i lyke too tok on teh web bkuz my bffs r on it

Did you understand that one sentence?  I’m sure you did.  But could you read it as quickly as you could every sentence that has followed it?  Probably not.

A few days ago I had posted a Tweet stating that over a span of six months I had stopped paying attention to anyone that couldn’t spell without a decent amount of accuracy or use proper grammar when constructing their sentences.  The Tweet was made the very same day I had posted an article stating that I would not be actively participating on Facebook because I wasn’t cool enough.  Naturally the statement was a cover for something else entirely but, despite my frustration at the matter, I had decided it would be better to keep my mouth shut and leave the subject alone.

Unfortunately, within hours of both the Tweet and the Facebook resignation, my inbox was awash with hastily constructed messages containing an abhorrent number of spelling, grammar, and syntactical errors so blatantly obvious to the eye that even the young Helen Keller would be left dumbfounded if she were to somehow read them.  This was the very reason that I’d decided to leave the social site behind.  Messages with spelling of questionable quality and grammar styles that would give a 6 year-old pause started appearing, and I’d spend way too much time trying to decipher what was actually being said.

Being someone who works with a lot of people who are learning the English language, you’d think this wouldn’t be a problem, right?  While I’m willing to give students of English a lot of rope to play with, native speakers of a language should be held to a higher standard.

Spleling Isnt Impotent Long As U Undarstend Me

A common argument for the lax spelling and grammar on the web is that such rigid linguistic structures are completely unnecessary so long as the other party understands the main message.  So long as the topic of discussion is something as generic as choosing a restaurant or deciding what movie to rent, I might agree.  However, in order to effectively communicate ideas across any medium that is rooted in written language, people need to know how to spell, how to construct a sentence properly, and how to change their language depending on the target audience.

“Curly Joe, at the behest of Bubble-Gum Tate, laughed derisively at the aged professor for accepting the challenge.”

“Curly Joe laughed at Professor Farnsworth.”

“That basketball playa laffed at farnsworth.”

The three sentences say essentially the same thing, but which would you rather see in an email or blog post?  My guess would be the first or second because the third, while understandable, does not give the reader a positive opinion of the writer’s intelligence level.

Putting Our Best Foot Forward

I’ll be the first to admit that my language skills are not perfect. There are hundreds of posts on this very blog that will prove the point.  However, while the clarity of the message is sometimes ambiguous, the spelling and grammar is checked and double-checked to ensure people don’t waste their time trying to translate a rough code consisting of phonetically spelled grunts that is supposed to pass as language.

It seems that ever since AOL joined the internet the effectiveness of digital communication has been decreasing.  This isn’t to say that everyone must use the strict rules of their target language, however, by keeping the very basics in line we can ensure our message is better understood.  On top of this, we can also ensure that young people are encouraged to use proper spelling, which will only help them in the future as they enter the workforce and contribute to the betterment of society … we hope.

That said, over the last few years I’ve started to avoid areas online where people’s language skills leave much to be desired.  Unfortunately, this often means that it’s impossible to enjoy any of the more popular websites, but it does make for a more satisfying internet experience.  I call it “The 1% Advantage” because, while 99% of the web is ignored, the remaining 1% offers the best bang for the buck … so to speak.

What’s your take on this?  Is spelling and grammar important online?  Do the classic rules of English restrict people from free expression?  Am I just an ass for ignoring people who can’t communicate effectively in their native language?  I’d love to know your thoughts on the matter.

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One of the reasons I had joined the site after years of abstaining was because it’s been damn near impossible to communicate with my sisters via email.  Whether it’s because they don’t check email anymore, or if it’s because of something more sinister (like my email is being redirected to the Junk folder), I really don’t know.  On top of this, it seems that I’ve been pretty lax on communicating with the extended family.  Facebook provided a single location where I could communicate with them. Horray!

But, wait a minute … I’m number one in Google when you type my name and the country I live in.  I’m in the top 5 when you type my name and the country I used to live in.  I’m number one when you type my name with the province most of my family live in.  Heck, I’m even number freakin’ one when you type my name with the cities I’ve lived in!  I’m not that hard to find, and most of the family hasn’t tried to contact me … so why am I trying to contact them?

Which brings me to the crux of the matter: too much communication.  Most of the family has been quite content with hearing from me once or twice in a blue moon.  There’s really no need to know when my sister goes to a coffee shop, nor do they need to know when I’m enjoying one of the absolutely godly Mount Rainier cafe lattes.  For anyone that really wants to strike up a conversation with me, 5 seconds on Google will direct people to this site.  From there they can leave a comment, see my Tweets (and follow me), or visit the stagnant image gallery to look at some photos.  As a result, Facebook is just a redundancy that takes up more of the limited free time and internet access that I have available.

Of course, there are other aspects of Facebook that I could do without.  Namely all the stupid application and games spam.  I don’t want to join Mafia Wars, or some farm, or anything else for that matter.  There just isn’t enough time in the day for me to waste. The spelling is atrocious, as well. Sure, it’s just a little thing, but when someone sends me a message that has 80% of the words misspelled and a disturbing lack of grammar, I get angry.  Just how much money has the education system in Ontario pissed away on unnecessary “special projects” to not even give a rats ass about their students being unable to spell?  It’s unbearable!

Finally, there’s the cool factor.  I’m a guy that likes working with non-Apple things, drinking a semi-unknown brand of coffee, wearing reasonably-priced clothes, and using unpopular programming languages to solve business problems.  None of these things are cool.  Facebook, however, is … apparently.  Therefore, I shouldn’t be there.

For the moment, the account on the social website will remain active, but aside from the RSS updates from this site, it probably won’t see much use in the near future.

What’s your take on Facebook?

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What the hell kind of comment is this?  First off, the English doesn’t warrant me even considering hitting “Accept”, and secondly, a fucking child porn gallery?  Written on a post that talks about attacking such a thing, no less!

Kudos to Akismet, too, for not even blocking something like this and marking it as spam before it even reached the server.

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Yesterday’s trek involved taking the JR from 鵜沼駅 (Unuma) to 大垣駅 (Ogaki), and then changing over to a very local line that would bring us all the way to 養老駅 (Yoro).

The best part about going places on Monday, aside from the lack of crowds, has got to be the relaxed pace that we’re afforded.  Reiko and I casually made our way from the station to the mountain, up, and back again.  A 9 km long trek similar to the walk one might do on the way to some of the temples in Kyoto.  The scenery was quite nice, and the trees were still green.  If you’re planning to go for the red autumn leaves, it will probably be better to wait until mid-to-late November when the cooler weather has been around longer.

The falls themselves were beautiful.  White water falling undisturbed, and making its way down the mountain in some mosquito-free parkland.  We couldn’t have asked for a better trip.

That said, if you do go, bring an extra jacket and maybe a collapsible umbrella.  The weather was supposed to be sunny with cloud all day, but we ran into spurts of heavy rain and strong winds.  By the time we were on our way back to the station the temperature had dropped from a comfortable 20 degrees to a cool 5.

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Over the last week or so, a directory has been created every second day consisting of a randomly generated name and containing two files.  The files both have a .vdm extension, and there doesn’t seem to be any fix to this.  While it wouldn’t bother 99% of all PC users, the 1% of us that insist on having things a very certain way on our hard drive now have something to complain about.  In my case, I have two directories taking up about 4 MB each on my drive, with a third due to arrive tomorrow at 9 AM.

Not cool.

According to a few posts on the MSDN forums, this affects almost all users of Security Essentials regardless of OS.  Naturally, there’s no word of a fix for this annoyance quite yet, but an MVP Moderator by the name of Rob Koch states:

“these are simply temporary files of a few MB in size and I will simply delete them from my PC as I feel the urge, since at this rate it would take about a year to use 1GB of space on my relatively small 60GB hard drive”

I would agree with the man if it didn’t mean that I’d also have about 200 crap directories in the root folder of my hard drive.

Some people have reported that they had to give Security Essentials full rights in order to have these directories disappear automatically, but this shouldn’t be necessary on a computer running XP, where almost every application is essentially (by default) running in administrator mode.

Hopefully this is something that will be properly resolved in the next update of Security Essentials, as I’d hate to make the deletion of crap folders a daily thing.  Sure, it would be incredibly easy to write a quick little function that would automatically clean up these folders every day, but we shouldn’t have to do that.

Oh well, at least Microsoft’s software isn’t quite as resource intensive as the solutions offered by McAffe and Symmantec … yet.

Do you use Security Essentials? Have you seen these folders pop up?

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Early last week I had received a request from someone in the UAE who had been referred to me from a friend I had met while living in Vancouver.  The email started out innocently enough, asking for a clone of Trillian right down to all 400+ features it comes with but with the option to change the language to whatever they chose.  In addition to this, a web version was also required so that people who were connecting from behind a firewall would still be able to use the application.  On top of this, the application would have to use a minimum amount of system resources, being able to run on a Pentium75 with 32MB RAM if needs be.  It’d be one heck of a project, but a fun one that could be worth thousands of dollars.

The Catch

I learned long ago that when something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  So when I got down near the bottom of the email I spotted something in the terms and conditions that gave me reason to pause:

• After completion program will be testing by our expert programmer of all things (code and speed – Security – errors and problems) And must be fix and modify everything before we release of payment.
• when completion of the program and examination within 30 days , and is free of any problems will be paid for the programmer.
• if no problems found, programmer may receive bonus (10% – 25%)

So, if I were to accept such a job, I would need to do several hundred hours of programming work for a company thousands of kilometers away, send them the work, including the source code and, if they accept it, they’ll pay me within 30 days of receipt?  I don’t work that way, sorry.

But in addition to this was something buried a little farther down in the terms and conditions:

1. The website , scripts and programs ( all projects ) should be intended and design to have get visitores inquery easy and( excellent speed ) and professional as the site of digg.com and trillian program, and provide me consultation for procuring webhosting,  maintaing and running the site operations. customize script and guarantee so that it’s able to scale up to million users at the same time without any problems or slow down.
2. we want u to add monitoring server , scripts and programs that send SMS message immediately after the any error or db down or delay of the program or database and sent message to technical support.
3. all the rights of the program + source is owned by us and the developer may not be offered for sale or free.  I mean Custom scripts,programs with all features just for me and can not be offer at your website.
4. money back guarantee 100% satisfaction
5. Language files to be independent, we will translate the script to Arabic , want it in 2 languages .
6. Direct technical support and immediate 24 \ 7 ( free for first 90 days then with extra charge )
7. 3 months free of cost technical support for this project after the completion of the project in order to fix any bugs which are faced in the production
8. Control panels for the Admin full options include integrated and comprehensive statistics. Control panel for super moderators, moderators, and users
9. guarantee code and securety
10. guarantee code to be fully flexible, expandable, robust and then smooth enough to expand and make further development.  The script must be designed to support to use by millions of users and visitors at the same time…  I mean to be light and fast and could be browsing by millions of visitors without any errores or down or any problem.
    and ensure security 100%.
11. Time: project must be completed well in time. 3% penalty for each day delay.
12. Legally the programmers will not use any open source programs , not use pre developed Code. The company programmed responsible for any legal problem about the program or the source or the rights
13. for web scripts : must use web 2.0 with ( PHP-MYSQL + CSS/XHTML + AJAx – Jquery + light box )
14. Cost including the high quality design .(graphic + html … etc )
15. payment by Escrow company of our choose with release 100% just when completed the project and after the final delivery with the source code.
16. time frame : deadline 8 weeks

Aside from the spelling and grammatical errors, a lot of this is quite normal in a freelance contract, and item number 6 alone means that I could never accept this job.  If I’m in the middle of my real jobs, the cell phone is completely silent.  Dropping everything to take a call just isn’t possible, no matter how urgent it might be to the other party.  However, item 4 is the one that sealed the fact that I could never do this job: money back guarantee 100% satisfaction.

The Impossible Clause

Are they for real? Nobody is ever 100% satisfied with software.  Ever.  Even the geniuses at Apple and Microsoft can’t make applications that absolutely everyone loves.  This little clause alone would mean that payment would forever be “one urgent modification away”, if it would ever be sent at all.

Employers who hire freelancers are free to set their own terms and conditions, as it is their right.  But anyone who is looking to get into freelance programming needs to keep an eye on what it is they’re agreeing to.  The task these people have put forth is no simple feat, and I’d hate to think some sucker might get goaded into this situation only to have thousands of hours of development time stolen away from them for little to no return.

I’ve always worked under the premise that I’ll be paid for my time.  If, after everything is said and done, the customer is still not happy with the end result, then I may offer a partial refund.  However, my time is my time.  This is especially true considering just how much communication I have with customers during the development stage.  If someone isn’t happy with one of my decisions, we can usually catch it before it becomes a problem.

Whenever I have the chance to talk to aspiring or new freelancers, I always stress the importance of being paid for their work.  This doesn’t mean that the customer has to get stuck with whatever the end result is, but at no point should a freelancer be investing resources into something for free … unless they choose to.

Have you ever had people approach you to do some side work only to find out their expectations and conditions were completely unworkable?  How did you handle the situation?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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The can was about as cold as McDonald’s coffee, but it was liquid caffeine nonetheless.  This stuff got me through high school, two post-secondary schools, and almost every day since then until moving to Vancouver in 2002.  Oddly enough, Nagoya University is the only place where we can find drinks that are more commonly found in North America.  Now, if only they sold Cherry Pepsi….

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After spending an hour with the site, though, I can see why so many people are taken with it.  Not only is it insanely easy to spy on your friends’ friends, but it’s super easy to see what people whom we haven’t seen in 20 years are up to.  Never again will I need to attend a class reunion or create some fictional story to make myself seem like a success. Now I can write all kinds of stories in a single location and re-tell the events a life so grand that even God Himself would be forced to double-check for accuracy!

Indeed, this is possible.  I started out by stating the impossible; that I was living in Japan, and married to a human woman named Reiko.  Many said that pigs would fly before I glanced away from a computer screen long enough to spot another person.  Later I uploaded  a single picture taken last year in Osaka of myself wearing a blue shirt with a Rilakkuma print to add authenticity to the line.  Shortly thereafter I started to add co-workers and offline friends to my list.  Finally, to make the whole scheme complete, I wrote on somebody’s wall.  Oh, what fun!

But wait a minute … this seemed awfully familiar.  Ah, yes … it’s exactly the same thing that I’d been doing for the last six years on my blogs.  The only difference that I can see is that instead of using WordPress to share the comings and goings in life, I’m using some site that is known for mining excessive amounts of personal information and has a huge number of marketing companies begging for the opportunity to sink their grubby paws into that data.

Oh well.  I’ll give the site a few weeks to prove its usefulness.  If my Inbox becomes crammed full of spam, the account gets deactivated.  If the site does not allow me to more effectively keep up with family back in Canada, the account gets deactivated.  If I am at all frustrated by something I see in the news about Facebook, the account gets deactivated.  As it stands, keeping up with all of the online accounts, messages, boards, and everything else that I’ve used for 13+ years has become too much of a chore.  This will likely be the last straw before I start ‘trimming the fat’, so to speak.

Do you use Facebook?  Is it better than a blog?  Is it better than Twitter?  Does it solve more problems than it creates?  I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter.

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The first canned coffee that I had after landing in Japan back in 2006 was of Suntory’s BOSS brand.  It wasn’t the best, but it kept the caffeine-withdrawal headaches away for those 12 days in April.  Today’s can was little different.

Aroma Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
Flavour Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars
Aftertaste Rating: 1.65 out of 5 stars
Caffeine Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Overall Rating: 3.1 out of 5 stars

One of the most appealing aspects of this canned coffee is the aroma.  For people who enjoy a nice cup of black coffee every now and again, they’ll enjoy the dark aroma that wafts from the inviting beverage. Unfortunately, neither the flavour or aftertaste were appealing enough to warrant finishing the can. After getting through just half of the coffee, I was reaching for the creme to soften the bitter taste, and a mint in an effort to reduce the lingering aftertaste.

Why Suntory decided to name this particular blend “Silky” is no doubt similar to the reasoning behind doctors telling children that their flu shots won’t hurt, as there’s nothing silky about it.  Perhaps they used silk worms as flavouring to hide the taste of aluminum can, I really don’t know.  That said, if you’re looking for a quick boost of caffeine, Suntory’s BOSS Silky Black will certainly do the trick.

Disclaimer: I paid for this coffee with my own money and have never had any contact with representatives of Suntory before writing this review.

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Over the last few months I’ve had some pretty disturbing conversations with various people about the role of the IT department within a rather large corporation here in Japan.  It seems that at this particular company, 8% of the entire workforce is employed in the IT department, but nobody has a computer that they can rely on 100% of the time.  Systems are using terribly outdated “security protocols”, and the amount of paperwork required to get the simplest thing accomplished is enough to scare people into doing things the hard way, rather than a better way.

Most businesses have to react quickly to changing circumstances, make concessions, an otherwise take risks to ensure that everyone has a job to come back to the next day.  Managers have to make decisions impulsively.  The IT department in question, however, had quickly developed an arcane cocoon of policies, reviews and procedures that were guaranteed to slow any application development to a crawl, and ensure that any update of external applications was rendered next to impossible.  As a result, the programming staff quit or were absorbed into the general “IT” section to perform help-desk tasks rather than use the skills they had worked hard to learn.

The IT department at the company couldn’t keep up with changes in the business, and occasionally denied the need for change.  As a result, the business processes started to suffer and sales were lost.

Hiding Innovation

I’ve seen some companies go to great lengths to conceal the development of key tools from their IT departments just to ensure things get done and life goes on.  Usually this is done thanks to the ubiquitous use of Microsoft Office.  Not only an office productivity tool, people will use applications like Excel and Access databases to create applications that rival the scale of full-sized corporate SQL Server databases.  Once these systems become indespensible, the IT departments will be encouraged to take the massive files and “do it right” to legitimize things or massage them for any of the various ISO and SOX policies the company might be under.

It’s downright scary sometimes.

Today’s corporate IT has lost the art of the quick and dirty development process.  The “duct-tape programming”, if you will.  Despite all of the Agile initiatives that have been tried over the years, entire new cultures of innovation-stifling rules have been seen to evolve to keep businesses from moving faster than the changes in technology.

Let’s Get Naked!

Unfortunately, I’ve been working on several applications for my current employer under a similar situation.  The IT department here has left the company stuck in the late 1990’s, with poor security policies and insanely frustrating hoops for people to jump through just to get something as simple as access to their own email on the corporate intranet.  When IT is questioned on why everything has to be more painful than a visit to a 19th century dentist, they reply by saying that development of new systems would take years to implement and would require so much input before the first line of code was written that departments would grow tired and give up.  Under the current situation, I tend to agree.  But there is another way: Go Bare-bones.

By getting a bare-bones application running quickly, programmers could demonstrate it and get feedback from users.  From there, it would be a simple enough matter to modify and expand the system’s capabilities.  This would be undoubtedly much more workable than planning every little detail in advance, and would get more buy-in from affected departments.  The problem that some IT departments have is that they think of development and change in terms of years.  In order to have an agile system that employees feel empowered by, developers need to be allowed to think in terms of weeks.

This rant isn’t really about Agile methods themselves, as that’s not enough to ensure the success of a business or particular department.  Heck, even the technology itself needs to change.  But, most of all, companies must once more permit themselves to create applications that are simple, temporary solutions using an architecture that encourages software changes.

Otherwise, the company may be doomed to suffer.

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