If you want to bone up on your geek score, here’s a little history lesson. Study it well so you can drop a little net knowledge in your next conversation and sound like you actually have some geek cred.

(Incidentally, I got my first internet ready PC in 1995. So that tells you at what point I entered the game.)

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I just discovered my new favorite YouTube channel: Merriam-Webster Online!

I was raised by an “Enriching Your Word Power” mom. Thus, I’m one of those nerds who might correct you if you said, “octopuses.” But I just found out that I’ve been wrong all these years! The correct plural is not “octopi,” but “octopodes” (using the Greek pronunciation “oct-top’-oh-dees”)!  But you should only use “octopodes” if you’re prepared to explain why, which I now am thanks to this video!

Funny thing is, I still can’t spell worth a rip.

Have you ever struggled to find the right word to express your frustration, pain, fear, anguish, or hate? I’m mean without cussing, of course. Cuz, you know, profanity is the crutch of the inarticulate.

Well, I’m always looking for a good alternative to profanity and today I found a great one!

Opposite of “Yay!”

Example:

Pardon me while I hammer in this nail that is right next to my thumb.
*Thumb crunching sound*
OPPOSITE OF “YAY!!”

Shamelessly pilfered from Chainsawsuit. (Don’t expect to understand Chainsawsuit. It’s weird. Like me.)

If she accomplishes nothing else (unlikely), Sarah Palin has made this valuable contribution to the American lexicon. I, for one, am going to incorporate this new term immediately and often.

Speaking on Sean Hannity’s radio show, Palin said that “Some on the left, that lamestream media, they’re contradicting what I wrote in the book.”

Hannity jumped in to ask, “Did you say lamestream media?”

“Yeah, lamestream,” Palin responded.

I got a healthy chuckle from this bumper sticker on my way to work today.

 I’ll bet Jesus would use his blinker.

We used to get in trouble in school for copying. Now, it’s how most programmers make their living! Can’t figure out how to make that div tag line up? Google-Copy-Paste. Can’t get your objects to serialize? Google-Copy-Paste. Can’t get your database query to work? Google-Copy-Paste.

There’s lots of talk about intellectual property and copyright infringement. But the fact is, in the world of software development, 99% of what you see is copied, massaged, reworked, preexisting code. It even has its own made-up word. It’s called “googlegramming” (i.e. programming via Google). This is a dirty word in development circles as it implies that a “googlegrammer” doesn’t really know how to write code. They just know how to copy and paste. These guys are always using a hammer to drive in a screw, metaphorically speaking. I’ve worked with some and its extremely frustrating.

But, is all googlegramming a bad thing? No. I don’t think so. You can take old code and use it to do something new and innovative. That, to me, is when googlegramming is allowed, nay, encouraged. (Although most would argue that this goes beyond the definition of the new, made-up word.) Using canned code is a great way to speed up development of a new creation. As the chair of the Comp-Sci department once told me, “Plagiarism is the highest form of productivity!”

And if you think this is a new phenomenon, check out this amazing youtube video that proves that Disney knew a thing or two about productivity long before the personal computer existed.

Please oh please someone buy me the “too big to fail” shirt! (2XL please, cuz… you know… I’m too big. *ba-dump-tshh*)

This isn’t a white board quip. It’s not a quip at all, actually, just a turn of phrase that cracked me up today. So I’m posting it under Conversation Enhancements.

…enough icing to make even the most die-hard sugar addict develop a facial tic.

From Cake Wrecks.

I brought home quite a few new conversation enhancements from the Mexico mission trip. I figure I spent about 32 hours over the last week in a van full of teenagers. During this time, I heard many bad jokes, gross stories, and countless repeats of the same less-funny-each-time catch phrases.

From this I came away with a new term which I define below.

collateral audience, n.:
A person or group of people who, despite their best efforts to avoid it, are forced to hear or see something, regardless of whether or not the thing they experienced was intended for their entertainment, consumption, or torture.

Here are some examples to help you know when you are part of a collateral audience.

1) Someone says, “Have you heard the one about…” to which you (and those around you) respond in the affirmative, but one person out of the group says, “no.” Thus you (and all those around you) must endure the story again for the sake of that one person, who, in the end, didn’t think it was funny either. These stories, more often than not, involve farts or Monty Python.

2) An excited youth points and exclaims, “Hey! Look at…” and you instinctively turn your head in the direction which the youth points, burning into your mind an image which you normally would have avoided at all costs, before your brain has time to process the rest of the youth’s statement, which turns out to be something like, “…that bloated dog carcass on the side of the road!”

3) You are in a confined space, say in a restaurant or driving a church van, and roughly 18 inches from the back of your head, two people are having a conversation in which you have no interest, but can not avoid hearing. This can also occur when the conversation in question is happening via cell phone and you’re only hearing half of it. Inevitably, this conversation involves female hygiene products and/or the “hotness” of someone you don’t know, and at least 37 incorrect uses of the word “like” per minute.

I rode my bike to work today for the first time this year. It was a little chilly (53-ish) but otherwise a perfect day for it.

When I got to work and logged in to my PC, Tammy sent me an IM. “Did you make it to work ok?”

Now, on the face of it, that’s an honest question from a loving and concerned wife. But you know me. I can’t pass up a chance to be a smart alec.

“Nope. I died. I logged in from Heaven. God set me up with a sweet laptop with the fastest wireless connection imaginable.”

I’m so mean.