Apostrophe abuse is something that get’s (sorry) my goat, and so I’m always amused to see examples of it in the wild – especially from people who really should know better.
Today’s example come’s (excuse me) from the Design House Restaurant in Dean Clough Mills, Halifax. Note the “if it has an S, it needs an apostrophe” approach – and enjoy the additional bonus of a note regarding “accsess.”
After I leave work of an evening, I cross the road via a Zebra Crossing. This is something I achieve each weekday evening, although not without the occasional hiccough.
Take tonight, for example. After stepping out onto the crossing, I noticed that a car on the far side of the road was making a fuss about having to stop. He eventually – grudgingly – halts with the front of his chavwagon sticking over the crossing. I walk past and get on the pavement.
As he sets off, he winds down his window and shouts “You’re supposed to wait for the car to give way, you fucking nob!”
Well, I’m always willing to be wrong, so I looked it up. It turns out – according to the Highway Code – that cars are required to “look out for pedestrians waiting to cross and be ready to slow down or stop to let them cross” and “MUST give way when a pedestrian has moved onto a crossing” (emphasis theirs.)
Never mind, chavwagon driver. I’m sure you’ll learn to drive properly one day. Possibly when you hit puberty.
I use the open-source Pidgin IM client, and came home to discover it had stopped connecting to my MSN Messenger account with the error “Unable to retrieve MSN address book.”
Turns out that Microsoft have blocked the version of the protocol Pidgin’s MSN plugin uses to communicate with their servers. While this is bound to be fixed in an updated version of Pidgin soon, I got impatient and fixed it myself.
To sort this error out, simply install the MSN Pecan plugin and restart Pidgin. If you edit your accounts, you’ll see a new option for account type – WLM. Choose that instead of MSN and it’ll start working again.
MSN Pecan is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS and is fully open source – albeit unsupported by the main Pidgin developers.
EDIT 20090119: The problem can also now be resolved by upgrading to Pidgin 2.5.4 or later, saving you having to install a third-party plugin.
I’ve been meaning to post something about this to my site for a while, but I’ve been busy. Oh, alright – I’ve been playing Guild Wars. Sheesh.
Anyway, on Friday I was treated – along with the rest of the staff at Frog - to a sneak peek of Frog 3.0, the next-generation software we’ll be showing off at BETT. While I am, for obvious reasons, as biased as a very biased thing, I have to say I’m honestly impressed. It’s shiny.
Having been in charge of an implementation of the open-source VLE Moodle in a past life, I thought I knew what a learning platform was. Turns out I was wrong – the new Frog does things I never even thought possible.
I can’t say too much about it until it’s officially unveiled, but if you’re heading to BETT be sure to find the big blue stand with Bob the Frog on it and have a play – I guarantee you’ll be impressed. I was, and I’m notoriously fussy.
With the missus getting increasingly addicted to Guild Wars, it’s been getting harder and harder to get on my PC of an evening. Accordingly, I have treated myself to a new toy – an Acer laptop.
The specs are reasonable, although I could have lived without Vista. It’s taken me almost a full week to beat the thing into submission – it’s amazing how irritating Vista is when you’ve used a grown-up operating system like Ubuntu for a while. Actually, that’s the next step – dual-boot the thing, with Vista for games (and Blu-ray playback) and Ubuntu for actually getting things done.
One thing I’ve noticed about the specifications, actually: it’s fitted with an ATI Radeon Mobility 3470 chipset, but CPU/Z shows it as a 3450. I’m assuming this is an artifact related to the fact that I removed the crippled drivers provided by Acer and replaced them with hacked desktop drivers based around the latest Catalyst version. The new drivers work fine – and with the performance of a 3470 – but display as a 3450. Strange.
All complaints – and between Vista and some of the stupid things Acer has done, there’ve been a few – aside, it’s a reasonable new laptop, and it only set me back £470.
Oh, and in honour of its status in the house it’s been christened TOYBOX – after the debris recovery vessel from Planetes.
