K-Squared Ramblings » office

Officebot

Kelson — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:12:20 +0000

New design for Optimus Prime?

Officebot, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Or maybe that should be “Office-mus Prime.”

Spotted at an intersection. Fortunately I had the camera with zoom and time to dig it out before the light changed.

Flood! Also: Cyber Monday Question

Kelson — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 07:30:00 +0000

Wow…nothing like flood damage in the office to start a Monday morning. Fortunately people were in over the weekend & caught it. #
Ooh, neat! Server problems too! (Not flood-related.) #
But wait, there’s more! They had to shut off the water line to the coffee maker! Can the entire office manage on a tiny 3-cup coffee maker? #
Now that online stores have joined in the madness of Black Friday (some starting a week early), what’s the purpose of Cyber Monday? #

Fragile, Mondays, Eyes & Saturn

Kelson — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Great indie rock: Butterfly Boucher’s Scary Fragile for #MusicMonday #
Speaking of Butterfly Boucher, here’s our writeup of the concert we went to back in June. #
From @lol_spam:

“TPA Report.” It should be a TPS Report, but the keys are, like, right next to each other. I guess even spammers can get a case of the Mondays. #
Yes! Realized eyestrain was a problem & finally got PC set up on my original monitor. Bigger is nice, but more importantly, it’s NOT BLURRY! #
Still not sure how I went 1.5 months w/o fixing the refresh rate on the temporary monitor. Usually the flicker drives me *consciously* crazy. #
Incredible new high-res image of Saturn! (via @ThisIsTrue) #

In Your Office

Kelson — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 17:02:02 +0000

A long row of furniture stores sits in the city of Lake Forest, on a frontage road alongside the 5 freeway. Among them is this:

I can just see the exchange at the workplace:

“Nice chair! Where’d you get it?”
“In your office.”
“Hey! What’s the big idea!”

Bathroom Humor

Kelson — Mon, 16 Jan 2006 02:22:09 +0000

One of the two soap dispensers in the bathroom at work has been broken for months. I think the building doesn’t fix it because it looks full. Over the past week or two, someone has started writing things like “Broken” or “Still Broken” (or, one day, “Kaput”) on paper towels and leaving them underneath or draped over the dispenser. Someone decided that this makeshift “Out of Order” sign needed an addition:

Taking the Web Beyond the Typewriter

Kelson — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 18:13:28 +0000

I recently stumbled across an old copy of the Demoroniser (which my American-trained sense of spelling keeps trying to spell as demoronizer), a script designed to correct some of the, well, moronic HTML generated by Microsoft Office. Aside from flat-out coding errors, Office would use non-standard characters for things such as curly quotes or em-dashes that would only show up on Windows computers. If you viewed these sites on a Mac, a Linux box, a Palm, etc., they would seem to be missing punctuation everywhere. His solution was to convert these to their plain-ASCII equivalents.

Over the last year or so, WordPress and A List Apart have converted me from “stick with the lowest common denominator” to “let’s show real typography.” Since the days of the Demoroniser, Unicode has become a standard part of HTML, so modern browsers* can either display a full range of characters or convert them to something they can display. You probably won’t be able to see Chinese text in Lynx, but a properly encoded curly quote—“ or ”—will show up as a plain old ".

For one thing, real typography looks much nicer. An actual “—” looks more professional than “--” does. Curly quotes are also more readable than straight quotes. Take this series of titles, first with curly quotes and next with straight quotes. With curly quotes, it’s easier to tell which pieces of text are inside the quotes and which are outside:

“Blah blah one,” “Another title,” and “Yada yada.”
"Blah blah one," "Another title," and "Yada yada."

Indispensable resources: Commonly Confused Characters and The Trouble with EM ’n EN are great for figuring out just which dash to use where, and also to get the codes right (if your authoring tool doesn’t take care of it for you). Evolt’s Character Entity Chart is helpful for looking up codes and for checking just how much your browser can (or can’t) handle.

So, reminded of the existence of the Demoroniser, I looked for a Unicode-aware update. The original script remains ASCII-only, but I did find the Unmoroniser, a modified version that converts the problem characters to the proper HTML entities instead. Accompanying the script is a rather long but nonetheless amusing rant on why this change is a good thing.

*In this case IE 5+, Mozilla/Firefox/Netscape 6+/etc., Opera 6+, Konqueror 3+ & Safari should have no problems. Netscape 4 manages the basics, but many characters only show up on Windows or don’t work at all.