dan-o's blog

my conversation with a convenience store clerk this morning

Most mornings, I stop at the same convenience store on the way to work, so all the folks who work there recognize me.  One of them is a sweet old Indian lady with a heavy accent.

Clerk: “Who did that to you.”

Me: “What?”

Clerk: “Your face.”

I was offended for a split second, then I remembered that we had some fun with glitter last night, and I must not have managed to get it all off of my face.

Me: “Oh. It’s glitter. I thought I got it all off.”

Clerk: “No.”

Awkward silence.

Clerk, laughing: “It looks good!”

Me: “Uh… thanks.”

dear everybody,

This is a slash: /

This is a backslash: \

So, if you’re reading a URL out loud, like, “myspace.com/chesterfrench”, please don’t say “myspace dot com backslash chester french”, because it makes me cringe.

I realized recently the source of the confusion: if you imagine drawing the character with a pen, for a slash, you are moving the pen backwards, and for a backslash, you are moving the pen forwards.  Please understand that “how you draw it” has nothing to do with the etymology of the words.  Backslashes did not exist before computers; they are called backslashes because they are the backwards version of a normal slash, which has been around forever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash_(punctuation)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backslash

one of my new favorite error messages

Though nothing will probably ever surpass my favorite of all time (from MSVC: “a reference that is not to const cannot be bound to a non-lvalue” — three negatives!), this is one of my new favs from Vista:

C:>ipconfig /release
The requested operation requires elevation.

I tried standing up, but it didn’t seem to help.