The Principled Peter

Today's link is titled "Why Jargon Feeds on Lazy Minds." The writer suggests that every "business writer, guru, or executive" should be forced to read Orwell's essay Politics And The English Language every morning before work.

I would also propose the following phrases be eliminated from the language:

• value your input really means, "want you to do my work."
  
• thinking outside the box When you hear this, it will be from someone who is neither, even if it's meant to be ironic.
• touch base If you forget this is a baseball metaphor, it sounds sexual. If you are aware that it's a baseball term, it's confusing, because what's being demanded doesn't resemble "touching base" so much as "being trapped in another pointless meeting only to make some idiot feel important."
• standardized on really means "all forced to use/do." e.g. "Our company is standardized on MS Office." or "Can we standardize on arriving 30 minutes early in case anyone has issues to discuss?"

I'm sure there is an endless supply of these, as idiotic gasbags seem to be abundant, and prone to gather and trade such gems among their own kind. Thinking that made me depressed, so I'm off to see if there's a new Homestar Runner cartoon.

You will. (or else?)

I watched the videos for the Aurora browser, and then several related videos for the same idea applied to a different problem set. In the end, they're not compelling. All of them use the basic concept that a 3D interface will make shopping easier. This is important because we all want to keep the economy strong to support the troops, but all that not-sitting-in-front-of-TV is too hard. I mean, if we were meant to have that much walking around and stuff, God wouldn't have invented liposuction.

Really, I watched videos demonstrating three different "next generation" browsers, and they all revolved around Amazon or eBay either in 3D or combined with some master database that KNOWS EVERYTHING YOU EVER READ OR THOUGHT.

First off, do west-coast farmers talk smack to each other? I grew up around farmers, and they mostly just asked each other, "How are you doing these days?" with some measure of concern, because they all had a rough enough time of it.

And the mouse-in-the-air thing? She's trading one repetitive stress injury for another. Great wrists, but her shoulder will need replacing.

In the last video, two men are discussing what to get a little girl for her seventh birthday, and they call her mother, who agrees to send a full inventory of the kid's room and a profile. Many commenters noted that it was a little creepy that Mom had a profile and did RFID scans of her bedroom's contents. What I want to know is why the gay uncle couldn't talk to the little girl and ask what she wanted, and wasn't it enough that his twink room-mate catered the event, spending all night making Spongebob characters from arugula, carrots, and melon?

There was another video where a man with a heavy accent wanted to buy a toy for (presumably) the same kid, and wanted it to last more than a week. Again, why not look at the damn thing, and see if it appears sturdy enough for that child's use. If you honestly don't know, get a gift certificate from the toy store and find a humorous card to attach it to.

Then there's voice command. (not in the Aurora videos, I'm going off on a tangent now. Sensitive viewers may wish to leave the web site) Joe Data-Entry is trying to update the catalog description for the "Sun Yellow" line of swimwear on the company web site. "Not 'son,' 'sun'," he says to his computer. He repeats it louder and slower. He sighs, then growls when the sigh is transcribed as some convulsion of letters and subsequently marked as misspelled. Now imagine a cube farm, with 1,500 people, none of whom have had proper training, all trying to convince their desktop that they really and truly know the difference between "crab" and "crap" and that they just have a head-cold, for Christ's sake.

It's bad enough that we have speakerphones but not private offices. There's always some "important" guy who not only has to use the speaker, at top volume (I mean, so that it distorts more than Hendrix's Marshalls at Woodstock) but also mutter aloud, "Let's see if my wife stayed at home today like a good girl..." I always pray that there's no answer, so that I can mutter, "She's probably off fucking some guy who has a three digit I.Q."

Back to user interfaces--I have given up on GUIs. I even gave up on mc. I have some files backed up on DVD-RW, and in one directory, there are several versions of every Amiga program ever made (apart from games, which take another entire DVD). I keep forgetting how painful GUI use can be until I double-click on that folder, and it takes ten frustrating, no, it's twelve now, unless it stops doing anything for five minutes, then it says twenty-three, but changed back to twelve minutes a second later, and finally eighteen minutes to display "thumbnails" of the contents. Why thumbnails? Is "LHA" a suffix used for pictures in Windows? I learned to use the command line for everything. I even switched to using vim and LaTeX for writing.

Thanks for the education, Internet!

Firefox has this wonderful option to open the tabs I had last time when I start it again. Things I think are potentially fascinating but too long for my fatigue level are left there in the stack until I manage to go through all the items in google reader (because we can't have RSS feeds in China) and the list of comics I read every day ("open all in tabs" is another wonderful feature) and check my various and sundry email accounts.

So today, I finally managed to get back to Pablo Defendini's article on faster-than-light travel and related topics. It made for interesting reading, though nothing I hadn't seen before. Then I noticed some of the words were hyperlinked and clicked on "noosphere" (though it's properly spelled with an umlaut). That led to wikipedia, which is outside the great firewall, so I copied the word into the search bar on The Free Dictionary (which includes a wikipedia mirror).

I was searching through the explanation of noosphere, and saw mention of Stewart Brand and, in the references, Serial Experiment: Lain. Now, I've watched Lain some number of times I'm not comfortable disclosing, but I still read the entire article, on the chance that it would give me yet another angle of looking at the story I hadn't noticed before. It did, but that's not the point here. One of the themes mentioned in the article was Dissociative Identity Disorder. I wasn't familiar with that term, as I only studied psychology for a brief time, back when your parents were still in middle school. So, off we went to another page, and I saw mention of "Borderline Personality Disorder" which led me to another page and then several ancillary searches, and now I have a fairly confident diagnosis for an acquaintance I've had entirely too much interaction with.

A character in Alice in Wonderland said "I try to believe ten impossible things before breakfast." Before I finished my morning coffee, I feel as though I had lessons in Postmodernism, Literary Theory, and Psychology. If I could keep up this pace until lunch, I might consider grad school.

as I stood 'neath the marquee moon...hesitating

There are three aisles in the corner of Hy-Mall (now called Tesco after the merger, but in my heart, it will always be pronounced Le Go) and the first is for wine, the second for beer, and the last baijiu. The fact that this bottle came from the third aisle and I haven't died yet are my only indications that I am not drinking aftershave right now.

You got a pretty mouth

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Inland North You may think you speak "Standard English straight out of the dictionary" but when you step away from the Great Lakes you get asked annoying questions like "Are you from Wisconsin?" or "Are you from Chicago?" Chances are you call carbonated drinks "pop."
The Midland
The Northeast
Philadelphia
The South
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

OK, all the technology the world could amass and connect together, and it can tell me I talk like I'm from Rochester. I'm actually impressed. Most folks can't pin down my origin nearly so well.

Another month?

Hmm, youtube just reappeared as mysteriously as it vanished a few days ago. I found a site for extracting clips to files (because there's no web access in the classrooms*) and grabbed a few things for a colleague, then the following day, there were blank spaces in many pages where the video clips ought to be. My question is: was it blocked in the whole country, or did I just do something stupid that prevented flv files from playing? And if the latter, how would changing out the theme for Firefox (the only change to the system) fix things?

Deer me!

So, I was mindlessly cruising around the web, minding my own business, or rather, gawking at everyone else's business, and I run across something called "The Endless Forest". Instead of reading all the words in their prescribed order, I poke at the thing and notice a ruined castle getting mentioned, and Halloween, so I thought, "Here's an online game I might really enjoy right out-of-the-box."

The game is pretending to be a deer. You give them a name, and they twist your name into a symbol that begs a "artist formerly known as..." joke, but I'm not stooping that low today, because my back is acting up. I would play along with that, if you could talk to the other deer, but they don't allow English, because (and I'm vaguely paraphrasing) that would lead to slang and out-of-character behavior. Pardon me, but I wasn't auditioning for amateur dinner theater. I only want to do something interesting while trying to find someone to chat with, and Second Life has been making my video card overheat. Does anyone know how to open up a Sony laptop to remove the dust? I'm certain that's my problem.

Seriously, deer do, in my estimation, four things:

1. eat vegetation.
2. poop.
3. fuck.
4. get shot by rednecks.

That's not much of a game, really, or a least nothing I would play online. Some people (furries) would be really into #3, but normal people have seen enough of that shit on Wild Kingdom to last until Marlin Perkins rises from his grave to be Mutual of Omaha's zombie overlord.