Ask-Steve.com

Happy Take Back Your Time Day!

Let's hope the latest idea out of Seattle makes it as big as its coffee and software. According to the official Web site, "TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY is a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."

It's hard to argue with that. Americans are the new, undisputed workaholics of the world. In a recent CNN money.com poll, 85% of the 7,800 respondents said Americans are working too much. In a separate poll commissioned by the Center for a New American Dream, four in five said they wish they had more time to spend with family. Half of all Americans — and I'm certainly one of them — say they'd trade some of their pay for more time off.

"The evidence is clear — over work and over-scheduling are pressing, daily concerns for many Americans," says John de Graaf, National Coordinator for Take Back Your Time Day, and editor of the new book, Take Back Your Time, just released by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. "We want people to know that the problem is not theirs alone, it is a national concern that needs to be addressed now."

Sign me up!

Relax, it's nearly Take Back Your Time Day — Seattle PI

Have Time for Take Back Your Time Day? — Newsday.com

Back to life: The little laptop that could

As reported in Requiem for a hard drive, the hard drive in my trusty Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LSK notebook died a very noisy death, leaving me chained to my desk and causing me all kinds of headache, even though I had a (nearly) complete backup. I was ready to scrap it and was already on the prowl for a shiny new replacement when a friend suggested I just replace the hard drive. Well, I did just that and, for $125, I have twice the disk space I had before and am sitting at Starbucks typing this on the resurrected unit itself. Thanks, Will!

Should you lose the accent? Not in Britain.

"It's like, 'Hi, my accent is really mangled and I don't know where I am, it's like I'm in the middle of the Atlantic.'"

So says Suzanne Levy, a British TV producer, in a Wall Street Journal piece entitled, "Bloody Sticky Wicket: Americans in Britain Often Blow the Accent." She is referring to Loyd Grossman, an American from Massachusetts who enjoys a successful career as a British television celebrity. Paul Foulkes, a professor of linguistics at University of York, agrees with Ms. Levy's assessment of Mr. Grossman's accent: "Oh, God yes. Horrendous."

So can Americans master a British accent? And should they?

E-mail: Check twice, send once

There's an old carpenters' saying: Measure twice, cut once. Sage advice that applies to many things we do in life. Like e-mail.

A little browsing and up pops a piece of e-mail from an Enron employee complaining about a mother-in-law: "the most selfish person on Earth." Another contains decades-old photos of former chief executive Jeffrey K. Skilling, sent him by his Beta Theta Pi fraternity brothers. A piece of e-mail written by a woman in Portland, Ore., asks an Enron energy trader, "So ... you were looking for a one night stand after all ...?"

I spy with my little -- cell phone?

A story in the Wall Street Journal looks at the new reality that any mobile phone may also be a camera. Many "health clubs, courtrooms, and celebrity haunts" are banning them altogether. When a photo can be snapped and e-mailed to someone — or uploaded to a Web site — almost instantly, confiscating the camera isn't going to do much good. Prices on phones sporting cameras are low enough now, and they'll only continue to drop, that paparazzi and even casual photo speculators may find it worth the risk of losing the phone in order to snap that exclusive photo.

Requiem for a hard drive

My trusty Sony Vaio PCG-Z505LSK notebook computer had a bad hard drive day yesterday. Around 3:00 p.m. it gave me the BSOD (blue screen of death) and automatically rebooted. It came back up and flashed a Disk I/O error and then went into the Win2K Pro bootup sequence. Just before the desktop should have appeared — the BSOD again. And another reboot. This time it went into a disk check. When it got to 3% it started to make sounds that I've never heard in my two decades of love/hate relationships with computers. It sounded like the hard drive was chewing a mouthful of gravel with sharp, metal teeth. It didn't sound good.