I have seen my lifetime supply of slides like the following:

My good friend Bruce Wyman – the Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum – has a thoughtful post up this morning titled Simplification of Things, Part 1 of Some.  In it, he shows us a better way to communicate what this slide doesn’t.

I have a handful of chronic grammar problems.  I received the following email yesterday:

You seem like an intelligent guy.  But you insist on referring to your friends as, "that."  If you’re not just trying to fit in by using bad grammar (as everyone else seems to do), show everyone how smart you really are.

"To all my friends that are . . . ."
"Since they are the ones that . . . ." 
"(Name) that is . . . ."

How about using the word, "who" instead of "that" when you refer to people?  "My friend who will be . . . ."  "To all my friends who are . . . ."  "Since they are the ones who . . . ."

To which I responded:

I have 12 grammar problems.  Then / than, who / whom, accept / except, …., and that / who!  Thanks for calling me out on it – I’ll try harder but given that I’m 42 and can’t seem to get my brain wired for these few things, I’m probably screwed for life.

Thanks oh vigilant grammarians for keeping me on my toes.

While I’m usually amused by the copyright gaffes I see, I laughed out loud when I saw that Google News was still Copyright 2007 (thanks to dschwartz for the tip.) 

Dear Mr. Google: It’s almost February 2008.  Oh – and make the date a variable! 

I guess I should be nice since I’m sure some of the companies I’ve funded haven’t fixed (or variable-ized) the copyright dates on their site.

I almost managed to not to write my annual "please update the copyright on your website" post.  Matt Blumberg even called me out for being off my game this year.  But this morning, after seeing the 5,323rd Copyright 2007 message of the year, I decided I could no longer resist the urge to shout at the top of my lungs: "It’s 2008 – update your copyright."  Oh – by the way – you are a software or web company – there’s a way to do this so it gets automatically updated – it’s called "using a variable for the year."

This has now been a pet peeve of mine since 1980.  Did you know that the use of the copyright notice has been optional since 1989 as a result of the 1988 Berne Convention Implementation Act?  Think of what you could use all of those pixels for.

I spent 45 minutes this morning desmegmafying three new Xbox 360 controllers, three new Wii controllers, a Wii charger, and a bunch of videogames.  Thanks to everyone that suggested Wii and Xbox 360 games to me – BioShock ate my morning (after I got the controllers out of their packages.)

My experience reminded me of Mark Cuban’s brilliant post from 2006 titled Seagate Leaves me bloody…  My right index finger is now sliced, my left palm has a cut on it, and my left index finger is still bleeding a little – five hours later.  But I’ve liberated the controllers from their plastic jail, inserted the batteries, and gotten my butt kicked at Wii Table Tennis.

When I looked at the damage I had done (including scraping up over 50% of the brand new controllers I’d gotten, including one particularly gruesome two inch long scratch in the black plastic of a brand new Xbox controller), I pondered the pile of crumpled and useless plastic that will take 154,792 years to decompose.

I spent some time on Wikipedia trying to figure out the type of evil plastic that is used for this stuff and got bogged down in common plastics and their usages.  I now know more about polycarbonates, polystyrene, and acrylonitrile butadiene styrene than I thought I’d ever want to know.

Why, oh why, do consumer products companies insist on using this shit?  There has got to be a better way.  I’m sure I would have done better at Wii Table Tennis if I hadn’t damaged my hands.