Earlier today the newest version of Microsoft’s popular Internet Explorer web browser went into beta testing.

Development of the product has been underway since shortly after the release of IE8.  Contrary to what web developers have come to expect from Microsoft, it looks like IE9 may actually push the envelope, and finally shift enough of the market into CSS 3 and HTML 5.0 to make these standards worth implementing.

If you want to try out some of the new capabilities, Microsoft has set up a site where you can give them a test run.

No, it’s not another revival of the British TV series The Prisoner.

According to a recent Nielsen report, Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, has just overtaken Yahoo! and now controls the second largest piece of the US search market share.

This turn of events was hardly unexpected.  This time last year Bing was the fastest growing search engine in the marketplace.  Shortly before that Yahoo, which used to be the market leader, agreed to merge it’s search functions with the Microsoft newcomer.

August was the first month of integration between the two services, which both maintain separate interfaces to the Microsoft algorithm.

As of …

People regularly confuse I with me,  or confuse me with I. Who among us stops to think, “Am I using this first person pronoun in the subjective case or the objective?”

But there are simple ways to remember how to use first person pronouns correctly.
First Person Technical
In case you’re interested, here are the technical details:

• Use I in the subjective case; as the subject of the sentence. “I ate ossobuco.”
• Use Me in the objective case; as the object of the verb. “That pesky armadillo chased me down the canyon.”
• Use Myself in the reflexive case;  following the noun that refers …
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Noun string are, as you might suppose, a series of nouns. Here’s one:

competitive price options

That’s easy to understand. The nouns competitive and price serve as adjectives to modify options.

Deciphering noun strings gets tougher with each noun you toss into the string.

Alternative regulated competitive price options

Postoperative recuperation program procedure indicator sheet

In a noun string, the writer uses a series of nouns as adjectives to modify the final noun. That’s what makes a noun string tough to read: At each noun the reader hesitates, wondering if he should understand this as a noun or as a …