JoeN's Blog : Culture Clash

Forced Blog (aka Flog)

JoeN — Wed, 09 Jun 2004 04:49:00 GMT

I came up with a term the other day when I was talking to some people about blogging. I'm still getting used to blogging (making time to blog, what is something reasonable to blog about etc) but I was talking to some people at TechEd (some Microsoft, some not) who were complaining about feeling like they were forced to blog.

They felt there was a lot of peer (as well as some management) pressure to blog. I immediately came up with the term “flog” - a forced blog. A Google search for “Forced Blog“ shows that this is a common term but perhaps “flog” is a shorter and more appropriate description :-)

Stop the Madness - Tabify, Untabify, Uniqueify, Winningest, Undefeateds

JoeN — Tue, 27 Jan 2004 18:53:00 GMT

OK - I've had enough of the made up words and spelling madness. Like most people I make up words sometimes but it is getting out of control - in life, on Sports Center, and in Visual Studio.

I'm not the world's best speller but sometimes you need to hold the line. Here's the latest round of made up words that have driven me crazy:

Tabify, Untabify. These options are on the Edit.Advanced menu and allow users to effectively swap tabs for spaces etc. I'm amazed that we didn't also change the rest of the options on this menu so they read something along the lines of: Uppercasify, Lowercasify, Indentify, Unindentify.
Uniqueify. This one I caught during a Visual Studio meeting where a member of the VS project team was talking about creating unique names for projects when they get created (you know the endless WindowsApplcation256, WindowsApplication257 etc). This is how it was used: “So after we uniqueify the project name...”
Winningest. This was my all time favorite from Sports Center (until the one below). This is usually used when people want to describe a coach how has the most wins in their career - he is the “winningest“ coach of all time at X school etc.
Undefeateds. My new all time personal favorite - this was the headline on Sports center talking about basketball teams that haven't been defeated yet in the current season. This was the title as they started to talk about the different teams.

Of course coming from Australia it took me a long time to get used to the “American“ dictionary - especially the small change of taking the s's out of words and replacing them with z's (organise becomes organize etc). I found this pretty annoying when I first came and didn't correct my email's etc. A few of the people that I worked with noticed and commented about it - saying “Didn't the spell checker pick that up?“ I had to tell them that I had secretly added my favorite words to the American dictionary so I wasn't nagged as much :-)

Oh and because I've been informed that it's “bad form” to have an entry without a link - here's something that I tend to use on daily basis http://www.dictionary.com

Movie Recommendation - WhaleRider

JoeN — Fri, 19 Dec 2003 19:03:00 GMT

I watched WhaleRider the other night and it was great.

A lot of films coming out of New Zealand really appeal to me, I think it's because I'm half Australian, half Fijian so the whole “Pacific Islander” angle rings true to me. My father now lives on a remote island in Fiji and his traditional values are very different to the values that a modern world encourages you to have.

WhaleRider was just a great movie about growing up and people adjusting to and working with a new value system - well worth watching.