Holy cow, I wrote a book!
I dreamed that one of my friends had made the U.S. cycling team. (Perhaps because everybody else got busted for doping.) Even more implausibly, I also made the team.
To celebrate, he challenged me to a short race. The path ran along a river, in which a medium-sized boat was setting sail. Our bicycles somehow could fly (which we considered perfectly normal) and we were flying over the boat, just about keeping pace with it.
The boat reversed direction many times, and we reversed along with it. At one of the reversals, I thought, "I could take a shortcut if I kept going straight," but I must've lost even/odd count because I flew off the boat... heading back to the starting line.
Bonus weirdness: For some reason, we were in Sweden, and the race commentator saw a school labeled Gymnasium and made some remark about repurposing buildings left over from the Olympics.
In Korea, it is generally believed that leaving a fan on in an enclosed room can be fatal. Ken Jennings looks at cultural superstitions and wrote a Slate article focusing on the scourge of Korean fan death.
My mother told me that handling cellophane tape makes you sterile. Though that may have just been her way of getting me to stop playing with cellophane tape.
What strange cultural superstitions exist in your part of the world? (Of course, this is a bit of an unfair question, because if you genuinely believe it, then you won't recognize it as a strange cultural superstition!)
Clarification: Please reply in the spirit of the article. Keep it fun.
It looks like the Visio blog populated a sample organizational chart with pictures of Microsoft employees, and I am now Oliver Lee, Director of Strategic Planning.
My secret identity has been revealed. I'm moonlighting at Contoso.
Remember, the term Microspeak is not tightly scoped to mean jargon used only at Microsoft. It's jargon used at Microsoft more often than in general usage. Today, it's a term that you really need to master if you want to talk with others about project planning.
To book a feature is to commit to implementing the feature, including assigning resources to get it done. This means finding designers to design the feature, developers to implement it, and testers to test it, as well as (the hardest part) finding time in the schedule to do it. The resource that is in shortest supply is usually time, since there is no way to create more of it.
More generally, a resource is booked when it is committed to doing something. This is a natural extension of the concept of booking a room in a hotel or a seat on a train.
Here are some citations.
We will be using the Widget framework that Bob is booked to finish in July.
There are no resources booked for enhancing the Widget framework this release cycle.
The Widget team knows that we need this feature from them, but they haven't booked it yet, so we need to develop a fallback plan.
The term is in general use, but for some reason, Microspeak uses it almost exclusively to describe the commitment to completing a particular piece of work by a particular date. Instead of saying that the work is committed or scheduled or confirmed, we say that it is booked. (If you use one of the other words, people may ask for clarification. For example, if you say that it is committed, some people might think you mean that the change has already been submitted to the source code repository.)
Curiously the antonym of booked is not unbooked. If a feature has no resources assigned to it, the preferred term is unfunded.
I dreamed that a colleague and I were looking for a copy of a TN3270 emulator in order to investigate a bug. The search took us into an abandoned-looking Building 5. But upon entering, we discovered that Building 5 was actually the secret lair of all the Administrative Assistants.
Oh, and we eventually found the bug in TN3270. It was an application bug that caused it to leave the laser on for too long in one spot, causing it to burn your thumb.
I dreamed that I was living in a nursing home in some Brazil-like dystopic future.
In this future, people had become so horribly disfigured that they wore flesh-colored suits under their clothes all the time just so they would look good "naked". This vanity extended only to people under the age of around 40. The old people in the home were just your average old people, with spotted, wrinkly skin. Nothing particularly ugly about them; just your average old people. In the dream, I was my current age, but I was living in the home anyway, probably because I became prematurely senile.
A dentist spontaneously appeared to give me a futuristic dental procedure. ("Hey, how'd you get here and what is that zappy thing in my mouth?" Did I mention that I was senile?) After she was done, the dentist said, "I fixed your back four teeth."
"You made them last longer?" I asked.
"No, they'll fail at about the same time as before. They'll just fail differently now."
"What did you do?" I asked.
"I'd rather not say. You can look in the mirror."
With trepidation, I looked in the mirror. My eyes were no good, so I had to ask somebody to tell me what happened.
"Dear God, she installed leeches in your mouth! Mind you, she did a really nice job, getting them to criss-cross like that."
Bonus details: The dentist and dental assistant were hideously disfigured, and I did not notice until later that each had one arm and one stump. The dentist's and assistant's stumps snapped together like a garden hose, making them a grotesque conjoined dental crew.
In 2010, a group of scam artists pretended that they were making a film, appropriately titled A Landscape of Lies. They did this so that they could claim over £2.7 million in tax credits intended to boost the British film industry. Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs began to suspect something was up when no apparent progress was being made on the project and the film company's "office" was an empty room. The scammers tried to make the project look legitimate by actually making a movie for £84,000 and releasing it on DVD. (You can watch the trailer here.) The fake movie was convincing enough to trick one film festival into giving it an award (which it later had to take back.)
Related: The claimed DHS-based television show turns out also to have been a scam.
I dreamed that two of my colleagues were playing a game based on pantomiming Unicode code points. One of them got LOW QUOTATION MARK, and the other got a variety of ARROW POINTING NORTHEAST, ARROW POINTING EAST, ARROW POINTING SOUTHWEST.
I wonder how you would pantomime ZERO WIDTH NON-JOINER.
I observed a spill suspiciously close to a three-year-old's play table. I asked, "How did the floor get wet?"
She replied, "Water."
It's not lying, but it's definitely not telling the whole story. She'll probably grow up to become a lawyer.
I dreamed that a friend of mind said, "Between your tenant and your lover, you should get along with at least one of them."