Alan Brandon

Over at Gadget Review I have a hands-on review of the Toshiba Satellite A665 laptop. The A665 is spacious 16-incher with an Intel Core i7 CPU, 4 GB of DDR3 memory, and NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M graphics. I liked the A665, and i think it would make a nice high-end entertainment computer for home use. It’s not that rugged, so I wouldn’t get one for business, school, or chronic Starbucks use. Also, I hate the off-centered keyboard.

The last Toshiba I spent any time using was probably a T4600 or thereabouts. It had the side-mounted tiny trackball that you worked with your thumb. Ah, the memories….

Toshiba T4600Cs with thumb-ball (image: CRN)

Frank Chimero has a great post up entitled On Content, in which he explores serving bad soup in a fancy bowl. Content strategy anyone?

…and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say…. Would people want the soup if it came without a spoon? It could be called “undesigned” or “naked” soup.

In many of the organization I have worked with, design (or redesign) has been tried as a way to fix bad content. Even though design is hard, it’s still seems easier than fixing content (content is hard work). But it’s not effective. If you want good soup you need a good chef and good ingredients. Slurp.

The apple meets the shield-and-bars in the DashLink iPhone cradle for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. In this piece for Gizmag I cover a slick accessory from Hell’s Foundry.

With my fat fingers, I’d hate to try using an iPhone or iPod Touch while riding. But safely stopped, this would be a good way to keep the tunes rolling (or use a GPS app).

My hands-on review of the Recon-Zeal GPS goggles is posted on Gadget Review. This was a fun one to do because the goggles have that living-in-the-future feel to them.

I’m trying to line up some more gear for more hands-on reviews. I’ll link to them here when I do.

When I was starting out in technical writing it was common to define terms such as CPU, MHz, and RAM, whether in-line or in a glossary. As such high technology became more mainstream, it was no longer necessary for most audiences. MHz and RAM seem to be understood by most of the general public. Indeed most non-technical readers can comparison-shop for a new phone or camera using these technical specifications.

But other industries are newer to the mainstream. For example, many of us learned new financial and business terms when our banks were bailed out and our 401Ks evaporated. Suddenly many writers needed to cover new topics, with new terminology that wasn’t familiar to their audiences.

Enter The Financial Writer’s Stylebook by Chris Roush and Bill Cloud. The book features definitions for 1100 terms, plus information  on legal issues specific to financial and business reporting.

Such a style guide should help writers who are new to financial topics — or whose audiences are. As Bill Cloud says on the American Copy Editors Society website, “There are fewer dedicated business copy editors. The confidence level it gives, whether to define something or not — I think that’s important.”

The book will be available in November.