Author Archives: Andrea

Stacks!

I think Apple invented stacks (which really are just folders that reside in the dock) just for me. No more dropping files willy-nilly on the desktop: Downloads automagically appear in one stack, and I created several other stacks for all my stuff. Now the desktop always looks tidy.

Stacks are a new feature of Leopard. I’m really happy I finally upgraded the system from Mac OS 10.3.9 to 10.5. And by the way, I upgraded the hardware, too. I won’t even call it an early Christmas present to myself because my old iBook was over four years old and there were a few things I could no longer live with in order to be able to work effectively, so I found a good new home for the iBook and bought a MacBook. :-)

Watching the English

… is the title of a book by a British anthropologist I read last summer before visiting the UK. The author, Kate Fox, takes a close look at her fellow countrymen, and to this foreigner at least, her observations were both interesting and amusing.

Of course, queuing is a particularly English habit which I’ve often observed. The English do it everywhere and consequently get cross if someone tries to jump a queue. What I have never seen, though, is what they do if someone actually jumps a queue, but MeFi user garius explains it in this comment, which I urge you to read:

“If you ever want to see British queuing at its best, go to Victoria Station in London during the rush hour… “

Hilarious!

The rest of the thread about queueing is worth a read if you are interested in queueing habits around the world.

How do you pronounce…

It’s not always easy to find out how to pronounce something in a foreign language. If you don’t know a native speaker you can ask and are not familiar with the phonetic alphabet, you can try the Acapela Text to Speach Interactive Demo. You can enter words or a sentence (or use their demo text), and the software will read it to you. There are 24 languages available, from Arabic to Turkish, and they’ve got the most common ones like English, French, Spanish and German, of course.

Found in this Ask MeFi thread.