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Things that make you laugh...

Elixir said:
Keith&Co. said:
So, i have a high school education. And many technical schools.
My coworker is going for his doctorate.
Yesterday, he wanted to use the word 'chauvinism' in an email. He didn't know how to spell it. He called out to the office, asking how to spell the word.
I said 'P-I-G.' He laughed but still wanted the actual word.
Another coworker said type something close and let the program's spellchecker fix it.
First guy said that's what he'd been doing for ten minutes. However he was spelling the word, it wasn't offering up any suggestions anywhere close to the right word.
Then i spelled it out. He was amazed that i got it right the first time.
Almost angry that someone with no college could show him up.
I shrugged. I see the word a lot. I spend some nights wandering DeviantArt telling people their oh-so-clever and oh-so-original memes are misspelled.
Third coworker jumps up out of his cubicle. "THAT WAS YOU!?!?"
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Lol! I'm a highschool dropout myself. Yet, I am the official Company Grammar Nazi. Also its proof reader and writer of all things that relate to product descriptions and applications. As amazed as my college-educated partners are that I know English better than they do, I am even more amazed that they failed to learn so many of the basics. The oddest thing is how they sometimes will latch onto and defend the indefensible. Case in point was a Cicero quote that someone on the internet translated into gibberish, and which one of my partners decided to put in big lettering on the 50' RV that we use for a mobile training lab. I was horrified, and it turned into a months-long kerfuffle before I was able to convince him that it made us look bad. "Nobody knows what Cicero actually said" was his main defense. "He certainly didn't say it in English!".
"Sure, but whateverthehell language he said it in, you can bet it made sense" I'd tell him. "So it should be translated into something that also makes sense." He was un-moved until I got out the original Latin: "Hominem ad deos nulla re propius accedunt quam salutem hominibus dando", and went through it word by word... We ended up taking the (expensive) letting off the bus.

I don't know what they've been teaching people about English in our Universities, but it's less than what we had to learn by the fourth grade. Maybe my early education was exceptional - it didn't teach me a lot of facts, but it taught me how to learn!
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I would translate that as "Man can get no closer to divinity, than by doing good things for others". Now I am interested to know a) How your company translated it; and b) Whether anyone with better Latin than I has a better translation.

In my opinion, Google Translate (and other similar services, including a surprising number of human translators) concentrates too much on the individual meanings of the words, rather than the idiomatic meaning in the target language; so we see such travesties as 'Sic transit gloria mundi' being rendered as 'so passes the glory of the world', which is merely what it says, when what it means (and therefore a far better translation for it) is 'Such is life'.

I never completed my BSc; The highest educational level for which I have a certificate is English 'A levels', attained at 18 years of age. In my experience, far too many people with Bachelor's degrees believe that education is something you can finish, and that a credential is the sole value and purpose of an education.
 
Elixir said:
Keith&Co. said:
This is why I like writing as a creative outlet.
Long before the color wheel turns black I can say 'Fuck it, it's a short story.'
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Yeah, when you leave a plot dangling, the rubes think you're being deep. :D
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Exactly. You can't give someone a single sock and say "It's more important what YOU think should be on the other foot."
 
Today, i was reminded of someone who used to work in our documentation section.
He was one of the first people to adapt our written procedures to electronic format for use in the Fleet, long before i started working here.
At the same time, i was one of the first sailors in the Fleet to utilize the electronic versions of our procedures.
Dupuis wrote my absolute FAVORITE troubleshooting guide.

At the time, the system used printers that produced a continuous strip of paper that was rolled up for later shipping off-ship for analysis. Dupuis was assigned to convert the troubleshooting guide for the printer. Most of our troubleshooting guides have names like 'Subsystem Error' or 'Blurred Display' or 'Procedure Failed'.


And I was the first person in the Fleet to use the 'Paper Take-Up Does Not Take Up Paper As Paper Take-Up Should Take Paper Up' guide.

I tried to make a song out of it.

My chief was not amused. Not by the song, not by the title, not by what he imagined to be idiot writers making fun of the Navy.... It was 20 years before i found out he was curious about just how many characters the title block could accommodate. Just to know, to see what they could and couldn't do.
He played around with the title, saved it, tested it in the lab, then forgot to fix it before the final copy was submitted for approval. After that it was out of his hands...

So, if nothing else, I learned a valuable lesson about leaving things lying around where the technical manager might think they were completed.
 
I escorted the wife to a medical practice, and a procedure which left her unable to operate heavy machinery for a day.
The building has a number of clinics of varying specialties, including a mental health facility.
Part of the way to the office we were visiting involved a long, shallow ramp. There's a handrail on each wall, and some generic art hanging on the walls.

As i left to get the car, i noticed someone going down the ramp, lining up each piece of artwork so the bottom of the frame was perfectly aligned to the angled rail.
And behind him, someone else was going down the ramp, returning each frame to be perfectly vertical...
 
Boss found his way to our office for his once-monthly face-time with the training office.
Asked what any of us had been doing. We filled him in on projects completed, progressing, planned.
Asked what we'd been doing in our personal lives.

"Well, i've been taking an online course in appreciating abstract art."
"Really? How's it going?"
"I get it, now."
"Get what, now?" he asked.
"Your nose. I get it, now."
 
A coworker was out at the site, interfacing with the Navy, and came back with a sea story.
A while back, there was this guy, see, on the USS Maryland, and when they put the LAN in, he loaded a bunch of pictures of naked women and sent them as emails to people, with a delayed delivery. So even after he left the boat, and they deleted his account, the emails had been sent, so they still showed up. And there were guys getting in trouble for breaking the rules when all they did was receive an email, sometimes years after he left.

"Not years," I told him.

"No, they were saying years!"

"Yes, they can say that, but I didn't put in any delays beyond six months."

"Wait, what?"

"That sea story was me. And it was on the Rhode Island. I left the Maryland before they had an email network."

I AM a sea story...
 
Data and Geordi: We want permission to experiment with creating an interface between Data's positronic brain and the ship's computers including maybe weapons systems and other stuff, so he can act as an emergency backup system in case of ship-wide failure.

Picard: Seems legit. Nothing bad can come of this fascinating experiment. Knock yourselves out.
 
Angry Floof said:
Data and Geordi: We want permission to experiment with creating an interface between Data's positronic brain and the ship's computers including maybe weapons systems and other stuff, so he can act as an emergency backup system in case of ship-wide failure.

Picard: Seems legit. Nothing bad can come of this fascinating experiment. Knock yourselves out.
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No wonder the Vulcans think humans are nuts.
 
Angry Floof said:
Data and Geordi: We want permission to experiment with creating an interface between Data's positronic brain and the ship's computers including maybe weapons systems and other stuff, so he can act as an emergency backup system in case of ship-wide failure.

Picard: Seems legit. Nothing bad can come of this fascinating experiment. Knock yourselves out.
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I've just started binge-watching TNG. I've never seen it before. Picard has a lot of seems-legit (or rather, boldly-going) moments. :D
 
Was reminded of my second Leading Petty Officer, today.

Guy used to berate us for individual mistakes with "I'd call you the king of the idiots, but that would be an insult to idiots!"

If a group managed to fuck things up, he'd swear he was going to beat us like a baby seal.

I wrote to fur companies to try to find out what is thepreferred mechanism for clubbing seals but none of them ever replied. I wrote PETA and all I got back was appeals for money.

In the end, we sent him a telegram saying "Thank for thinkng of us. -the idiots."
For the seal club we just got a baseball bat and put Hello Kitty stickers on it.
 
Angry Floof said:
Data and Geordi: We want permission to experiment with creating an interface between Data's positronic brain and the ship's computers including maybe weapons systems and other stuff, so he can act as an emergency backup system in case of ship-wide failure.

Picard: Seems legit. Nothing bad can come of this fascinating experiment. Knock yourselves out.
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I was always amazed at how much stuff on the flagship was like one faulty module or one line of code away from being 'a threat to all life on board.'

You'd think that after one, two or twenty such incidents, they'd install an OFF switch for the holodeck on every level, in every compartment. Maybe four on the bridge.
 
Keith&Co. said:
Angry Floof said:
Data and Geordi: We want permission to experiment with creating an interface between Data's positronic brain and the ship's computers including maybe weapons systems and other stuff, so he can act as an emergency backup system in case of ship-wide failure.

Picard: Seems legit. Nothing bad can come of this fascinating experiment. Knock yourselves out.
Click to expand...
I was always amazed at how much stuff on the flagship was like one faulty module or one line of code away from being 'a threat to all life on board.'

You'd think that after one, two or twenty such incidents, they'd install an OFF switch for the holodeck on every level, in every compartment. Maybe four on the bridge.
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Even Microsoft would be embarrassed by the ease with which attackers can pwn the Enterprise's entire system.

You would think that Starfleet had never heard of elevated permission requirements for critical systems.

Or perhaps advances in quantum computing have rendered security measures futile, and they just have to trust every crewmember, alien, AI, unknown phenomenon, and holodeck-spawned nightmare to be nice.

Even then, some strategic air-gapping between critical subsystems could save them a lot of heartache for very little loss of functionality.
 
bilby said:
Even then, some strategic air-gapping between critical subsystems could save them a lot of heartache for very little loss of functionality.
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Well, these ARE people who've lost either the technology or the will to install fuses...
 
Wonderful morning.
My alarm is set for 0610.
I woke up at 0509, and thought, Hey, I can turn off the alarm right before it wakes the wife up! Had a minute to spare!

Math is not my thing at oh-dark-thirty.

Got up, dressed, morning rituals, a little surprised at how light traffic was. A little surprised that I needed my headlights. Very surprised that the morning DJ wasn't reading the news...
Kinda surprised that so many stoplights were malfunctioning. Blinking red at half the intersections...
The early-birds in the office were stunned by my arrival. "Why are you here so early?"
Aw, shit! "I, um... Just enthusiastic about that presentation!"
 
My wife was angry with me yesterday. Sh e had a cross expression. And her arms were crossed.
That made her a double-crosser and i attempted to alleviate the tension by referring to her as Benedict Arnold.

Went about as well as you'd expect.

Totally worth it.
 
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