I understand that natural languages are evolving constantly and that new
words, new expressions and new spellings trickling into our everyday speak is
what makes the language alive.  It also explains why artificial languages
such as Esperanto have utterly failed to gain momentum.

I am ready to endure a certain amount of abuse when I listen to the TV or to
people.  Fair enough.

But something that really irritates is me when these blatant misuses of
English creep into written text.

Here is a short list of that
improprieties I have noticed these past years:

• Don’t start an article or a blog post with "so".  Ever.
• "Anyways" is barely a word and  it’s dubbed
  archaic. But can I
  interest you in "anyway", "either way" or "at any rate"?
• As for "irregardless", even the
  dictionary says "don’t use
  it".  So don’t.
• "Criteria" is plural.  The word you are looking for is "criterion".
• When something doesn’t matter to you, you "couldn’t care less". 
  Note the negation.  Just think about it for a minute and it will make
  sense.
• In "weird" and "receive", the e comes first.  I know, it’s weird. 
  Just learn it by heart and don’t think twice.
• If you’re not sure if you should use "its" or "it’s", replace it with "it
  is".  If the sentence still makes
  sense, then "it’s" is correct.  Otherwise, use "its".
• In "gauge", the ‘a’ comes first.
• A pandemic is global, by definition.  If you really want, you can say
  "global epidemic" but "pandemic" by itself is enough.
• "D
  

There have been many comparisons of the various messaging clients available
today:  Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger
and hybrid ones as well, such as Trillian.  These studies usually do a
good job at comparing the features offered by these clients, but for some
strange reason, I have yet to find one that really nails the one thing that
makes the difference for me with Google Talk:  presence ubiquity.

Throughout the day, I typically move between three or four different PC’s
(work, laptop, home, etc…) and this particular feature means that not only do
I not need to log on constantly, it also means that I can start a conversation
home and finish it at work without having to do anything.  The logic behind
the message broadcasts is sometimes a bit mysterious, but it works most of the
time and is a joy for computer vagabonds like myself.

Since no article ever mentioned this feature, I am guessing
my situation is pretty unusual, but since it’s the only one that only exists in
Google Talk, I am stunned that it hasn’t been emulated by any other client. 

Having said that, I do agree that Google Talk is very
austere and I have to confess an unending fondness for Yahoo’s cute smileys, but
presence ubiquity is the main reason why my Friends List on Google Talk
keeps getting bigger why my Yahoo’s Buddy List has been stagnant for over a year
now.  People who need to reach me now know that Google Talk is the first
client to try.  If they don’t know where I am, Google Talk certainly does.

Of course, the fact that Yahoo keeps
nagging me about
upgrading without giving me a chance to opt out and that it will change my
home page  if I’m not careful during the installation doesn’t help. 
It could be worse, though:  you could install AOL Instant Messenger and
spend the next ten minutes hunting down and killing all the "Free AOL" shortcuts
that suddenly pop up in unexpected places on your desktop.  I
hear their latest experimental version, codenamed Triton, goes even further and
changes your home page, installs Plaxo, a toolbar and a modified full-screen version of IE that
lands on their page.  Oh and you can’t refuse the installation of this
software:  you will need to uninstall it by hand later.

That’s clearly not "not evil".

I feel some comfort thinking that Google Talk uses open standards and doesn’t
come with any additional baggage, but I wouldn’t mind if it added some of the
bells and whistles found in its competitors.  How about them smileys for a start, 

?

I like Lost a lot.  Its innovative plot coupled with strong
acting and ingenious twists is like a breath of fresh air that is almost making
flashbacks look cool again.  I TiVo all the episodes religiously and I have
hardly  been disappointed by any so far, which is quite an achievement for
a show in the middle of its second season (a feat that has only been topped by
24, which just started its fifth season).

However, I’m beginning to notice a disturbing trend in the storyline: 
the Lost writers seem to be very good at coming up with startling scenes and
puzzling twists, but they do very little in terms of explaining them. 
Instead of tying up loose ends, the episodes keep adding new implausible twists
that make you wonder if the authors really know where they are going or if they
just shoot for cheap one-liners and hope that viewers will forget them later.

Well, I’m not forgetting.  Here is a quick list of the unresolved facts
that I can think of so far (spoiler warning:  these facts cover both
season one and two, you might want to stop reading now if you are not caught up
with the show as of January 15th):

• Mutant animals.
• The mysterious "others".
• Winning lottery numbers that pop up in unexpected places.
• A semi-crazed French woman.
• A virus that makes people hear voices.
• A quarantine shelter buried in the ground.
• A man who’s been sequestered in said shelter for years and ran away (how
  convenient).
• Jack happens to know that man.
• A mechanical arm that pulls people into the ground.
• An underground machinery that requires numbers to be punched in on a
  regular basis.
• A heroine cargo that was flying out of Nigeria and ended up crashing on
  the island.
• A swirling cloud of black smoke.

And I’m sure I am forgetting quite a few.

I hear that enough of the plot has already been written to occupy five
seasons, which is great news, but I’m really hoping that we’ll start seeing the
explanation of some of these mysteries soon, or my patience will start wearing
thin very fast.

Ah… Mac World.  And I don’t mean
the conference, I mean "Mac World".  You know, this weird
parallel universe
where all those who have fallen prey to the Steve Jobs Cult dwell and sneer at
the rest of the population with a look of utter pity in their eyes.  I’m sure you know a few of these people if you’re a developer
or you work at a software company.  Maybe you’re even one of them.

It never misses:  whenever an Apple conference approaches, the tech
world gets all abuzz and Macboys can barely avoid exploding on the spot in a
thousand tiny droplets in anticipation of whatever Steve will throw in their
direction as long as it’s introduced as "One More Thing".

Witness my good buddy Michael, someone who would certainly not be described
as irrational, and much less exuberant, by his peers.  Michael
decided to
sign a check for $3,200 payable to Steve just to pre-order a MacBook. 
I bet that thousands of people are doing the very same thing as I write these
words, so Michael is hardly alone.  But that doesn’t make this behavior any
more explainable.

What I find really ironic is that after Jobs spent so much time explaining
that the Power PC was a speed demon and hearing tireless Mac users claim that
their machine was "plenty fast enough", these new announcements allow the Mac
community to breathe a common sigh of relief and finally say "okay, okay, we
admit it.  Our PowerPC’s are impossibly slow, we’ve been lying all along,
but it’s all going to change now!  So please stop disrupting our fantasy
with your facts".

Don’t get me wrong:  I can understand being excited about a product that
will bring new features or radical innovations, but paying forward $3,200 just
to get a faster machine?  And of all companies, to *Apple*, which
has a long track record of:

• Exaggerating and omitting some vital facts in their announcements (any
  word on the battery life of these new Core Duo-based beasts?).
   
• Making a terrible job at provisioning their stock supply (any bet
  on the percentage of orders that will actually be delivered in February?).

Maybe it’s just me, but with the power of the Internet at my fingers almost
twenty-four hours a day, I find it absolutely impossible (and unforgivable) to
make the slightest purchase before doing a quick research and seeing what other
people think of the product I’m about to buy. 

What makes things worse with
the MacBook is that we’re talking about a completely new product that is
guaranteed to have flaws in its initial versions.  Yes, yes, I know, Steve
says it runs flawlessly, but just stop staring at the pendulum he is swinging in
front of your eyes for a second and trust me on this one (and stop drooling too): 
You’re better off waiting.  A couple of weeks will do.

You’ve been
stuck with a machine slow as molasses for almost two decades, surely you can
hold off for a bit, can’t you?

So, dear reader, what’s your excuse for preordering one of these
chimerae?

Update:  Erik pointed me to

this piece which seems to indicate that indeed, the benchmarks used by Apple
to compare Duo Core processors to PowerPC ones are flawed.  A technique not
unlike the one they used a few years ago to prove the opposite, though, so you
can’t accuse them of being inconsistent in their misinformation.

One thing that really irks me is articles that are split into multiple parts
and that force you to click Next every time you are ready to read more. 
Here is an
example.

Whenever I encounter such an article, I immediately search for a Print
button, and most of the time, it takes you to a page that not only contains the
entirety of the article, but also removes all the ads and other clutter from it.

See
for yourself.