The GoYin Store: Buy GoYin Wholesale

Sometimes you’ve got to admit that Bush has a pair of big brass ones.

If you haven’t already, check out an excerpt from the 2006 White House correspondents dinner here.

Mark Davies is a professor at BYU that has created an online resource to help non-native English speakers use the correct synonym in daily usage. An example of a problem that non-native English speakers confront that Davies helps with is the usage of the words “evil,” “bad,” “foul” and “wicked.” These words mean essentially the same thing but are not always interchangeable. For instance, a non-native speaker might intend to say that the weather is ‘foul’ but use the word ‘evil’ because they think the words are perfect interchangeable synonyms.

I think Davies is a great contributor to society. Instead of mitching and boaning about how immigrants ought to learn to speak English, he is being an active solution. But that’s not what I want to address.

Todd Hollingshead is a writer at the Salt Lake Tribune, and he wrote an article about Davies’s new online resource. The great thing about the article is his clever use of meta-humor. When talking about the synonym selector tool he opens the article with:

Professor Mark Davies is hooked on words. Addicted.

Well, not really addicted. It’s more like fixated.

No, that’s not quite right either.

“It’s an obsession,” Davies confesses. “I can’t escape from words. It’s like a kid in a candy store.”
Yes, Davies is a word nut. A lingo jingoist. A phraseo-phile. But at least this Brigham Young University linguist is putting his diction affliction to good use.

See the entire article here.

It is refreshing to see clever, well-thunk writing in places where you least expect it, like in a newspaper.

I’ve seen a lot of products come and go at work, but I don’t think I’ve seen one yet with such mass appeal as the VRFM9.

The VRFM9 is a sleek little FM modulator that plugs into your 12 volt power provider in your car (aka cigarette lighter). It has 1/8 inch audio inputs for your iPod or any other audio output device like a DVD player, laptop, etc. The thing that sets this modulator apart from the rest is that it has both an SD card slot and a USB port. You can plug in any memory drive (USB flash drive, SD cards, etc.) and the modulator works as both an MP3 player and an FM transmitter. As long as you have WMAs or MP3s saved on your storage device, the transmitter will play those files over an FM frequency that you select.

We’ve had many an FM transmitter come and go, and they usually just get better and better. The VRFM9, made by VR3 is as good as its gotten so far. Here’s a bit of a consumer test review performed by us at Sewell:

The Thumbdrive DJ was the first FM transmitter that was successful at Sewell, mainly because of its appearance in PCWorld Magazine with a direct link to the product page. The transmitters we sell have come a long way (including the VRFM8 which doesn’t have the SD slot and costs less>.

We performed an in-house quality test of the modulator and it outperformed the other 4 modulators that we carry in sound quality. We have also had nearly zero returns for the product.