Good afternoon. Today we will be discussing the thorny issue of grammar and spelling. Or grammer as I prefer to spell it.

As an avid Facebooker (is that the right word?) I’ve become dismayed to find friends joining groups such as ‘If You Can’t Differentiate Between “Your” and “You’re” You Deserve To Die.’ and ‘I judge you when you use poor grammar.’

You see, I wasn’t too bothered about good/bad grammar and spelling until the advent of the Grammar Bully (or Grammar Snob). Or Lynn Truss, as the devil child is known. Her “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” book kicked off the recent trend of looking down on those who use punctuation and grammar incorrectly.

And my response is…. piffle.

As someone on Facebook quite rightly stated, ‘it is an extremely outlandish and bigoted comment… saying something like that to a dyslexic, is like saying to a deaf person, “If You Can’t Hear You Deserve To Die”‘.

And as Bill Bryson wrote about in his excellent book “Mother Tongue”, the English language is constantly evolving. In Shakespeare’s time it was still quite volatile - indeed, on one page alone he spelt one word in about a dozen different ways. Many of the differences between the English and American language is down to the same thing - at the time the US was settled, the “modern” English language was still fluctuating. With a vast difference between the two nations, changes occurred in one language that didn’t therefore happen with the other. Take the word “sidewalk” which we called the pavement. Except we used to call it the sidewalk and changed it. The US stuck with it. But, arrogant as the British are, we often accuse the US of changing just to be awkward.

And if you look at the way we communicate these days - rushed, electronic means - then the need to get punctuation right is surely less of an issue? In fact, there was an excellent discussion about this last week on BBC Breakfast News. A University Professor was tired about the poor punctuation and grammar from his students. However, other than that he hadn’t thought anything through and ended up looking like a buffoon for most of the interview. On the other hand they had a nice lady (who’s name I can’t recall) who believes the English language should be simplified. She’d thought through her arguments and put the Professor to shame.

It takes 3 times longer to teach the English language in Britain than it does to teach the equivalent native language in other European countries. That’s simply because it’s such a tough language - mainly because it follows rules for some of the times and other times doesn’t. So a lot of spelling, for example, has to be learnt on a word-by-word basis.

This ladies argument is that rules should be stuck to rigidly and words simplified where there are multiple meanings. For example, beech and beach. Why two spellings? The context in which you use them gives away which ones you mean. “At the weekend we went to the beach”. “My table is made of beech”. When we speak to someone, we don’t have to spell out these words - the context is assumed. So why do anything different when we write? And the same with punctuation. Taking the previous Facebook group example, if I say “Your leg is on fire” or “You’re leg is on fire” it wouldn’t make a difference. So why is it a murdering offence (apparently) to write it wrong?

There is even a comment on one of these groups from one individual who “hates” when people abbreviate in text messages. Now, hold on… let’s go back to modern communication. You’re restricted to the length of a text message and have to type it using a small number of keys. Why do you think people use abbreviations? When they use it in everyday writing, now that I can understand. But in texts? Get a grip. I think there are far more offensive things in the world to get wound up about.

Another example… quoting from Faceboook….

“there’s a place near my house which sells ‘Kebab’s’ lol. Indicating that the shop is in fact owned by a Kebab.”

Now I could immediately point out starting the sentence without a capital, and their use of “lol” (without punctuation before it), but that would be petty. However, looking at what they’re trying to say, does anybody believe that they saw the word “Kebab’s” out side a Kebab shop and it confused them. Actually, considering the IQ of some of these people who are grammar snobs, then maybe they were. But then I suspect the correct punctuation wouldn’t have helped.

We all know what they mean by that sign, and that’s what’s critical.

It’s all rather eloquently summed up by Marcus Brigstocke’s recent entry on Room 101:

The example he gives is where a sign says “Apple’s 30p”

Grammar Bully: Mmmm, so the 30 pence belongs to the apples does it? No, I don’t think it does at all, no I think you meant 30 pence for the apples…

Marcus Brigstocke: Just buy the fruit and piss off!

God only knows how many mistakes I’ve made in this Blog but… hey… I don’t care. And if you care to judge me, fine. I’m not stupid. I’m not unintelligent. I’m not dyslexic. I’ve just got better things to do with my time than think about punctuation, which I learnt at school about 25 years ago now, and will actually make no difference to what I’m trying to say and generally put over.

I had an email today from a good friend, asking for recommendations about setting up a personal domain name. I get asked this quite a lot, so I thought I’d Blog the answer for future. You know it makes sense.

Right, if you’re simply after a domain name for your email - i.e. having a nice personal email address such as joe.bloggs@artiss.co.uk - then this is easy. I use 1&1 who can supply them for £2.99 for 2 years. This gives you the domain name, but no email facility. You’ll need to keep your existing email but use the 1&1 Control Panel to divert your new domain name to your existing email address.

That means if you move ISP and therefore ISP-based email address, then you simply change the forwarding, and your friends don’t need to know anything different - they still use your personal email address.

Not only that but you can set up different diversions for different email addresses.

The down-side to this is that when you reply from most email account it will use your “proper” email address as the “from”. In other words, if you’re using an ISP supplied email address, it will use that when you reply. Google Mail, which I highly recommend, isn’t ISP dependant and will allow you to reply to emails using your personal email addresses.

Now, that’s the email covered. What if you want a domain name for a website as well? Well, the 1&1 offering will allow you to divert the matching website address to anywhere else. So again, you can divert, say, artiss.co.uk, to that free space given to you by your ISP. But, again, there’s a downside. The forwarding works by creating a frame with your website inside it. That means the URL doesn’t change as you move around pages, and makes providing specific links to page rather difficult. Now there is a way around this by pointing the “name servers” directly to the web space. However, this is dependant on both your ISP and domain name provider allowing this. It’s also a bit of a technical jungle at times.

So, if you want a website and want it to look all cool, froody and sophisticated, I’d suggest you look at getting a host - i.e. a company that can provide the domain name and webspace and link them together automatically. The additional upside of this is that they’re likely to provide a better quality service than the free offerings from your ISP.

Streamline.net provide a “power” option for £47.98 for 2 years. This includes your domain name, email forwarding, 750MB of space and even PHP & MySQL if that’s your bag.

UPDATE: A Blog reader has kindly pointed me to Microsoft Office Live. They provide a FREE small business package which includes email, 500MB of space and a domain name. It looks as if the email is their own mail service and you may have to use their own designer to create the website rather than upload your own. Plus I suspect it won’t allow PHP, MySQL, etc. So limitations you should be aware of… BUT it’s free, so worthy of investigation.

Have you seen my new profile piccy? A moody black & white one - the larger version looks even better. Well, if only to prove how simple things can be, here are details on how it was done (and it means I don’t forget… stupid rubbish memory I have).

There are two versions of this photo, both of which are in various sizes. One has a Polaroid-style background, the other hasn’t.

First of all, here’s what you need (or rather what I needed - feel free to use your own alternatives)… one wife for camera duties, one old-ish Konica 5mp digital camera and an aging (but still perfectly fine) copy of Paintshop Pro 5.
Here’s what I did…

1. Wearing a tatty old t-shirt, I turned it back-to-front so that the plain back was in view, rather than the crabby picture on the front.
2. I sit on my landing sideways against the wall, looking side up towards the camera. Sitting because Jen takes the photo stood up (although a little crouched). Looking up means my face relaxes rather than bunches up (and saves you having multiple chins).
3. Anyway, a number of photos are taken and I chose the best. The first thing I do is port it into PSP5 and chop out the relevant part (head and shoulders). At this point I realise that because of the angle, it wasn’t just wall behind me. Over my left shoulder is a large proportion of door jam, and interior of my bedroom. Arse. So I spent some time lifting sections of wall from elsewhere in the photo to patch over the top. A little bit of the smudging tool and you wouldn’t notice anything amiss. You might also notice some white “sparkles” - the joys of digital photography - so I have to remove those as well.
4. Now I convert the image to black & white.
5. Hmm, that nose is mind is looking a little shiny, so using a similar technique to the wall, I remove this by adding in different parts of the image.
6. My eyes are said to be one of my most attractive facial features, so I decided to take advantage of this and make these colour. Initially, I tried to transfer the eyes from the original colour version of the photo onto this new black and white version. Unfortunately, my eyes also picked out a lot of surround colours, such as some bright blues and flashes of white light (not from the camera - the flash was off that). So plan B was to simply highlight (using the circling tool) the pupil and then colourise it. This worked a treat.
7. And that’s it for the standard picture. For the Polaroid version, I found a blank Polaroid on the Stock.XCHNG website. This was angled so I first had to straighten it. Then I had to extend it’s length for my picture to fit onto it. Finally, I highlighted the surround of the polaroid before adding a drop shadow for effect.

Voila! How beautiful, eh? Hmm, that’s up for much debate, but it’s a reasonably good picture to use.

Now, I don’t normally Blog personal issues. Well, I did, but removed them - first of all because I know prospective employers often look at peoples Blogs (and I’m on the job market) and secondly because I’ve recently had a member of my own family misuse information in such a Blog entry against me. So, all-in-all, it’s bad news.

But today I’m going to talk about work.

I don’t think it’s giving anything away to say I’m unhappy at work right now. The problem, as I see it, is that I’m a support manager in a development team. The company has a separate support division, headed by a Service Director, and a development division, headed by a Delivery Director. Our team report to the latter. This means the emphasis is not on support and work is, well, lacking as most support activities go on within an area that we have no links with. Most of the time I’m doing administrative work - presentations, skill profiles, etc.

My manager is away this week and I have some work I can do (not a great deal, mind) but it’s so mind-numbingly bland that I’m struggling.

Now, other than personal Blogs, the other thing I don’t do is bang my own drum/blow my own trumpet (delete as appropriate). But, damn it, I’m being absolutely wasted. My IT knowledge is superb, as is my ability to learn and adapt. I do web development in my own time as it’s creative and interesting - something my work-day isn’t.

A good few years ago I did a personality test (the Belbin Team Inventory), along with the rest of the team. It neatly divides you into different skills areas. Everyone had multiple skills. Except me. I had all my scores in one area - what was called a “plant”. This means…

Plants are creative, unorthodox and a generator of ideas. If an innovative solution to a problem is needed, a Plant is a good person to ask. A good plant will be bright and free-thinking. The Plant bears a strong resemblance to the popular caricature of the absent-minded professor-inventor, and often has a hard time communicating ideas to others.

Well, spot on, except for the last bit. Which is good, because I’ve cracked the one down-side. My communication, particularly of technical terms, to others is excellent. The idea is that you take a “plant” along to a meeting, whether they know the subject matter or not, and they’ll ask questions, make suggestions and, yes, generate ideas. My manager made advantage of this and took me along to his meetings after that. He’s not my manager now, but of my team-mates from back then, now in a senior position within the company, still “borrows” me every-so-often for just this reason. Unfortunately, it’s not recognised any wider.

Cards on the table… I am imaginative, creative and naturally gifted at IT. I’ve been programming since I was 12 for a start. Unlike many who came to IT because they saw a career in it, and possibly saw good salaries, IT chose me and it was natural for me to do it. It’s rare for someone to find their exact niche in life, but I did. Now it’s being wasted.

Meantime, I can just spend my spare time (including my lunches) indulging a little of my passion. Web development mainly, but I’m also writing an IT article which I hope to get published. I’m also designing an OS (not coding it, but design on paper. I may very well patent many of the ideas). I get to sleep most nights by designing things in my head. Ahhh, yes, the perfect TV, MP3 player, PC, etc. are all in my head! I should patent those actually… a modular PC idea that I had some time ago has recently been announced by an Asian company.

So my work problems aren’t due to not being able to do the job, but a simple lack of inspired and interesting work. I recently went directly to the Service Director and told him of my concerns and a possible solution. Since then I’ve been tasked with putting together details of this idea and turning into a formal presentation for management. It will free up the other support guys in the team to do development (which is what they want to do, and what they business needs) and move me into the support area. Great. Except my manager has ideas of moving someone else (who doesn’t want to go into support), and forcing me back into development. Do you think he doesn’t get it?

Why support and not development? I always loved coding when I was at home and college. And I love doing web development now. But I’ve never liked development commercially because of its constraints. I need to be able to use my imagination and flair but that’s stifled when I have to follow someone else’s designs. Support is great because its so random and you have to use some real imagination to get to the root of a problem quickly.

Oh well. I’m feeling a bit grumpy today because I woke up this morning feeling like I hadn’t got a wink of sleep. Probably spent too much of it subconsciously sorting out the online aspects of my OS….

Right. It gets technical now.

It seems my problems at work where my laptop takes an age to sign-on is due to it making a copy of your profile onto our LAN. For “roaming” purposes. Therefore the more you have in your profile folder, the longer it takes.

So I set about reducing this down. And in the process, I came across a number of useful workarounds and general tips.

As part of this (because IE puts its temporary files in your profile folder) I’ve created a “Temporary Files” folder on C:\ (both at home and at work) where I’m trying to get as many apps as possible to put their cache, temporary folders and general bog.

So far I’ve found that I can move IE Temp Files, Firefox Cache, OpenOffice Temporary Files and Java Temporary files. All in a single neat folder, out of the way.

Oh, the reason I’m doing this at home as well, is because it reduces the amount I’m regularly backing up, if I can remove the bog to a single folder out of the way.

Anyway, here are a couple of workarounds to problems that I came across too…

Move Firefox Disk Cache

• Type about:config into Firefox’s Address Bar and press Enter.
• Right click on the resultant screen and select the option to create a new string value.
• Name this entry browser.cache.disk.parent_directory
• The content should be the location of where you wish the cache to be located

And that’s it done.

Move a Firefox Profile

• Shut down Firefox
• Move the profile folder to the desired location. For example, on Windows XP, move the profile from C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to D:\Stuff\MyProfile
• Open up profiles.ini in a text editor. The file is located in the application data folder for Firefox on Windows Vista, XP, 2000: %AppData%\Mozilla\Firefox\
• In profiles.ini, locate the entry for the profile you’ve just moved. Change the Path= line to the new location. If you are using a non-relative pathname, the direction of the slashes may be relevant (this is true for Windows XP)
• Change IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0
• Save profiles.ini and restart Firefox