K-Squared Ramblings » typos

Goin’ On a Typo Hunt

Kelson — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 15:00:11 +0000

NPR has an article on The Great Typo Hunt: Two friends cross the country with a Sharpie pen, correcting grammatical and spelling errors in road and shop signs. And there’s a book.

I may need this.

When I was in college in the mid-1990s, I kept a “Bent Offerings” newspaper cartoon on my bulletin board. One person was scrawling “I before E…” on a wall. Another was correcting a menu, muttering, “It’s Brussels Sprouts, not Brussel Sprouts!”. A third was examining someone’s T-shirt, disapprovingly asking, “Is that how they taught you to use an apostrophe?” The strip was captioned, “Roving Gangs of Rogue Proofreaders.”

The appeal hasn’t stopped. You may have noticed I have two categories on this blog devoted to weird/funny signs and mistakes in signs.

Yeah, this sounds like a good bet.

Do You Fix Old Online Typos?

Kelson — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:00:58 +0000

I always feel somewhat embarrassed when I find a typo in one of my old blog posts, and try to fix it. I’m a little less concerned with forum posts, since they tend to be more ephemeral anyway, and I should probably treat Twitter updates and Facebook status the same way, but I’ve made my share of “Oops, I mean to say ____” posts.

How about you? If you stumble on one of your own online posts and find a typo, what do you do about it?

The poll is open through June 8. And yes, I know there’s a typo in the question. I didn’t notice until after several votes had been cast, which meant that Twtpoll won’t let me fix it.

Silly Comment Spammer…

Kelson — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 22:20:24 +0000

Yesterday I got a strange comment that I thought looked a bit spammy. It was one of those sneaky comments that pretends it’s reporting a problem on your site. The layout looks off in Chrome, or is broken in Firefox, etc. Except, of course, when you look at it in that browser, it’s just fine.

This one claimed that they’d gotten an alert on their firewall when hitting the blog, and could it be related to one of your ads?

Unlikely given how few ads I use, but possible, since I had a third-party poll, some Amazon links, and a banner for Mozilla Plugin Check. Still, the author’s website looked pretty spammy, once I pulled out the extra w, so I put it back in moderation–

Wait, what was that about an extra w?

Well, they’d linked to wwww.[REDACTED].com. Kind of amusing, but I didn’t think anything of it until I had the chance to look for other sites with similar comments…and found that they all pointed to the broken site!

LHC, Snow Angels, and an Email Massage

Kelson — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:30:00 +0000

LHC Update: Another power failure. This is just getting silly. (Oh, and also: World still here.) #
I guess I’ll be listening to some of Tori Amos’ Christmas album after all. “Snow Angels” is today’s free holiday song on Amazon. #
Search hit: “thunderbird thinks this massages is a scam” #

GeoCities / Com & Line

Kelson — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 06:30:00 +0000

GeoCities lingered for a day, but has shuffled off this mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir invisible. # Over at Speed Force, I wrote a piece on GeoCities, RIP: Fandom’s Lost Pages.
Interesting typo seen on a mailing list: “com and line option.” (command line) #

Man-Eating Birds, Algae-Powered Cars, and Googly Androids

Kelson — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Fossils linked to Maori legend of man-eating bird. # The giant Haast’s Eagle, which died out at least 500 years ago, was originally thought to have been a scavenger, but new analysis of fossils indicates that it was a lion-level predator…making it the probable basis for the Maori Te Hokioi legend.
Top Cyber Security Risks 2009. # Operating systems are becoming less and less of a problem, as attackers focus on client applications like Adobe Reader, QuickTime, and so forth.
Odd headline combo: “The algae-fueled Prius hits the road” and “Flesh-eating bacteria hit the beach.” (ZDNet newsletter) #
I like the sound of “Googly Android devices” #
Not sure what this song is, but what I can hear of it sounds like the chorus from Gethsemane – over and over and over. #
WTF? Allergy recall of “Fannie May Milk Chocolate & Almonds” due to undeclared almonds. How is that undeclared? #

Word Weirdness, Bandwidth and Typos

Kelson — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:31:39 +0000

Odd: the Weather Channel Android app is 3 times the size of Sherpa. What did they do, forget to compress the graphics? #
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of disks on the freeway. Or a pigeon w/a datacard. #
Realized while writing “Go to Help…” that it would be easy to make a very unfortunate typo. #
WTF? MS Word 2007 *still* has no keyboard shortcut for Find Next…and it’s not listed in the Customize Keyboard dialog! #
Aha! It’s called “RepeatFind” even though the button is “Find Next” and DOES have keys…Shift+F4 & Ctrl+Alt+Y??? Standard is F3 or Ctrl+G! #
Saw a good typo on a tech forum: Windows XP “Service Park 2″ #

Self-DMCA, Antivax Anger, Specter Switch

Kelson — Tue, 05 May 2009 06:30:00 +0000

Warner Music issued a DMCA takedown notice to an official Warner Music video channel. I think I need some popcorn. #
From @david_colquhoun via @BadAstronomer:

Guardian science editor’s daughter gets measles. He’s angry with the anti-vaccination brigade. #
I nearly mistyped “foreign” as “foregin.” It sounds like an appetizer you should eat before drinking gin. #
Senator Arlen Specter’s party switch is largely symbolic. He didn’t toe the Republican party line, so why expect he’ll toe Democratic line? #

No More Diedrich

Kelson — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 06:59:59 +0000

Diedrich Coffee’s website no longer has a store locator. It’s all online ordering. %^*! Starbucks. #

On another note, saw a great misspelling in search terms: “synapses” for “synopsis” #

Christmas Shopping

Kelson — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 07:59:59 +0000

Need to sleep. Found myself typing “Satan Claus” by mistake. #
Symptom of car culture: I almost feel like I have to justify crossing the street on foot to go to another store instead of moving the car. #
Sun Halo. All you have to do is look up once in a while. #

Linens & Things: Nothing left to sell but the shelves… #
Almost. Walked around a corner and they do have SOME stuff left #
Virgin Megastore is closing too, but they’ve still got lots of stuff. Incl 5000 copies of Serial Mom. #
Replica toys: I get the nostalgia factor, but at the same time it’s a weird idea. #
Going out of business sales seen today: 4. Mervyns, Linens&Things,Virgin,Steve&Barry’s. #
And the more stores I look at, the more “What You Own” competes in my head for the ubiquitous Christmas music. #
Amazon’s wishlist needs a generic option. Like “I want an 8GB Micro-SD card” rather than “I want THIS Micro-SD card specifically!” #