Roundup - mike's web log/comments

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February 06, 2009 | Roundup | 9463 hit(s)

Kinda went to town on the pix and quotes today, oh well.

Pizza-Pro 3000^tm. No comment.

[v Friend Dennis]

And speaking of tools ...

The Ultimate Dogfooding Story. In the world of software, "dogfooding" refers to testing software by using it yourself. ("Eat your own dogfood.") Jeff links to a post by Erik that references a thingy named Sawstop, which is a safety device for table saws. Here's Erik:

Slide a piece of wood into the spinning blade, and it cuts the board just like it should. Slide a hot dog into the spinning blade, and it stops instantly, leaving the frankfurter with nothing more than a nick.

The interesting part of the story (read Erik's piece) is how this guy tested the device.

Fastidious spelling snobs pushed over the edge. People who get wigged out by spelling errors might be suffering additional stress, given current economic ills.[1] [via Fritinancy]

Lexicon. Facebook has a neat little app that "counts occurrences of words and phrases on Walls over time." (Must have a Facebook account to use, of course.) Here are a few of examples that I found interesting (click to see larger images):

Search term: "Obama" (note spike, which is in November):

Search term: "Mike" (note extremely even distribution -- hey, it's a popular name!)

Search term: "Mariners" (note that the range is essentially baseball season. The uber-observant might note that the graph falls off before the World Series, haha.)

[via Daugher Sabrina]

[1] I notice -- and even mock -- spelling and punctuation errors, but I can assure you that I don't refer to people who commit these mistakes as "infidels" who commit "acts of terror," sheesh. Relax, people.

Brian MacDonald 08 Feb 09 - 6:51 AM

Infidels? Acts of terror? I sincerely hope those people aren't editors, or "going editorial" is going to join "going postal" in the lexicon of insanity.

In fact, I would be willing to bet that the people who fly off the handle about grammatical errors aren't professional writers or editors, on the whole. Editors see too much of this stuff to get worked up about it, and we also know that everybody screws up sometimes. (Case in point: I recently found a very old blog post where I'd substituted "your" for "you're," an error that I would have sworn, with my hand on the Chicago 15th ed, that I never make.) Perhaps I'll have to take a survey on my own blog.

mike 08 Feb 09 - 11:55 AM

I actually see a certain, mmm, let's say tendency toward this in the larger editorial here community at work; people have said things along the lines of "the word blog is grotesque." A person I worked with once said that anyone who couldn't use an apostrophe correctly was a "moron." This was in reference to emails at a company that does not, as a rule, hire morons. (http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=654)

Two issues I, um, take issue with are the extremeness of the judgments; surely many of these people would chafe at encounterintg this level of judgement about their dress, or personal life, or politics. And, of course, there's the implication that these types of errors matter, that someone's use of an apostrophe to mark the plural is the end of civilization. Don't these people have more important things to worry about? :-)