Word: cranked
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Beneath the bits and bytes that shape the character of Silicon Valley, there's a booming digital subculture committed to the art of self-improvement, geek style. It's known as life hacking, and it's all about sweating out the best ways to crank through e-mail, sabotage spam, boost productivity and in general be happier. British tech guru Danny O'Brien coined the term at a 2004 technology conference after studying how programmers come up with "hacks," or shortcut solutions for routine but time-consuming problems. The trick, he says, is not to worry about the entire problem...
...pitch and a knack for fund raising. With the support of the U.N., his so-called $100 laptop quickly found backing from, among others, Google, Red Hat, Advanced Micro Devices and Nortel. His team is still making prototypes, but a finished motherboard was delivered in April. A wind-up crank has been replaced by a new foot pedal to supply power in areas lacking electricity...
...opinion of human nature was low, and that low opinion applied to his heroes and his villains alike - he was endlessly disappointed in humanity and in himself, and he expressed that disappointment in a mixture of tar-black humor and deep despair. He could easily have become a crank, but he was too smart; he could have become a cynic, but there was something tender in his nature that he could never quite suppress; he could have become a bore, but even at his most despairing he had an endless willingness to entertain his readers: with drawings, jokes, sex, bizarre...
...most ridiculous celebrity stories the Big B v. SRK brouhaha has taken on a life of its own. In a wonderful illustration of globalization's reach, even U.S. satirist Stephen Colbert has helped fuel the dispute by featuring Bachchan and Khan - "the Indian Robert Redford and Brad Pitt only crank up the handsome and rip the knob off" - in his television show's celebrity feuds segment. Khan, Colbert said way back in early January, had failed to turn up to Bachchan's New Year's Eve party. And so the cycle of silliness continues: a comic takeoff of an Indian...
...Over the next few weeks, the publicity people will crank up their machinery around our prizes. The winners will rehearse the speeches they'll give at our awards parties, always saving the best lines in case, just in case, they need them on Oscar Night (Feb. 25). And we critics crawl back in our holes, happy at the anonymity. You see, we don't think it's our job to herald the Academy nominations. We're mainly interested in writing judiciously about the medium we love, and noodging people to challenge themselves, once in a while, at the movies...