Dinosaur Comic from 5th Jan just made me laugh out loud. What do you mean, it reminds you of someone? Shut up.

Sorry for the lack of blogging. I’ve decided to stay with my parents for the week, as I’m here dog-sitting for a couple of days anyway, and the rest of the week I’d only get lonely in Stratford and come back. I don’t think this is a fun week to be on your own. I’m only checking my emails a few times per day, which is quite a change from normal! I did manage to upload a fair few christmassy photos yesterday, with the help of Picasa. Since Jo’s had so little trouble, I might brave a Wordpress upgrade tomorrow without all of my normal programs.

I went and checked on the flat earlier today, and discovered I’d left a window open. Dumbass. It was out onto the walkway at the back of the building so in theory wasn’t publicly accessible. Still, there are only four windows in the flat, so it was a pretty stupid thing to do! It was very cold in there, too. Still, no harm done. Thankfully everything else was fine. I picked up a couple of plectrums, which work far better than the Pointy Piece of Plastic I ripped from some packaging, as well as a couple of other bits and pieces I’ll need to last until the weekend.

I’m currently a few chapters into Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which was a present. I don’t know whether it’s the content, the writing style, or a mixture of both, but I’m finding it absolutely fascinating. I guess I was also looking for an excuse to ditch Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, which I’d been struggling with. Maybe it gets better, but the endlessly florid dialogue of turn of the century academics drove me to distraction! Maybe I’ll come back to that at some point. Although my to-read pile now contains a couple of Richard Dawkins books, as well as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, so it may be quite a long wait.

I was in Comet this morning, and all over the floor were large arrows, underneath which was:

I-Pod’s ??

I frame no hypothesis.

There’s apparently heavy snowfall expected tonight…Wonder how much we’ll see here.

In tomorrow’s Times Oliver Kamm berates the Plain English Campaign for intellectual snobbery. And he makes a good point. I never did understand why the famous Donald Rumsfeld quote about ‘known unknowns’ was quite so reviled. Sure it was convoluted, but I understood the point. Because of the aren’t-we-superior facade, though, I just assumed I wasn’t understanding something. This year, the winner was:

The only thing which isn’t up for grabs is no change and I think it’s fair to say it’s all to play for, except for no change.

That’s the best they could do?

Couldn’t they concentrate on matters of linguistic import? Language is frequently manipulated for the purpose of deception, and outing these examples would be far more use. Why not expose the no-win-no-fee adverts from companies who give every impression of being legal representatives, when in fact they’re only trying to sell people insurance against losing? Or there must be countless political phrases that seem clear but are in face entirely ambiguous. Or even something as seemingly innocuous as car manufacturers who, banned from promoting speed as a virtue, say “the only thing you’ll be overtaken by is adrenalin.” They could expose the loopholes so that rules can work as intended. Or they can just make fun.

I keep thinking of a line from David Mamet’s State and Main, in which the ditsy Sarah Jessica Parker adopts a furiously indignant expression, and exclaims:

…I have something to say, and I think you know what I mean!

before storming from the room, convinced she’s won the argument. Given the media attention lauded upon the PEC results each year, it’s a shame the whole exercise is little more than pseudo-intellectual sniggering.

Dad found this in the loft yesterday:

It was typed by my grandmother, at some time during the second world war. I guess that ‘txt-speak’ is the result whenever people communicate frequently, quickly and informally. You certainly couldn’t say that it affected her writing in years to come - she used to send immaculate handwritten letters by the dozen! She died in 1997, just a little too early for her to get into email and instant messaging, which I bet she’d have found fantastic. She’d definitely have loved being able to see her Australian grandchildren via webcam.

I used to have a good number of clients who I’d describe as little-old-ladies, without being derogatory in any way, who were really clued up on email and the Internet generally. They were definitely the best type of clients: they were always friendly, always admitted if they’d been playing around with settings or clicked something they thought they shouldn’t have, were always eager to learn new tricks or methods of doing things faster, I was always offered tea and biscuits…I used to like them a lot. Far better than smelly businesses
There used to be a 90 year old lady in Knowle who advertised her services for computer support. I was told of a time that she helped somebody out via mobile phone while passing through the checkout at Tesco. That’s just brilliant. Imagine being the person standing behind her!

Update: Dad tells me that my grandmother was in the RAF and worked at Chicksands Priory as a telegraph operator. He said she was in codebreaking, and according to this site Chicksands was a listening station that supplied Bletchley Park with raw data.

Before I head off to bed, I give you the word ‘vasectomy’ in sign language.

Ugh, that reminds me. I was in hospital overnight a few years ago, and in the bed opposite was a horrendous man. He was explaining to the rest of the ward why his wife was ’such a bitch’ and seemed to be generally the kind of guy you’d cross the street to avoid, or alternatively kick in front of a passing bus. The silver lining was that he was in hospital for a vasectomy, so at least he wouldn’t be inflicting his personality onto any more kids. He explained the process of the procedure in great detail, and I remember it to this day. Ah, memories…

The hardest tongue-twister I’ve tried in quite a while:

I wish to wash my Irish wristwatch

I’ve finally got it, but the final two words caught me out for ages.

A truly excellent word that I’ve been meaning to look up since reading it in The Amulet of Samarkand.

Widdershins (sometimes withershins, or widershins) is a word which (usually) means anticlockwise, however in certain circumstances it can be used to refer to a direction which is against the light, i.e. where you are unable to see your shadow.

From the Logitech website:

This is the latest software release for most tethered cameras and the QuickCam Cordless camera

Tethered! I have an image of webcams trying to escape, Patrick McGoohan like, and Logitech being forced to tether them to the USB port. Hmm, I wonder if the slight current in the USB cable acts as some kind of depressant, supressing the inherent rev0lutionary tendencies…This could be a scandal. There’ll be protesters wittering on about lens rights, looking bedraggled and digging out old webcams from landfills.

Lifehacker just linked to a very interesting article on writing in a conversational style:

Unless the book is a reference book, where precision matters over understanding, and the writing is meant to be referred to not read and learned from, there are almost NO good reasons for a tech book to be written in a formal (i.e. non-conversational) style. Much of the time, it’s an indication that the author is thinking way too much about himself, and how he will be perceived.

I agree The article has a very interesting comparison in which two paragraphs of identical content are written ‘formally’ and ‘conversationally’, and the difference is quite remarkable.

Edit: So apparently this is a common phrase. Yesterday was obviously a bad linguistical day for me

At the risk of embarrassing myself, is “head’s up” a real phrase? I’m sure that people say “just to give you the head’s up about…”, but there’s little sign of it on the Internet and now I’m worried I dreamt it one day and remembered it as fact. I was about to write “just to give you the head’s up that Donnie Darko is on BBC2 this evening” and was trying to figure out the apostrophe usage, which makes no sense in this case. The head owns the up? Can’t be. Are there multiple heads going upwards, then? I don’t understand. I’m locking myself inside a box for the rest of the day.

Donnie Darko’s on this evening. I recommend you watch it; is good.

I wonder whether it’s NASA or the media who like the phrase ‘grounding the fleet’. It’s like when the pope was dying, and everybody was falling over themselves to say ‘last rites’. It sounds all dramatic and isn’t something that comes up very often, so I can understand the enthusiasm. Still, it’s not like NASA have more than one shuttle launched at a time, and they’re not actually bringing the existing shuttle back early. So ‘grounding the fleet’ isn’t really very accurate. But I’m just a pedant, and shall shut up now.

Amanda Congdon of Rocketboom just said ‘tootles’ to end the broadcast. People other than me say that? I picked it up from The Emperor’s New Groove (could have been ‘toodles’, but I prefer mine ). Now I don’t know whether I’m a trend-setter, or just boring…

Incidentally, does anyone know a handy way of remembering the spelling of ‘emperor’? I get it wrong every damn time.

Tootles!

It’s not terribly cheerful, but definitely warrants Word of the Day status. I present to you:

lugubrious: Mournful, dismal, or gloomy, especially to an exaggerated or ludicrous degree.

Found on Memories of Douglas Adams.

Does the word ‘mank’ come from ‘Mancunian’? It doesn’t, does it? While we’re talking about all things northern, what’s with a town being called ‘Liverpool’? A pool of livers? Gross. Does anybody reading actually like liver? Really?

Argh. I need cake.