Because I've been away from the book blogging world for a time, I can't remember specific books that I've read because of specific blogger recommendations, but I know there are SO MANY. I know I added several to my TBR shelf after reading all the intros on Monday, and the ginormous number of want-to-reads on Goodreads is thanks to reviews from blogs over the years. So I blame you all!!
An author that I push/strongly suggest/gush about too much is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I urge friends to read her books and watch her talks. I've picked works by her for two book clubs now. My success in creating Adichie groupies has been marginally successful. When one book club met at my house to discuss Half of a Yellow Sun, a couple of guests pretended that they finished the book (they later confessed that they didn't want to hurt my feelings) and talked about how much they loved one character without realizing that he did something pretty horrible later on in the book. They felt a little awkward and we still joke about it. Just recently I hosted a book club with another group of ladies to discuss Purple Hibiscus, which I had already read and loved. Less people attended than usual, but I'm not sure if that was due to lack of interest or just busy schedules. But one person there loved Purple Hibiscus, and immediately read two of her other books, and she loaned me We Should All Be Feminists. That made my night! One Adichie fangirl born!
Other books that I get really excited about and want everyone to read are All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren, Middlemarch by George Eliot, anything by Graham Greene, Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt, Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy. Oh, I could go on and on but I think the prompt said just one so I should stop!
Giggling about the book club participant not finishing the book and loved a character NOT, hahahhahaha and that is why you are always honest during book club discussions. Great post
We're reading Americanah for our book club in June. And, I've got We Should All Be Feminists at the top of my TBR. Glad to know you recommend this author!
You could NEVER gush too much about Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (in my opinion). I think she's an incredible writer. Half of a Yellow Sun was absolutely devastating (Purple Hibiscus too!), and Americanah was stellar and funny and a surprise. I can't wait to see what she does next.
Love book group stories - I always tell the members of my club, you don't have to read the book, but know that we will be discussing then ending (it's a mystery club). Something similar happened at one of our meetings and it was pretty funny - although a bit embarrassing to the person who made the 'error'. :-)
Even though you've been gone from blogging the last few years, I still remember some of the books I've read that I first heard about from you. :)
I really want to read Far from the Madding Crowd but I'm not sure I can agree with All the King's Men! I wanted to finish that book so badly but it was such a struggle for me to get through.
I read Half of a Yellow Sun thanks to book bloggers (I won it in a giveaway years ago...maybe from Caribousmom?) and loved it--I've been meaning to read more by her!
I just read We Should All Be Feminists last week and loved it! Sadly I have never read her before... oops!
Every minute there are 277k tweets, 4,320 minutes of video are being uploaded to YouTube and more than 2.5 million Facebook posts are being shared. That’s a lot of content which only makes the competition for the user’s attention almost impossible.
Many marketers also use link shorteners when applying UTM tags to campaigns – remember to never send a UTM link without shortening it – it’s a sure way to drive off traffic.
Most online analytics tools (such as Google Analytics or Tableau) are only available for traffic that lands on your own site. So how can you monitor clicks to other sites? That’s right – you shorten them. All of the url shortening services offer some information regarding the people who clicked on your specific link, usually stats such as number of clicks, geographic information, operating systems etc.
This is an extremely important tool to get to know your audience! For example, if you are Facebook admin and would like to better understand the engagement of different segments of your followers. All you need to do is just shorten the links and see if the users who are engaging are really from the countries you intended to target and how they’re consuming your content – through mobile, desktop or maybe only tablets? Know your audience so you could always stay relevant.
Continue to so the same work and make money from it. When sending traffic through a shortened link you can earn money by presenting an ad or promoted content in the middle. This kind of ads, called interstitial, is a full page ad with any content you wish to fill it with. Clk.im shortener offers within the free package the ability to shorten a link and enjoy by earning money from an automated ad platform. The idea is to earn money on the traffic your website/blog/YouTube channel generates.
The premium account offer users the ability to control the content within the interstitial meaning that you can simply promote any service or product you want.
Clkim is proud to introduce a Deluxe Starter package. This package is perfect for anyone who wants to increase their overall ROI...
Welcome to the world of Big Copyright: Paul McDonald looks at the new regime of national, regional and global industry alliances policing intellectual property in screen media.
Posted in From Nottingham and Beyond | Comments Off on The Rise of Big Copyright: Content Protection and the Formation of Anti-Piracy Alliances
Is this the end for linear TV? As television and the internet become increasingly intertwined, Catherine Johnson investigates UK broadcasters’ evolving strategies to deliver TV online.
Are you dreading February 14th? Sugars and sweets running your children up the wall and the sugar crash have you worried? Rather than stuff your kid’s baskets with big chocolate hearts, fill it with stuffed animals! Not only will they have a much lower sugar count, but these gifts will last longer than a day. Our top Valentine’s picks for kids? Valentine’s Day gift are:
Any of the cuddly, multipurpose stuffed animals would make a great gift for kids, but of course we have our favorites! The My Pillow Pet Love Dog is a cute and fluffy friend that will make a great addition to kids? Valentine’s baskets. The heart spotted ears and bright red color is a delightful compliment to the colors of Valentine’s Day as well! The My Pillow Pet Love Cat will satisfy the cat lovers in your family as well.
However you spend the day, with stuffed bellies or stuffed animals, make it a fun Valentine’s Day, one that is special for kids and for you!
Did you pester, bother or aggravate people last year? Now is the time to make a fresh start and clean up your act. After all, when you act kind you make a great example for kids! They look up to you, so try to follow through with your New Year’s resolution so they do as well. One way to help kids kick their annoying habits is to introduce them to their own Annoying Monsters!
If your kids need a friend to play with ? the Infuriating Igor will not only make a cute and cuddly friend, he’ll also talk back! That Igor will repeat everything your kid says – but in a squeaky voice.
Is your child a tickler? Let your children tickle attach the Annoying Monster Boris instead of everyone else. Leaving you free to clean up and finish tasks.
FFFFTTTTT. PFFFFFTTT. It may be funny for your kid to make noises, but at least when Annoying Monster Percy makes them – it won’t smell!
For serious fun, start 2012 off with picking out your most annoying traits and getting rid of them! Let the Annoying Monsters be terrible, while you and the kids behave.
A while back I posted about AutoHotkey not being able to interact with Windows 8 windows and other applications that were Ran As Admin. My solution was to run your AutoHotkey (AHK) script as admin as well, and I also showed how to have your AHK script start automatically with Windows, but not as an admin. Afterwards I followed that up with a post about how to get your AHK script to run as admin on startup, so life was much better, but still not perfect.
#1 is only a problem if you haven’t set your AHK script to run as admin on startup as I showed in my other blog post (i.e. you are still manually launching your script) or you haven’t changed your UAC settings to never prompt you with notifications (which some companies restrict) (see screenshot to the right).
#2 was a problem for me. I use AHK Command Picker every day. A lot. I’m a developer and in order for Visual Studio to interact with IIS it requires admin privileges, which meant that if I wanted to be able to use AHK Command Picker in Visual Studio, I had to run it as admin as well. The problem for me was that I use AHK Command Picker to launch almost all of my applications, which meant that most of my apps were now also running as an administrator. For the most part this was fine, but there were a couple programs that gave me problems running as admin. E.g. With PowerShell ISE when I double clicked on a PowerShell file to edit it, instead of opening in the current (admin) ISE instance, it would open a new ISE instance.
Today I stumbled across this post on the AHK community forums. Lexikos has provided an AHK script that will digitally sign the AutoHotkey executable, allowing it to interact with applications running as admin, even when your AHK script isn’t.
On the Select Source File prompt choose the C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\AutoHotkey.exe file. This was already selected by default for me. (Might be Program Files (x86) if you have 32-bit AHK installed on 64-bit Windows)
On the Select Destination File prompt choose the same C:\Program Files\AutoHotkey\AutoHotkey.exe file again. Again, this was already selected by default for me.
That’s it. (Re)Start your AHK scripts and they should now be able to interact with Windows 8 windows and applications running as admin 🙂
This is a great solution if you want your AHK script to interact with admin windows, but don’t want to run your script as an admin.
If you do want to launch an application as admin, but don’t want to run your AHK script as admin, you can use the RunAs command.
Myself and a few co-workers have updated from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and have run into some weird problems. After a bit of Googling I have found that we are not alone. This is just a quick list of some things the the Windows 8.1 Update seems to have broken. I’ll update this post as I find more issues.
I found that some of the links in the website our office uploads our Escrow deposits to no longer worked in IE 11 (which 8.1 installs). Turning on the developer tools showed that it was throwing a Javascript error about an undefined function. Everything works fine in IE 10 though and no undefined errors are thrown.
I have also noticed that after doing a search on Google and clicking one of the links, in order to get back to the Google results page you have to click the Back button twice; the first Back-click just takes you to a blank page (when you click the Google link it directs you to an empty page, which then forwards you to the correct page).
Others have complained that they are experiencing problems with GMail and Silverlight after the 8.1 update.
So it may just be that IE 11 updated it’s standards to be more compliant and now many websites don’t meet the new requirements (I’m not sure); but either way, you may find that some of your favorite websites no longer work properly with IE 11, and you’ll have to wait for IE 11 or the website to make an update.
We use the SonicWall VPN client at my office, and I found that it no longer worked after updating to Windows 8.1. The solution was a simple uninstall, reinstall, but still, it’s just one more issue to add to the list.
Have you noticed other things broken after doing the Windows 8.1 update? Share them in the comments below!
In my personal opinion, I would wait a while longer before updating to Windows 8.1; give Microsoft more time to fix some of these issues. Many of the new features in Windows 8.1 aren’t even noticeable yet, as many apps don’t yet take advantage of them. Also, while MS did put a Start button back in, it’s not nearly as powerful as the Windows 7 Start button, so if that’s your reason for upgrading to 8.1 just go get Classic Shell instead.
If you are like me and don’t want to have to enter your password each time Windows loads, you can have Windows start up without prompting you to enter a user name or password. The simple (and BAD) way to do this is to simply not have a password on your user account, but that’s a big security risk and will allow people to easily remote desktop into your computer.
So, first set a password on your windows account if you don’t already have one. Then select Run… from the start menu (or use Windows Key + R to open the Run window) and type control userpasswords2, which will open the user accounts application.
On the Users tab, clear the box for Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer, and click on OK. An Automatically Log On dialog box will appear; enter the user name and password for the account you want to use to automatically log into Windows. That’s it.
You may also want to make sure your screen saver is not set to prompt you for a password when it exits either.
A word of caution about this: ANYBODY will be able to get into your computer. This is probably fine for your home desktop PCs, but you may want to think about enabling this on your laptop, especially if you regularly take it out and about and it has sensitive information on it (ID, credit card info, saved usernames/passwords in your web browser). If you weren’t using a password before anyways though, using this trick is still more secure than without it