Infoalmanac

The Serenity Prayer for Geeks

In the past few weeks, I've been learning what to do to make this information blog useful to you. Cleaning up the extraneous clutter on the pages, adding the needful back in and providing opportunities for your feedback.

Like most website owners, I've continued to sweat the small stuff, often waking in the middle of the night with an answer or another item for the to-do list.

There are three possibilities in this (and any kind of work)

• Find the problem and accept that you cannot fix it. There may be a work-around, but computers live by rules. Some of those rules, when broken, cause it to crash. Don't break those rules.

Information Finding — Do It Yourself Research 1

Locating information without a clear system for finding it is something akin to driving sixty miles an hour down a foggy Texas coastal road. Either you get lost or wind up in the drink!

Folks who were brought up with encyclopedias and dictionaries and library cards seem to intuitively understand how to find out what they want to know. Flipping the dial on the TV as a pastime instead makes it harder for the rest of us.

Here's one way to cruise the foggy info-highway for obscure sites:

1.  Brainstorm some different versions of what you want to know. Lean toward two or three word searches. (Yahoo's information search options listed below the search box when you type in your search term will suggest some to you if you want to dive right in with one word.)

2.  Search on the first term.

3.  Open every site on the page that's not an ad. (I open these in new tabs so I can keep the original search page up. . .