mike's web log

Editing Worksheet -- Part 1: Answers

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 22:10:13 GMT

Last week I posted the first half of a worksheet that we worked on during the recent copyediting class. Here are my notes for the issues in the sentences.

There's plenty of room for debate here. Because the Chicago Manual of Style was one of the class texts, many of the edits are based on that book. Other style guides have different theories about how to manage some of these issues.

Of course, some edits aren't controversial; you do have to spell words and names correctly, for example. Anyway, see what you think. If you have questions about any of the sentences, feel free to leave a comment.

This is the key for the abbreviations used to flag errors:

n.n = as discussed in CMoS reference (might not have definitive answer)
au = consult author to clarify meaning or agree on style
dict = consult dictionary; in general, use first variant.
edb = consult The Eggcorn Database
ssg = consult specialized style guide (e.g. Microsoft Manual of Style)
TCH = as discussed in The Copyeditor’s Handbook
um = consult usage manual (e.g. Garner, M-W Dictionary of English Usage)
web = find authoritative information on the web (e.g. company website)

And here are the sentences.

Gray [more]

Editing Worksheet -- Part 1

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 10:47:32 GMT

When I was teaching copyediting recently, I came up with a worksheet that contained 34 (!) sentences that might or might not have had editorial issues. We looked at the worksheet at the beginning of class, then reviewed a bunch of editing guidelines in the Chicago Manual of Style (16th ed.), then reviewed the sentences again at the end of class. Other editorial references we talked about in the class (tho these were not readily available) included dictionaries, the Microsoft Manual of Style, The Copyeditor's Handbook, and Garner's Modern American Usage.

Here is the first half of that set of sentences. See what you can make of them. I'll post my notes (not necessarily answers) for this half in a few days.

Grey whales have found a safe place to breed on Mexico's coast, where programs have been implemented to try to bring the marine mamals back from the brink of extinction.
Commercial radio seemed dead, but college radio gave it a new leash on life.
Madeline Allbright (born May 15, 1937) was the first woman to become the United States Secretry of State.
The list contained an extensive list of do’s and don’t’s for practicing good browsing hygiene.
Reviews have found that the data is flawed in a surprising number of research projects.
312 people showed up in response to an ad for 2 open positions.
You can buy both .pdf and hardcopy versions of the book.
[more]

Copyediting Principles

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 00:13:28 GMT

Over the course of five Saturdays in March, I taught a class in copyediting at Bellevue College. The class is a requirement for students in the Technical Writing certificate program, and an elective for people in other cert programs.

We try to cram a lot into the 15 hours of class, though not at great depth, obviously. Things like what the different levels of editing are—developmental editing, substantive editing, and copyediting. (This class focuses only on the last.) What copyeditors do. What sorts of resources editors draw on. How to interact with authors. How to use revision marks and comments in Microsoft Word. How to create a project style sheet.

The texts are The Copyeditor's Handbook by Amy Einsohn and the Chicago Manual of Style. We spend a lot of time riffling through Chicago in search of guidance for specific situations: Where do commas go? How do you format a book title? Do you use a hyphen with anti- ? Still, the point is not actually to learn a lengthy list of rules for all occasions. Instead, we’re trying to illustrate for the students how and when and why to use a guidebook like Chicago. We had ample opportunity to discuss the limitations of One Rule to Rule Them All, and how the real task is much more pragmatic—help the reader, help the author, help yourself by keeping a style sheet.

For the last class, I put together a list to try to summarize the aspects of the class that weren’t just about finding the right chapter and verse in Chicago or APA or MLA or MMS [more]

Terms of venery, IT style

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:36:47 GMT

Everyone knows about a herd of cows and a clutter of cats and a murder of crows, right? These are called collective nouns or terms of venery. (The latter, more interesting, term refers to hunting, should you be wondering.) Many such terms are listed here, here, and on Melanie Spiller's site.

For fun the other day, we came up with terms of venery for the many species that can be found in the world of IT. Herewith our list. Can you come up with more?

A compilation of programmers
A unit of testers
A click of QA engineers
A spec of program managers
A package of builders
A deployment of SysOps -or- A distribution of SysOps
A bundle of network engineers
A row of DBAs
An interface of UX designers
A lab of usability testers
A snarl of IT admins
A triage of Helpdesk engineers
A pixel of graphic artists -or- A sketch of graphic artists
A meeting of managers
A retreat of general managers
A scribble of writers -or- A sheaf of writers
A revue of editors (haha) -or- A scrabble of editors
A project of interns
An oversight of auditors
A tweet of tech evangelists
A quarrel of patent lawyers

Contributors: me, David Huntsperger, Peter Delaney, Scott Kralik

Together in a small, crowded, moving box

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 23:52:18 GMT

These days I work in a tall office building, which means that I spend a lot of time in elevators going up and down between office and lobby, not to mention up and down for meetings. Sometimes I run to co-workers in the elevator, but often it’s a bunch of strangers.

I don’t know how international it is, but the protocol for Americans—or let’s say Seattleites, anyway—is essentially to ignore strangers, and to stand facing the doors. Phones help ease the awkwardness of this situation (strangers are so near, yet so ... non-existent), because people can look down and fiddle busily with their phones instead of desperately trying not to make eye contact with other passengers.

But our elevators (and, I assume, those in many other buildings) have a feature that changes the dynamic in interesting ways. Above the bank of floor buttons is a 12-inch screen that displays a rotating selection of news bites, weather, traffic, reviews, deals, and so on. (According to the provider, this “reaches smart, busy, upscale professionals on the move and struggling to ‘do it all.’” Sure, whatever.)

People now have something to look at in the elevator besides the closed doors, or their phones, or the back of the person in front of them. This subtly changes the feel of the constantly changing group going up and down together. They’re watching TV together!

The headlines that are displayed will occasionally move someone to make a remark, or at least to grunt in acknowledgment. This can be an ice-breaker for others … it’s a conversation starter!

Sherry ~~Turkel~~Turkle, who teaches "the Social Studies of Science and Technology" at M.I.T., has [more]

Hurray, new & improved technology! What do you tell users?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:02:44 GMT

Imagine that you're a music company in about 1984. For many decades you've been selling vinyl records, and then along comes this newfangled "compact disc" business. It's obvious to your company that this is the future, and your audiophile customers are all excited. But your everyday customers are confused: are you going to stop making records? Are they supposed to replace their enormous record collections with CDs? And what about the whole ecosystem that's grown up around records: record stores, stereo manufacturers, even furniture makers ... what do you tell them?

I've lived through similar scenarios in the software industry multiple times: the company devises a new technology—not just an update to your already successful releases, but a new approach. As with the record company, tho, it's rarely easy to simply pull the plug on your old stuff, since many of your customers are heavily invested in your old technology.

If you're the documentation person under these circumstances, you have a tricky job. If the new technology is sufficiently different, you can create a brand-new documentation set from scratch for the new technology. (The documentation sets for record players and CD players have very little shared information.)

But it's not always that clean a break. Consider a database product where the new technology is an innovative search syntax. Everything else about the database (storage, backup, etc.) is the same; you just have a new way for users to craft their queries. Moreover, the old query syntax still works.

Too often, what ends up happening is that writers add a section to the existing documentation that describes the new technology. This "solves" the problem. Hey, now we have two technologies! We've documented both of them!

But what do your users actually need?

[more]

Rocket Science for Beginners

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 10:31:33 GMT

The title of this entry does not, as far as I know, reflect an actual book title. But based on something I saw today, maybe it could. Here's an article I saw today on the ArsTechnica site:

Keep it secret, keep it safe: A beginner's guide to Web safety

I was initially interested, because although I am more-or-less conversant with the basics of safe browsing—using wifi safely at a coffee shop, for example—there are certainly other people in our household who might value some tips "for beginners" about how to use the web safely.

Then I actually read the article. Here are a couple of examples of advice for those beginners:

Clicking the browser's padlock icon while visiting Facebook, for example, gives us the most relevant information about the certificate and its encryption algorithms: the certificate has been signed by VeriSign and the connection uses TLS 1.1 with 128-bit RC4 encryption.

[...]

If you want to roll your own [VPN] server, you can use free software like OpenVPN (or, for Mac users, the VPN server included in the $20 OS X Server package).

Frankly, I'm not really sure how grateful my wife would be to learn these things.

Obviously, the issue has to do with the term "beginner." It's not actually clear to me who exactly the author had in mind as a beginner, but it's not my wife, or my kids, or a bunch of other people who are perhaps not quite ready to examine the certificate chain for the current session.

[more]

The case of the bouncing emails

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 12:19:57 GMT

Here's a way not to make friends and not to influence people: hand out your personal email address everywhere and then discover that the address is merrily bouncing people. Whoops.

I taught a class over the last couple of Saturdays and told folks they could send their homework to me at mike@mikepope.com. On Wednesday I got an email from a student telling me that the email address I had handed out wasn't working. (The student had managed to find me via a different channel, thank goodness.) I tried sending an email to the address I'd distributed, and sure enough, back it came.

The keeper of my domain (mikepope.com) is GoDaddy. As part of registering my domain and getting them to manage it, I'd gotten "free email forwarding" for the domain. When someone sends email to the mikepope.com domain (e.g., mike@mikepope.com), the message is forwarded to my other, "real" email addresses.

Some months ago, I started getting a steady volume of messages to my real email addresses that told me an email had bounced, often with the message "invalid recipient address." The strange thing was that these were bounces for emails that I had never sent. This turns out to be a well-known problem—spammers forge a From address on their spam mail (they don't want you to reply, they just want you to click the link in the email they send). Spammers use many, many different forged From addresses in their attempts to get around spam-detection strategies. Apparently the mike@mikepope address had fallen into the hands of just such a spammer.

[more]

Outlook! Stop sending messages on Ctrl+Enter!

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:34:24 GMT

If you're like me and you use Outlook and you're a bit of a sloppy typist, you've probably inadvertently sent messages off by fat-fingering Ctrl+Enter. By default, this keystroke performs a Send operation, and boy, can that be annoying.

Turns out there's an easy fix. (To Outlook, not to your typing.) I got this from someone on the web, I think it was. (Alas, I don't remember, so my apologies to whoever that was.) In Outlook, click File > Options. In the Options dialog box, click the Mail tab, then scroll down to Send messages and uncheck (Ha! Take that!) the option CTRL + ENTER sends a message. Here's a picture:

This works for Outlook 2010 for sure, and probably (?) for Outlook 2007. I can't speak for earlier versions.

Office space

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 12:34:30 GMT

I spent over 17 years at Microsoft, and for most of that time, the company went to extraordinary and expensive lengths to try to give every full-time employee his or her own private office space.[1] The company kept building new buildings, and every office move — and there were many — involved a substantial effort to sort out seating arrangements so that people could both have their own offices and had some reasonable proximity to their colleagues.

The company's focus on office space presumably was based on an implicit acceptance of the idea that people engaged in concerted intellectual work need to be able to work in peace. In the widely read Peopleware, a book from the mid-1980s about managing software projects, authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister addressed the need for this type of space:

Before drawing the plans for its new Santa Teresa facility, IBM violated all industry standards by carefully studying the work habits of those who would occupy the space. [...] Researchers observed the work processes in action in current workspaces and in mock-ups of proposed workspaces. They watched programmers, engineers, quality control workers, and managers go about their normal activities. From their studies, they concluded that a minimum accommodation for the mix of people slated to occupy the new space would be the following:
100 square feet of dedicated space per worker
30 square feet of work surface per person
Noise protection in the form of enclosed offices or six-foot high partitions (they ended up with about half of all professional personnel in enclosed one- and two-person offices)

[more]

Sleight of hand

Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:55:18 GMT

Two stories, both lifted from articles in the New Yorker, about magicians who are, well, magic. The first is about the sleight-of-hand master Ricky Jay, from a profile in 1993 titled Secrets of the Magus:

Deborah Baron, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, where Jay lives, once invited him to a New Year’s Eve dinner party at her home. About a dozen other people attended. Well past midnight, everyone gathered around a coffee table as Jay, at Baron’s request, did closeup card magic. When he had performed several dazzling illusions and seemed ready to retire, a guest named Mort said, “Come on, Ricky. Why don’t you do something truly amazing?”

Baron recalls that at that moment “the look in Ricky’s eyes was, like, ‘Mort—you have just fucked with the wrong person.’ ”

Jay told Mort to name a card, any card. Mort said, “The three of hearts.” After shuffling, Jay gripped the deck in the palm of his right hand and sprung it, cascading all fifty-two cards so that they travelled the length of the table and pelted an open wine bottle.

“O.K., Mort, what was your card again?”

“The three of hearts.”

“Look inside the bottle.”

Mort discovered, curled inside the neck, the three of hearts. The party broke up immediately.

Then this appeared in the current issue in an article about Apollo Robbins, a different kind of magician, titled A Pickpocket’s Tale:

[more]

The (lack of) dogs in the night

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 09:25:21 GMT

I get so distracted by things I hear in meetings that I sometimes wonder how I manage to get anything work-related out of them at all. (Perhaps my boss wonders that too, hmm.) Anyway, the other day someone said that we should put a work item on a "dogs not barking" list.

I pondered this while the other participants continued their conversation. I was pretty sure this was new to me. I thought of a possible meaning or two, but didn't feel confident that I had it.

Fortunately, the guy who'd uttered the phrase is friendly enough, so I popped into his office and just asked him outright. "Oh," he said, and kind of laughed. "It's a phrase I picked up around here from management."

He went on to explain that "dogs not barking" refers to looking out for what's not obvious. It's kind of the opposite of the squeaky wheel, was his (anti-?) analogy — in this context, a squeaky wheel is the customer who's complaining loudly about something they need. But what's out there that customers need but we're not hearing about?

His theory was that it derived from a situation where you'd expect dogs to be barking — at a burglar, say — but they're not. There are times, goes the theory, that you should be hearing dogs bark but you're not, and that means trouble.

Anyone else know this phrase?

The 10-ton truck on the 2-ton bridge

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 11:57:12 GMT

We got a customer comment the other day observing that we had a contradiction in our documentation. In one topic, we note that the maximum size of a particular document type is 128K. In another topic, we note that the maximum is between 2K and 10K (dependent on some technical details).

We investigated. The results were a little surprising: seemingly paradoxically, both topics were technically correct. The 128K limit pertains to a transport limit — it's the largest document that will be accepted for upload. The 2K-10K limit is a business rule that is invoked later when the document is being saved.

It's like a 10-ton truck trundling down a road. Maybe the weight limit on the road is 50 tons. However, if the road crosses a bridge with a weight limit of two tons, that's the effective limit for the whole road.

We contemplated various ways to fix this problem. A complicating factor was that the text about the 128K limit was generated into the documentation automatically. (By a JavaDocs-like process, if you're curious.) The particular conundrum was how to explain, yet dismiss, the 128K limit in a way that made sense to the customer, since for the most part there is no practical circumstance under which the clearly documented 128K limit actually made sense.[1]

[more]

Alpha to Z: User-oriented name order

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 22:47:48 GMT

At work the other day I was working a list of our products and I found I kept hunting around in the list for a specific one. Here's how the list was arranged (I left a few out for brevity):

Amazon CloudFront
Amazon CloudWatch
Amazon DynamoDB
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
Amazon Elastic MapReduce
Amazon Glacier
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS)
Amazon Route 53
Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)
Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)
Amazon Web Services Account Billing Information
Auto Scaling
AWS CloudFormation
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM)
AWS Storage Gateway
AWS Support
Elastic Load Balancing

It's a bit more obvious here than it was in the document I was updating, but you can see that the products are arranged in strict alphabetic order. (You might wonder, as I did, why sometimes it's "Amazon" this and other times it's "AWS" that, but what you see here are the official product names, and there's no messing with that.)

Still, and in spite of this perfectly logical order, "Elastic Load Balancing" at the end felt like it had been tacked on as an afterthought. Likewise "Auto Scaling" felt out of place, and seeing Amazon CloudWatch separated from AWS CloudFormation was odd.

Putting things in alphabetical order has a number of recognized challenges. You need to decide whether you're going to sort case sensitively; how to accommodate spaces and punctuation; how to handle acronyms and initialisms; and so on. (You can explore some of these under Special Cases [more]

This week's editorial fun

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 11:06:07 GMT

A collection of editorial curiosities I've seen lately around town. (Sorry for the photo quality; I cannot master my phone camera.)

No comment.

Update 13 Nov 2012:: I just noticed also that they misspelled "indulge," heh.

Parking garage. This was a term I hadn't previously seen, although it's an obvious enough one.

Editors sometimes argue about just how flexible the word only is. It's not this flexible.

This sort of thing is of course not hard to find ...

This made me laugh. First, I'm not quite clear on why there's a separate entry for Saturday. And then there's the edit ...

Try and understand this

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 10:42:53 GMT

The legitimacy of try and in the sense of try to has been debated for a long time, but it's an established usage in informal English:

I'm going to try and be there at five o'clock.
Please try and understand my point of view.

(For a good summary, including OED cites, N-gram stats, corpus search results, and a blessing from Fowler, see the blog The Writing Resource.)

Objections to try and sometimes seem a little forced; for example, Grammar Girl posits an argument from logic: "If you use and, you are separating trying and calling. You're describing two things: trying and calling." She goes on to say that try-and versus try-to may be more of a pet peeve with her.

And yet. I ran across an interesting example today of try and where I had to read the sentence a number of times before I got it:

If you try and lose then it isn't your fault. But if you don't try and we lose, then it's all your fault.

This is from Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game.

The intent, as I eventually deduced, was "If you try and [you] lose ...". For my first several attempts to read the sentence, I kept parsing it as "If you try to lose ...", which didn't completely make sense. But first readings are stubborn. In other words, the intent is per Grammar Girl's logical parsing (two actions), but I was not reading it that way.

I think some punctuation here might have helped — a comma after try. Or an extra you inserted after try and.

Speaking of [more]

A specious take on fuel efficiency

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 08:33:56 GMT
I’ve put a little over 18,000 miles on my motorcycle. The fact that it gets a whopping 53 mpg gives me an entirely unjustified sense of virtue as I pass other vehicles. Still, now and again I’ll consider the nominal fuel savings that I’ve achieved by riding the bike instead of driving my car. And how much might that be?

To keep things simple, I’ll round numbers grossly. I’ll assume 18,000 miles, 50 mpg for the motorcycle, and 25 for my car (which I actually know, because the car’s computer tracks this). So:

18,000 miles at 50 mpg = 360 gallons

Since the bike gets essentially twice the mileage of the car, it’s all very easy. If I'd used the car for the same miles, I would have used 720 gallons. At (assumed) $4/gallon, I’ve "saved" $1440 by riding my motorcvcle (360 x $4 = $1440).

Of course, this is all laughable. Many of the miles I’ve put on the motorcycle are miles I would never have put on the car—i.e., miles driven just for fun. Not to mention that this supposed savings in fuel expenditures doesn't come anywhere near what it cost to buy the bike in the first place, and what it costs to insure and maintain it.

Even so, every time I pass a Prius, I think "neener-neener, I get better mileage than you." And maybe by the time I’ve put 600,000 miles on the bike, it will actually represent a real savings.

Guard cat on duty

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 06:39:27 GMT
I'm working in a new job, and I was surprised not long ago to get an email from one of our senior developers that read something like this:[1]

To: [whole group] From: [senior developer] Subject: I love kittens because they're fluffy

This would be one of yer more wtf new-job moments. A few minutes later we got this:

To: [whole group] From: [senior developer] Subject: re: I love kittens because they're fluffy I stepped out of my office for 30 seconds and I was in the office next door!

There was a reasonable explanation for all this, as it turned out, which involved security. Every company has security policies for computer use, of course, and larger companies might have dedicated IT folks who enforce such policies. One way they might enforce policies is to perform security audits of people's workspaces. For example, has someone written their password on a yellow note and stuck it on their monitor? Fail.

Another policy that the security folks might audit is the practice of locking your workstation when you step away from your desk. Obviously, if you walk away from an unlocked machine, anyone can jump on your computer and start hunting around for sensitive information.

Even a vigilant security audit team, however, can't watch everyone every minute. But I happen to work with a bunch of security-minded developers, so a protocol emerged that if they could catch you with your workstation unlocked, you were fair game to have a fluffy-kitten email sent from your computer. Our senior developer guy, in spite of his protestations, had been caught sneakily when he stepped out for the quickest of conversations.

[more]

Headline fun

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 23:43:18 GMT

Friend Dennis spotted the following headline on the website of one of our local TV stations:

I can't really improve on Dennis's comment: "I guess it's better than shooting him with bullets."

It's a great example of the ambiguity that can arise in the term with, which can function either to mark a relative-type clause or to mean "by means of":
Officers who shot man [who has] dementia
Officers who shot man [by using] dementia (haha)
Back in my editing days (ha), we policed the use of with carefully. This would be an example of why we did that.

PS "SPD" is Seattle Police Department, in case that's not clear.

PPS The headline is cooked right into the article's URL, too.

Key remappings in Word

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 16:55:45 GMT
This is a blog post just to record the key remappings I do in Microsoft Word 2010. (It is probably not of interest to most people.)

I've found that it speeds up revisions tremendously to map keyboard shortcuts to the commands in Word that you use to find, accept, and reject revisions and comments. As a bonus, I don't like that the traditional Find key in Word 2010 is mapped to some sort of Navigation pane (where traditional Find is available under Advanced Find). So I map Ctrl+F as well. As I say, this is primarily for my own reference.

Task Command Key mapping
Display Find/Replace dialog box EditFind Ctrl+F
Find next revision or comment NextChangeOrComment Ctrl+Shift+F
Accept current change AcceptChangesSelected Ctrl+Shift+A
Reject current change RejectChangesSelected Ctrl+Shift+R

Spellcheck typo

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 13:06:54 GMT
Someone at work spotted this great example of a typo that was almost certainly introduced by spell checking (aka a Cupertino):

The original is on the techradar.com site, tho they might fix it eventually. However, for the time being, it's even embedded in the URL:

http://www.techradar.com/news/mobile-computing/tablets/amazon-announces-kindle-paperweight-1095267

Two editorial curiosities

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 11:53:24 GMT
I'm on hiatus at the moment (more on that next week), but I did want to break radio silence briefly to note a couple of editorial things that I've run across recently.

The first is a variation on the common confusion between rein and reign. For example, people often write reign in when they mean rein in.[1] However, I've never personally seen that confusion extend to a context where it's this clear that we mean the straps you use on horses. This is from a Netflix capsule summary:

Maybe I just haven't been paying attention.

And a second one is just a somewhat curious use of the expression "+/-". This is familiar to me to suggest numerical tolerances. So I don't quite get the motivation for using it in this sentence from a running website:
Avoid running during the hottest part of the day. Listen to your body and stop exercising, find a shaded, cool area, and rehydrate (+/- seek medical attention) if you experience lightheadedness.
If I were writing this out, I'd write something like "and if necessary ...", but I've never seen +/- used to mean that. Do they mean and/or? If so, is +/- shorthand for that?

[1] Tho I think that this particular confusion is understandable, since to my mind reign in could be something that constitutions do to chief executives.

Punctuating a, long and wordy, qualifier

Mon, 02 Jul 2012 10:20:14 GMT
I found this in a comment on a blog post:
The, not really qualified for the position of teacher, instructor never bothered to use Notepad++.
I like this, because the author has the right instinct: there's a complex modifier for the word instructor, and he understands that it needs to be typographically indicated to make it parsable. The usual way is to hyphenate the whole dang thing:
The not-really-qualified-for-the-position-of-teacher instructor never bothered to use Notepad++.
Or a more boring way is to recast, e.g.:
The instructor, who was not really qualified for the position, never bothered to use Notepad++.
But that takes a certain oomph out of the sentence. It's possible that "Scott" considered hyphenating but was not comfortable; creating a chunk of hyphenated text like that takes a certain determination, and a faith that the reader will plow through it. Obviously, yer various style guides are not going to be down with using commas as the alternative. Still, like, I say, I do like this. It shows a writing mind at work.

If I signup, they'll sendout their newsletter

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 12:22:30 GMT
From an email. My linguistic sensibilities tell me that this is an irreversible trend. My editorial sensibilities nonetheless chafe a bit:

See also: To set up is not to setup.

Really the surprise here is the source: the venerable, editorially conservative New Yorker.

Blogaversary

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 09:26:24 GMT
Just a quick note: this blog is 9 years old today. I started it in 2003 as a kind of example project for a book I was working on.

A few stats:

Entries: 2,268
Words: 701,668 (not counting code)
Comments: 2418
Hits: 1,426,013

Something that's kind of amusing (well, to me) is a page that shows the times of day when I've posted, by hour. It seems, for example, that my most productive blogging time (posting time, anyway) is between 11:00 pm and midnight.

I've been thinking about rewriting the blog pretty much since I started it, what with new and better ASP.NET technologies coming out all the time. Perhaps year 10 will finally see that happen!

Task	Command	Key mapping
Display Find/Replace dialog box	`EditFind`	Ctrl+F
Find next revision or comment	`NextChangeOrComment`	Ctrl+Shift+F
Accept current change	`AcceptChangesSelected`	Ctrl+Shift+A
Reject current change	`RejectChangesSelected`	Ctrl+Shift+R