According to the wonderful Mixed Signals, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is searching for radio hosts. They're calling it "American Idol for public radio". I recently stumbled across Mixed Signals and was instantly hooked. Some of my recent favorites: The curatorship of Mixed Signals appears to change hands rather frequently. The las...

If you look at the structure, the way groups are expressed by the member do not match the value returned by : expresses grouping as a series of semicolon-separated numbers, each expressing the number of digits in each group (least-significant group first). A trailing zero indicates that the last grouping should be repeated indefinitely. For ex...

There is a new placard in our cafeteria which reads "Merchandise your food with pride". That's the first time I've seen the word "merchandise" used as a verb. Here, I'll translate that last paragraph into management speak for you: The cafeteria newly signed a placard whose read is "Merchandise your food with pride". That's my first see of a verb...

Most westerners are familiar with the fact that the way numbers are formatted differ between the United States and much of Europe. What people don't realize is that the grouping is not always in threes. In India, the least significant group consists of three digits, but subsequent groups are in pairs. I've also seen reports that the first group...

I remember some time ago getting a piece of email that basically said, "Hey, is anybody using start.com?" I have since learned that that domain was registered by the marketing department, presumably to "synergize" with the "Start Me Up" campaign or something like that, but nothing ever happened with it. Nevertheless the registration kept getting ...

The Government Accountability Office paid nineteen visits to chain tax preparers, presented information on two hypothetical families, and asked for assistance in preparing the tax return. "Only two returns showed the correct refund amount, but both of those returns included errors." The article goes into specifics of what sorts of mistakes were mad...

It was already taken, but that's okay.

In case you didn't get the joke, "News for dummies" is just my nickname for the news designed for non-native speakers. It tends to be spoken more slowly and use less advanced vocabulary. I use the term because I'm the dummy, you see. If I were smart, then I'd use the news for native speakers. (Sometimes I give it a shot and then my head explodes. G...

(This is the first in a series of short posts on where Microsoft products got their names.) The original name for the malware protection service was "mpsvc" the "Microsoft Protection Service", but it was discovered later that that filename was already used by malware! As a result, the name of the service had to be changed by sticking an "ms" in f...

What's the deal with the house in front of Microsoft's RedWest campus? Here is my understanding. It may be incomplete or even flat-out wrong. The house belongs to a couple who was unwilling to sell their property when Microsoft's real estate people were buying up the land on which to build the RedWest campus. (I'm told it was originally a chick...