Alex Byers | storyteller • optimist

WHERE HAS THE TIME GONE.

I’m leaving on a jet plane, back to the District on Thursday. I couldn’t be more excited to get back to school, start really cracking over at The Hatchet, and work my senior year to its fullest, but I do wonder what happened to the last seven weeks I spent in Minnesota.

It would have been hard to ask for a much better short-term summer break – a trip to Arizona, plenty of relaxation, cutting a few strokes off my golf handicap – but I’d be lying if I said I felt like I accomplished everything I wanted to this summer. I had hoped that my time in the midwest would be a digital retreat of sorts – where I would get up to speed and learn everything I could ever need to know about journalism and the web and social media and the like.

That didn’t happen.

In fact, when I make a list of the things I still need to catch up with, it’s a list much longer than I’d like:

• Figure out how to really use LinkedIn
• Figure what Publish2 really is and how I can use it personally and for The Hatchet
• Learn how to code in Javascript
• Write posts here much more frequently
• Complete roughly six thousand more minor tasks for The Hatchet
• Record some music
• Practice my video and still photography skills
• Write a particularly important post I’ve been saving up that is essentially the mission statement of this blog.
• Many more tasks that has wasted away into oblivion

Maybe it hasn’t been so bad. Actually, it hasn’t – it’s been great. But when you follow [read: try to learn from] so many smart people who seem light years ahead, it’s hard not to feel a little lazy.

Here’s to picking up the slack.

I want to expand a bit on a tweet I posted last week that may have been lacking some context.

The idea I floated had to do with word processors and their spellcheck libraries. In Microsoft Word and other software, you can tell the program to “learn” words. Effectively, you’re telling the computer to not put a curvy red line beneath a given word. Examples of this might include a last name you write frequently, the name of a product, or any other word you use often that might not be a real word.

My idea would give word processors the ability to do just the opposite: forget words.

If a word is forgotten, the program would automatically put the red line below the word, regardless of whether or not it is misspelled. Why would you want to do this? Read on, friends.

The following situation may seem slightly farfetched, but I’m certain it’s plausible. In addition, there are other, more likely examples, but as I’ve personally experienced one of them, I’d rather not share it. WARNING: Potty language is upcoming.

Let’s say you’re a copywriter for an ad agency, You’re working on an ad for a new energy drink, and the idea behind the project is that it’s not for the faint (of heart.) In your copy, you write the following – Energy Drink: Not for the faint.

Except you don’t.

See, the t and f letters are in close proximity on your standard keyboard. You mistakenly write taint, not faint. The word processor reads taint as correctly spelled, thinking of the verb that means to skew or otherwise negatively adjust. Your boss, however, reads the word taint as a slang term for a certain rarely-seen part of the male body.

Ouch. But if you had told the computer to automatically highlight taint, you would have been much more likely to catch the mistake in the editing process. You’d have saved yourself from a pretty big embarassment.

I know there are likely a million flaws or with this idea (or better fixes, like, uh, improving your editing.) But we all make stupid mistakes – I have to think this would help avoid a few of them. Am I crazy?

By the way, I wrote nearly this entire post on a Blackberry via WordPress’ new mobile software. Stuff is awesome.