Fugu Talk

The Internet Archive lets go you go back in time (via their Wayback Machine) to see old snapshots of a web site. Consider the humble beginnings of Technicat, with this version back in 1999:

Five years later, I ditched the animated GIF kitties and went with a programmer-oriented setup, using an open source content management system called Forrest which adheres strictly to W3C standards, and added some essays on software development.

And then last year, I spiced it up with some graphics created by WordsEye, a new company logo designed by Shane Nakamura Designs, and tweaked the look after seeing the CSS Zen Garden.

Only ten years in the making!

After rating a couple of Whedonverse books on Goodreads, the publisher asked to be my Goodreads “friend”. A crass Myspace-like practice – the SmartPop profile lists all their own books and gives top five stars. To top it off, I just found in my Goodreads inbox a note from them inviting me to read their other offerings. Fortunately, Goodreads makes it easy to block a member and flag its messages.

For a publisher of cool, esoteric books, they have pretty lame marketing. I’d already planned to read their books – now I’m inclined to avoid them.

I was pleasantly surprised to find my old chess rating listed on the United States Chess Federation web site, despite my memberships expiration in 1985 (fresh from my modest success on the Iowa high school circuit, I got trounced in a tournament my first month at MIT, whereupon I retired and devoted my time to failing my courses).

In any case, I decided to resurrect my attempt at a software project management essay titled Chess Lessons. I’d started it a few years ago, but never fleshed it out as much as my other essays on Technicat, and from my web access logs it seemed most people who googled onto it were really searching for chess lessons. But now I figure, hey, that’s their problem (and Google’s).

The essay could still use some work, but who knows what will catch on. The essays sat around in a not quite finished state for two years until Seven Habits of Highly Effective Programmers got Digg‘d, and that’s been the most popular to date. I thought What I Learned at MIT was more of a gimmick, but that essay made it on Reddit. I saw recently that It’s the User Interface, Stupid made a very brief appearance on Reddit (voted off like an early-round American Idol contestant), but it seems most of the essays have a few fans – I sometimes get email (the nice thing about email responses is they’re usually positive – browsing for blog reactions is not for the thin-skinned).

The essays ranked by popularity can be seen on this month’s web log listing:

The latest version of FuguTilt. Added terrain, improved the day/night transition, added a splash sound from Sound Dogs (referred by Spiraloid)

Despite it’s size and cost, I can’t type more than a few words at a time on my Toshiba Satellite laptop without hitting an up-arrow key and scrambling the line above, which is harder to recover from than your standard mistype-then-backspace. Which is just one more reason why I do as much of my work as possible on my MacBook Pro.

Finally, I compared the Toshiba keyboard with every other keyboard I have lying around, and the problem is obvious – the right shift key is the same size as a regular key.

But you can see here the left shift key is normal-sized, meaning it’s the width of almost three regular keys.

With the right shift key, I’m hitting what would normally be the correct spot for a shift key, but instead Toshiba elected to cram in the arrow keys there. If I was a hunt-and-peck typist, that probably wouldn’t matter, but now I’m trapped between a keyboard redesign and thirty-years of touch-typing.

In the heated competition among phone companies to see who can come up with the most annoying television ad (Verizon’s “can you hear me now?” is the reigning champ), AT&T has come along with a spot showing a business deal in Hong Kong botched due to misspoken Chinese. Ironically, after the offended businessmen stalk off muttering in Cantonese, the smug narrator not only says goodbye in Mandarin, but botches the pronunciation horribly (it’s as if someone said “goo-goo” to you instead of “goodbye” – you might get the idea if he’s waving). And Cantonese, while usually considered a dialect of Chinese, is actually different enough from Mandarin that it’s sometimes considered a separate language. Mixing the two is like, perhaps, mixing Spanish and Portuguese.

That’s par for the course for your everyday Joe, and not just Americans. Although my mother tongue is Cantonese (or would be, if I could remember it), there was a Korean grocer in Playa Del Rey who would give me the Mandarin salutation ni-hao-ma and then stare at me expectantly, until I moved. But AT&T is a global telcom – don’t they have anyone on staff who knows there’s more than one Chinese dialect? And can tell when one of them has been butchered? I mean, at least check the Wikipedia entry.