Over the years I have made it a tradition at this time of year to look back on the most important news events in the world of Information Technology.  This year I am having a bit of difficulty deciding what is really worth reviewing.  Microsoft released Windows 10 (yawn), Apple introduced a smaller iPad (ho hum), and there was more of the same news about government snooping and the erosion of personal privacy.  As I looked back on the tech-related news of 2015 I found myself looking even further back and discovered something much more interesting.

The other day I received an email from a client who said she was having trouble sending emails with attachments. 

Someone recently referred me to an article appearing in the New York Times titled “If Your Wi-Fi is Terrible Check Your Router.” 

It is rare for more than a few days to go by without my receiving a call from a friend, client, or a reader asking about some strange email they have received.  Almost every time someone asks me what they should do, my answer is to inquire “Does your computer not have a [Delete] key?”

As I write this I have just finished a telephone support call made all the more difficult by a failure to communicate.  I really want to blame this problem on an Englishman by the name of Peter Mark Roget, but in truth he did not create the problem in 1805; he just documented it and quantified it.  The real problem is that the English language has so many synonyms and there is no consistency or agreement amongst technical people as to how they should be used.

A site found on the World Wide Web is fixr.com on which anyone may search for building and remodeling prices.  The next time you need to know how much it might cost to wallpaper a room in Boston, this web site is a good place to start.  The programmers who created this web site obviously had to collect a lot of statistics to populate their database with information about what things cost and where; so in the process of doing this seem to have data-mined Google’s search history producing some results that are at once interesting, revealing, and even entertaining.