feel bad about it isn’t going to help matters.

Why don’t we try to see the positive side to procrastination instead? After all, the glass is half full isn’t it, not half empty?

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Whenever you fill in an online form, you are invariably confronted with a picture of horribly distorted words that you are asked to spell. Are these web hosts just needing a little extra help with their spelling, or is there something more subtle going on?

Filling in online forms nowadays can be a bit of a mission. Not content with forcing you to fill out pages of obscure questions about your first pet etc., before allowing you to hand over your hard earned cash to buy the website’s latest offering, web hosts are now also asking you to decipher increasingly cryptic pictures of words before allowing you to continue.

Is this just a global conspiracy to test the online world’s spelling abilities, or is there a deeper, more important meaning?

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Web addresses can often be rather long and cumbersome, which may work fine in print, but don’t necessarily translate well to the spoken word. So what is the best strategy to handle URLs in podcasts?

How often have you received an e-mail from a friend or colleague that contains a link to an interesting web page, where the link spans two or three lines of the e-mail and contains all sorts of seemingly random numbers and characters? Quite often I suspect.

Accessing these sorts of links in an e-mail is really easy; just click on the link and bosh, you’re off to the website in question. However, if you had to speak the web address over the phone for example, it would be another matter entirely. So what is the best way to approach this problem of pronouncing web addresses in podcasts or via the spoken word?

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