Linked List: September 5, 2015

Saturday, 5 September 2015

For Meetings 

My thanks to For Meetings for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. For Meetings is, well, an iPad app for use in meetings: recording meeting notes, agenda items, actions, attendees, and more. It’s an unusual name, but after thinking about it, it’s kind of genius in its aptness.1 If you read about For Meetings here in this post on DF today, but then try to remember the name of it a few weeks from now when you find the need for it, you will recall it just by asking yourself “What was that iPad app for meetings?”

Creating and publishing official “meeting minutes” seems like a total pain-in-the-ass, and For Meetings is entirely focused on reducing the friction and drudgery involved. It makes great use of the iPad’s larger screen — it’s the sort of app and use case that the purported upcoming iPad Pro is targeting. This is about using an iPad as a serious business tool. Structure content using bullet points and numbered lists. Visualize attendees, apologies, and absentees. Use tags to organize your meetings.

Find out more (and watch a demo video) at their website, or download it — for free — from the App Store.

  1. They style the app’s name “for Meetings”, with a lowercase leading “f”. DF house style is to title case all proper names, with a handful of exceptions for prefixes like Apple’s iNames. ↩︎

Temple Beats Penn State for First Time in 74 Years 

This is the best thing to happen to college football in Philadelphia in my lifetime:

After 39 games of coming up empty against the state’s predominant football program, the Temple Owls came up with the signature victory they’ve been seeking since returning to “big-time” football in 1970.

Led by quarterback P.J. Walker and a swarming defense that totally befuddled Penn State quarterback Christian Hackenberg, the Owls upset the Nittany Lions, 27-10, in the season opener for both teams before a record crowd of 69,176 at Lincoln Financial Field. It was Temple’s first win against Penn State since 1941.

Great little Safari extension from Canisbos:

This extension circumvents certain techniques used by Google and Facebook to track link clicks.

When you click a link in Google search results, Google uses JavaScript to replace the actual link with an indirect one, which they use for click tracking. Google then redirects the browser to the actual destination after logging the click. DirectLinks disables the JavaScript that replaces real links with indirect ones, so that when you click a search result link, Safari goes straight to the destination.

If you’ve ever tried dragging-and-dropping a URL from Google search results and getting a Google redirection URL instead of the actual URL you wanted (and Google’s JavaScript will show the actual URL in the status field if you hover over the link, so it’s impossible to tell that’s what’s going to happen), this extension is for you. There are obvious privacy benefits as well.

[Update, 16 Nov 2020: Canisbos’s entire website is now defunct, so this link now redirects to The Internet Archive’s cached version. The extension doesn’t work any more, either, of course. So it goes.]

Boston Red Sox Fire Beloved Play-by-Play Announcer, Then Ask Him to Tweet That He Wasn’t Fired 

Joe Rodgers, writing for The Sporting News:

The Red Sox, who have angered fans with their decision to dismiss beloved play-by-play announcer Don Orsillo after this season, reportedly tried to defuse the backlash by asking Orsillo to lie about the reason behind his departure.

According to Boston radio station WEEI, NESN requested Orsillo tweet that the decision to part ways with the network was mutual, when in fact the network dumped him for Dave O’Brien in order to “re-energize” the team’s television’s broadcasts. Orsillo declined.

Orsillo, who has been the network’s play-by-play voice for Red Sox baseball since 2001, has the support of more than 58,000 fans who have signed an online petition to keep him in the broadcast booth.

This is really a bizarre story. I’m a Yankees fan, so I don’t watch many Red Sox telecasts, but I’ve watched a few over the years (via my MLB At Bat subscription) when the Sox were playing important games down the stretch. Orsillo is a great announcer — it’s no surprise that fans are upset.

Here’s a tip to the Red Sox organization: a better way to “re-energize” the team’s telecasts would be to field a team that isn’t in last place.