About

I'm Mike Pope. I live in the Seattle area. I've been a technical writer and editor for over 35 years. I'm interested in software, language, music, movies, books, motorcycles, travel, and ... well, lots of stuff.

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There is an inherent and pervasive bias in pure-text communication which makes statements intended to be good-humoured sound sophomoric, makes statements which were intended to be friendly sound smarmy, makes statements which were intended to be enthusiastic sound brash, makes statements intended to be helpful sound condescending, makes statements which were intended to be precise and accurate sound brusque and pedantic, makes statements which were intended to be positive sound neutral, and makes statements which were intended to be neutral seem downright hostile. [...] Writing is hard.

Eric Lippert



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Blog Statistics

Dates
First entry - 6/27/2003
Most recent entry - 4/29/2025

Totals
Posts - 2660
Comments - 2678
Hits - 2,740,267

Averages
Entries/day - 0.33
Comments/entry - 1.01
Hits/day - 343

Updated every 30 minutes. Last: 4:25 AM Pacific


  08:46 AM

We (well, I) normally associate being a language jerk with the combination of concepts involving editor, stick, rear end, and up. At least the first part of that complex, however, need not be true.

Someone posted a question on an internal alias the other day in which the subject line said:

regualr expressions

This was, as you might guess, a question about regular expressions. Several generations into the thread, the subject line started appearing this way:

Re: regualr [sic] expressions

Do you see what happened here? Someone spotted the typo. They didn't ignore it. They didn't fix it. They pointed it out for everyone to notice.

Why did they do that, you might ask? See subject line for this entry.

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