The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

Today, I was amazed at the sudden change in direction an IRC conversation took. This afternoon, on IRC, my friend George gave us a link from The Register about how AOL UK is dropping their support for Mac OS X and focusing on supporting Windows. At one point in the article, a spokesdroid for AOL UK states that localizing the software — the act of “translating” the software for another country and culture — takes “may months of effort”. I mentioned that if localization was so expensive, they could simply use the American version instead. After all, although both countries spoke different variants of English, the American software would still be comprehensible to British users.

And that’s when Adam went off. Adam often comes off as a complete and total prick who needs a good working over with a two-by-four, but he is a dear friend for whom I would take a bullet nonetheless. Adam’s a walking contradiction — the most belligerent peacenik I know, a genius at human-computer interface who generally holds most humans in at least mild contempt. He’s prone to ranting, and especially on matters of Apple-versus-Microsoft (he’s a Mac zealot, sometimes to the point of irrationality) and war. Combine the two, and you’ve got the recipe for an Excedrin headache.

Somehow the thought of making Brits use software localized for Yanks got him on a tirade about American cultural imperialism. He went on about how the Americans naturally assume that the world should adopt their values and be like them.

Steaky baby (my nickname for Adam), you’re talking about protecting the home of the once-mighty British Empire from cultural imperialism? The people who who brought us the Raj in India, the Opium War, never ever installed an ethnic Chinese as governor during their tenure in Hong Kong, caused trouble even in their own backyard and practically wrote the book on imperialism? I think they can handle a little American spelling.

I was suggesting a way to get British Mac users to still use AOL, not a way to turn the UK into the 51st state! Geez, these Limeys (Adam’s descended from ’em) are so touchy when it comes to Queen and country.

One wonders how these dentally-challenged pasty-faced anorak-wearing lightweightsmanaged to take over so much of the world in the first place.

Editor’s Note: Mr. deVilla wishes to make it clear that Adam should not take the above too seriously. Mr deVilla also suggests Adam avail himself of the many laxatives available at a finer drugstore near him. ASAP.

I blame George

It’s George’s fault. He started it. But I will forgive his little faux pas and visit him in New York City in order to celebrate his birthday with him. And embarass him in public by playing “Happy Birthday” on the accordion for him in a very crowded public place.

May I recommend…

Stuff About Things, a blog about stuff and things by my friend and co-worker, John Henson.

Also of note: pony, a blog by my friend and former co-worker, Adina. She has a keen journalistic sense. You can tell just by the way she noticed the rise in incidence of public farting and dutifully noted it in her blog. Look out, Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein!

I’ve been doing a fair bit of work in C#, so I decided to take advantage of that and start filling in the C# and VB.NET blanks. Since they’re based on the same interpreter (the Common Language Runtime) and class library (.NET framework), it was reasonably easy to work on both. You should be able to see my results in the string functions and math functions sections, and to a lesser degree in the new data types section.

Lots to do this afternoon, so I’ll post more later…

One of the nice policies where I work is that they give you a day off for your birthday. The day off doesn’t have to be on your actual birthday, which means you can use the anniversary of your birth to turn a ho-hum original recipe weekend into an extra-crispy long weekend. That’s exactly what I’m doing today.

Geek

I was looking at my friend Xiuzan’s blog, where she says that according to the Geek Test at fuali.com, she’s 31% geek. I took the test, and clocked in at 58%! I think that’s a little high for my liking — I’ll leave the extreme hardcore geek stuff to the experts (say, my housemate). For my efforts, I was rewarded with this cute little link button. The button says “I may not be cool or good-looking, but I make mad dough”. I must disagree — I am cool and good-looking, and I don’t make mad dough. Oh well. While doing some random Googling, I found the source of the “geek girl” image from the button — a fake shrine to “Bedzie Skagovichski: Most beautiful girl in all of Poznan University” on a fake personal site relying on immigrant humour. Am theenking I am funny, no?

More ways to procrastinate

• Check out this bit of creative ad-editing done to a Windows XP ad in London, England.

• Spam your loved ones from beyond the grave.
• Religious nut-job uses Windows XP to demonstrate the existence of God (using the “Intelligent Design” argument). Proof of the existence of Satan. maybe…

Geek

I’ve been a little on the busy side for the past few days, so I’m a little behind on my blogging. They’ve been keeping me busy at my place of employment by working on a prototype app, which I’ve decided to write in C# because I need to get a UI up and running in a hurry, and there’s no better way to learn a new language than using it on a real project. I suppose I could’ve gone with VB, a language in which a have a number of years’ experience, but as VB tools guru Daniel Appleman (the guy behind Desaware) puts it in this article, “there are going to be managers and companies stupid enough to pay more for C# programmers, and in those cases VB.NET programmers have a moral obligation to take their money”. Sounds like a good enough reason to me.

Non-geek

Last Sunday, my nephew, Aidan William devilla-Choi was christened, and I was named his Godfather. I spent a good chunk of the day talking with a gravelly-throated Marlon Brando-esque voice. About a half-dozen babies were baptized at the same time, the most notable one being related to a family who lookeas if they’d fallen out of a bad sitcom on the WB. They wore the loudest zoot suits this side of American Pimp, but I have to give ’em mad props for representin’. Sometimes you need to say “fuck whitey” and go for the funk. Note to my sister: yes, I’ll post the pictures soon, in my online family album. Promise.

It’s late and I need to go to bed. More later.

This is the very first posting to The Adventures of AccordionGuy in the 21st Century. I won’t report anything right now, other than that this blog is now up and running.