Said Svec

Holy Parenthetical Emoticons, Batman!

I’m glad that Randall has the guts to tackle the tough issues facing the world today: emoticons in parenthesis. Check out the comic.

Since I’m starting my own copyediting and proofreading business, this issue is particularly timely and relevant for me.

Randall outlines the basic options:

• blah (or blah :)
• blah (or blah :) )

The first option looks like the author threw an extra colon in there.  The second option looks like the author mashed the keyboard with her elbow.

We also need to consider these options:

• blah (or blah :-)
• blah (or blah :-) )
• blah (or blah :-D)
• blah (or blah :-D )
• blah (or blah :-)-)
• and what about (this (or this (it gets ridiculous fast :) ) )

“American” English writing style is primarily dictated by two style guides: The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) and The AP Stylebook.

I could only find references to emoticons and parenthesis in CMOS, and it dodges the question (source):

Until academic standards decline enough to accommodate the use of emoticons, I’m afraid CMOS is unlikely to treat their styling, since the manual is aimed primarily at scholarly publications. And the problems you’ve posed in this note give us added incentive to keep our distance.

If the experts are no help, what are we to do?

Thankfully the web makes everyone a Certified Internet Expert (including me :) ), so follow along as I puzzle it out.

Round One

• As a programmer I want each open parenthesis “(” to match exactly one close parenthesis “)”.
• As a writer I realize that an emoticon must be considered as a whole, not merely as a collection of individual characters.  Therefore any parenthesis or other character within an emoticon should have no bearing on the punctuation of other words.

Round Two

• As a programmer I know that I will try to visually match each parenthesis pair I see.
• As a writer I find “) )” slightly less offensive than “))”.

Round Three

• As a programmer I will use sed or vim or a Firefox hack to rewrite any text I don’t like, so I don’t really care what you writers think.
• As a writer I want the rules that govern “:)” to match the rules that govern “:D”.

The Decision

As a Certified Internet Expert I decree that emoticons shall be considered as a single symbol.  An emoticon shall always be followed by a space.  If an emoticon ends a parenthetical phrase, the closing parenthesis that matches the opening parenthesis must be used, regardless of whether the emoticon itself contains a parenthesis.

Correct examples:

• He said he would be happy to do it (he lied :) ).
• He lied (she knew he would :D ).

Tune in next time for another exciting episode of geeky grammar.

I. M. Wright’s latest post “Green fields are full of maggots” talks about defining the problem and defining done.

My favorite quote (which is, itself, a quote):

“What’s so evil about general solutions? After all, your code could be both a floor wax and a dessert topping.”

He makes some great points about building software to solve a real, concrete problem, instead of building software as a semi-abstract-solution-that-could-solve-any-problem-possibly-the-one-people-are-paying-us-for.

My second favorite quote (second favorite only because it doesn’t quote Saturday Night Live) sums up the danger of the abstract:

“You put the problem at the center instead of the customer. When the customer isn’t at the center, your code loses its soul. It goes from being astounding to being adequate, from marvelous to mediocre.”

What is your goal?  Mediocre, or Marvelous?

We have an M&M’s-filled candy machine at work and we wondered:

• What do you call it when you get exactly 6 M&M’s in a single turn of the dispenser, one of each color?  M&M Yahtzee?  Full House?
• And how about when you get more than 6 M&M’s in a single turn of the dispenser, with at least one of each color?

Suggestions?  Please leave a comment!

PS: the 6 M&M’s colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and brown.  See for yourself.

It seems like just yesterday Google was celebrating the opening of their new office in downtown Austin, Texas – actually, it was mid-October, 2008, according to the Austin American Statesman (google has the story in their cache, but the Statesman’s link doesn’t work).

But today Google announced that they are closing the Austin office, along with offices in Trondheim, Norway and Lulea, Sweden, in order to “build larger and more effective teams, reduce communication overhead, and give engineers increased options for future projects” :

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/changes-to-engineering.html

Google says they’ll try to keep people from those sites at Google, but of course the employees would have to move to larger Google sites.  That makes sense for Google in terms of managing tons of projects, sites and people, but that’s a real bummer for the Austin Googlers.

Again, from the Statesman:

“We really do like Austin, we like the engineers in Austin, we like the town, we like the geography, but there just wasn’t any way in the short term or medium term to really grow the office to the size that Austin deserves,” [said Alan Eustace, Google senior vice president of engineering].

Hopefully Austin tech companies can pick up some good talent from those who don’t want to leave Austin.

I just finished the book “Blog Blazers” by Stephane Grenier. My three word review: “Not too shabby.”

I have to admit this book wasn’t exactly on top of my “to-read” pile. I’m not usually a big fan of blogs/books about blogging, podcasts about podcasting, etc. – it’s all too meta for me. But Ian Landsman was offering a free review copy on his blog, and I’m a sucker for free books, so I gave it a shot.

“Blog Blazers” consists of 40 interviews with popular and successful bloggers, including Andy Brice, Bob Walsh, Dharmesh Shah, Eric Sink and Jeff Atwood. Stephane asked each person the same questions, including:

• What defines a successful blog?
• Do you have any tips or advice on writing?
• How do you market your blog?
• What is your best monetization method?

Because each interview followed the same form it became a little monotonous to read in one sitting. I could only take about ten at a time. Many of the answers were repeated by several of the interviewees, which was a bit boring, but the repetition confirmed that their advice is probably good. Or they’re all suffering from groupthink, but I’ll go with the first reason.

As I read the interviews I asked myself, “So what? Will this change anything I do?” I came away with these thoughts:

• Original content vs. commentary: try to write as much original content as possible, as opposed to just commenting on others’ content. For instance, don’t write book reviews. :-)
• Use your own domain, instead of myfreeblog.wordpress.com or myfreeblog.google.com. That’s next on my to-do list.
• A lot of bloggers get found through StumbleUpon – I haven’t used that in a long time, maybe it’s time to check it out again.

Nothing earth shattering, but it’s a lot of good blogging advice. The book also included a number of blog(er)s that were new to me, some of which are now in my RSS reader.

My favorite quote was from Eric Sink. When asked “How long does it take to become a successful blogger?” Eric answered, “The time varies so much that any answer would be incorrect. I’ll just say this: Some things are not under your control. Persistence is.” (emphasis mine)

Becoming internet-famous overnight probably ain’t gonna happen – the best way to develop a good blog is to be persistent about writing good content.

So there you go – it was a decent read, well worth a trip to the library, and maybe even purchasing if you want advice on building your blog.

A software vendor gave a sales presentation at my office today.

The vendor sent two people to present – a sales guy and an engineer.

The sales guy started the pitch with an overview of the software. Sounds great, says us, but we need a bunch of technical details to know if it’s worth pursuing. This is a critical piece of software, it will interact with a lot of internal systems, and so we need to know what we’re getting ourselves into.

So we ask a bunch of questions which the engineer answers to our satisfaction. Probably 30 or 45 minutes go by, mostly a back-and-forth between us and the engineer. He knows his stuff, and he seems to enjoy telling us about their technology.

The sales guy doesn’t have much to contribute, which is fine. Or rather, it would have been fine, if Mr. Salesguy would have appeared to be paying attention, or at least not acting distracted and bored.

Instead Mr. Salesguy checks his email. Checks his voicemail. Fiddles with his pen. Fools around on his computer for a while. Does a lot of things that tell me he doesn’t care about this sale. All with a look of “Get me out of here” on his face. Which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence or help the sale at all.

What’s the lesson here? When you make a sales pitch / presentation / demo / whatever, make sure that every single member of your team is devoting 100% of their attention to the customer. Even if you’re not currently speaking, even if you’ll never speak – act interested! Better yet, BE interested! And if you can’t get interested, then you probably don’t need to be there in the first place.

How to tell you’re a bad programmer:

1. You think you’re an awesome programmer.

2. But no one else has ever told you so.

3. You’ve never looked at old code you wrote and thought, “Ewwww! That is horrible code! What was I thinking???”

4. You’ve never looked at someone else’s code and thought, “Dang, whoever wrote this is a freaking genius.”

Note that this also works if you substitute <other profession> for “programmer,” and <output of other profession> for “code.”

If you don’t see growth, it probably ain’t happening.  If you don’t see growth potential, it probably ain’t happening either.

Raymond Chen learns from himself:

http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2008/11/27/9145565.aspx

I like the fact that he’s honest and humble enough to admit that kind of “mistake.”

A good pro/teacher/mentor/expert should be willing to learn from others, including himself.

Swiss elevators start at floor 0:

Swiss Elevator controls

And this Swiss department store starts at -1:

Directory for Manor, a Swiss department store