We’re speaking your language...

“It’s lovely to see Esperanto being taken seriously on your page, but your figure of 1,000 speakers is a bit short of the mark,” says Lynda Hill.
How dare you Lynda – we sourced that from Wikipedia, so it must be true!
A “native” speaker is someone who learns it at home from their parents and – let’s be honest – we’re surprised that there are even 1,000 of them. In a less tolerant society someone would call in the social services.
We’re not anti-Esperanto, we just like poking fun at people who are different. So if you’re a speaker, or if you work with a speaker, please get in touch. In Esperanto, if possible.

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

... but r U red e to h8 LOL? xx

While we are on the subject of odd languages, Richard Murrell brings LOLCODE to our attention, defined as “an esoteric programming language inspired by the pidgin English expressed in examples of the LOLCAT internet meme”. What they mean is, it’s a made- up language based on text messages. Richard gives us this example:
HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
I HAS A VAR
IM IN YR LOOP
UP VAR!!1
IZ VAR BIGGER THAN 10?
KTHX
VISIBLE VAR
IM OUTTA YR LOOP
KTHXBYE
This from Google: “Loops lack counters or conditions, and thus do not cease inherently. They must be manually broken with the GTFO...command”. A language worthy of our attention, you must admit.
Any LOLcoders, please continue our education.

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Locked out

You will recall that Kevin Ellis made quite a good joke last week about prison keyboards and escape keys.
“I suspect the difficulty was that the authorities wanted to replace the Escape key with an extra Ctrl key,” says Mik Towse at Xemik Solutions, joining in the fun. “However, rather than fail due to lack of Ctrl, they could have replaced it with a Scroll Lock.”

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Get with the program(me)

“This morning a colleague of mine asked me to clarify something for him,” says a shocked Richard Hind, writing from York College. “He asked: ‘Program, as in computer program, isn’t spelled double-m-e, is it?’”
Richard asked why he would ask, and the teacher pointed out that the A-level paper he was marking used the double-m-e spelling throughout. We toast the stubborn old-skool Englishness of the AQA examination board, because we’re sure it can’t have been spelled that way because of that other great British national characteristic: careless amateurishness.

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Light-headed

Martin Raynsford tried to buy some LEDs from Farnell last week, and received the following advice: “8530319 is a discontinued item with a limited inventory of five. The quantity in your shopping basket has been adjusted accordingly...Product 8530319 needs to be ordered in multiples of 10. We have altered your quantity from 13 to 20”.

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Eerie Indiana

The IT stories you don’t get in other newspapers usually turn up in The Sun. For example, the tale of Abbi Rendell’s cat Jerry, lost in October in her home village of Polperro, Cornwall.
She posted on the local web site (www.polperro.org) asking if anyone had seen Jerry and received an email from Deb Wilgus.
Deb had seen Jerry sleeping outside a local hotel. But... Deb lives in Indiana, and saw Jerry while watching Polperro on her webcam. Are we the only people who find this a bit creepy?

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Under the influence

Norwich Union Healthcare’s groundbreaking research is important to pass on: one in three employees admitted going to work with a hangover and more than one in 10 has been drunk at their desk.
In construction, 24 per cent have been drunk at work and among professionals, it’s 23 per cent. Only about one in seven IT people has been sozzled at work, but it’s still above average.
But not as far as the 41 per cent of people in media jobs who admitted being drunk at work, which makes us wonder why the other 59 per cent bothered to lie to the researcher.
So put that glass down – what happened when you were drunk at work? Your stories please.

May 13, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

No understando publicity lingo

“Of course Nerdic is not a language – just the result of a highly successful publicity stunt,” writes Bill Chapman, commenting on our report into a highly successful publicity stunt by that company we can’t remember the name of who wasted our precious time by pretending that “Nerdic” was Europe’s fastest-growing language.
“If you’re looking for a real new language, take a look at Esperanto,” he says.
So we did, and we agree: it’s much more interesting than geek jargon.
Did you know that George Soros is one of only 1,000 native speakers in the world? That “computer” translates as “komputilo” and malmangi means to vomit, or literally to “un-eat”? Or that if you visit the Staki public house, you will find that your glass is duon-plena?
Of course you didn’t. We welcome any speakers of interesting-yet-pointless languages to suggest useful words for our readers. Or, of course, to correct our grammar.

May 6, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (7)

It’s bitte out

Keith Hurford at the Welsh Blood Service had a bright idea to stop cold callers phoning him from India.
“I once asked my son, who was doing GCSE German, to answer the phone in German and was stunned when the caller began a conversation with him, also in German. There’s obviously no escape.”

May 6, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)

Trouble praising double glazing

“Hang on a minute,” says Steve Mansfield. “Your correspondent Andrew Long ‘used’ to be a cold caller, and is ‘now’ a recruitment consultant?
“Since most recruitment consultants don’t have the faintest idea about, well, anything, whereas at least cold callers know that you need double glazing or cavity wall insulation, isn’t that a move down the career ladder?”
But Steve: in one job his role is to call people who don’t want to be called to try to sell them something that he doesn’t know about and that they don’t really want. In the other job, he’s a double-glazing salesman.

May 6, 2008 in backbytes | Permalink | Comments (0)