waider

Since I've been told so frequently that I sound American, I figured I'd have to try out that damned test that's been doing the rounds. The result:

What American accent do you have?
Your Result: The Northeast

Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.

Anyone who's heard me attempt to say "fugettaboutit" can laugh now.

John Allison uses Irish: Scary-Go-Round strip for 26-05-2006. I like his definition of a céilídh: a disco with all threat of sex removed. There'll be dancin' at the crossroads in Tackleford!

It's rivetpepsquad's:

I saw this and I thought of you.

Love,
waider

In doing so, mangles english language:

"The numerosity and substantiality of the disclosures..."

clickosity on the linkiality to readinatise moreible

Words I have "taught" my phone since it last got wiped:

crap, ballina, btw, azerbijan, bastard, charlton, barbie, ardsallagh, fucking, fellah, fecking, ennis, delicatessen, domesticity, eircom, dalkey, damn, geary, hurrah, liam, knackered, laoghaire, nowt, michaeli, nuff, snork, superchick, shite, shannon, smartarse, snooker, stanislaw, pfo, sftp, reggae, wtf, yay, waider, yum, wahey, waaah, yerself, woah.

anyone who's talked to me on instant messenger will recognise a certain waiderly flavour to that list.

It's odd the way phrases get attached to events. The July 7th bombings in London somewhere along the line picked up the phrase "race against time", used in a variety of contexts, some sensationalist and a bit bothersome (the sort of Media Scaring You Into Compliance angle). I've just skimmed through an Observer article on the guy who was shot on the Tube, and the phrase crops up twice.

While the misuse and misspelling of common english words and phrases occasionally bothers me enough to post a whiny item here about it, I'm quite happy to let other people get hot under the collar over more obscure and/or less obvious errors. This way, I can keep making ronebofh cry while still maintaining some sort of moral high ground.

There has been an annoying trend in recent years - or possibly longer than that, and I wasn't cranky enough about it until now - to take an existing word and modify it in meaningless ways to label largely unrelated entities. I am, of course, referring to such delightful neologisms as "blogtastic", "warchalking", and the recently-mentioned-here "podslurping". Now, I'm skimming someone's page, and he's just mentioned gtkpod. And during the week I looked at monopod. One of these is a loader for iPod devices, the other is a "scraper" for "podcasts" (ugh, again) that doesn't require a portable media player of any sort, much less an actual Apple-brand one. But thanks to this wonderful trend, it's impossible to tell which is which without digging them up. It's not like all software should be usefully named (after all, my own media player loading code is labelled "MPLE" thanks to a sequence of characters I found in one of the file headers), but this predilection for inane reuse and permutation of overused words is just, well, stupid.

When I'm feeling less cranky about it, of course, it reminds me of a long-ago post to talk.bizarre.

Quoting verbatim from a bugtracking system:

"The presents the customer with very bad usability."

Indeed it does. I couldn't have put it better myself.