isoglossia

Somehow, February’s skies didn’t get any publicity, so here’s an extra-large serving. February and March skies over Nova Gorica:

November
December
January

A few weeks back I received an email from one of my sisters, a typical email, an everyday, ordinary email, containing the word ‘atlatl’. Though I have a number of sisters, I have only one who is likely to use this word in an idle fashion.

So a few weeks go by and I am moved to reply to this email. What’s more, I feel the need to refer to the atlatls she mentioned. Typing ‘atlatl’ into the pristine whiteness of a text field produces a dotted red underlining which is Firefox’s way of alerting you to a misspelling or typo. This spellchecker is a new addition since Firefox version 2.0, and I am usually happy to have it enabled — it’s especially good for catching typos in blog comment fields. Right-clicking pulls up a context menu with suggestions for what you may have intended to type (above you can see what the dictionary thinks ‘atlatl’ was meant to be), as well as the option of adding the unknown word to the dictionary’s pool of knowledge.

We shouldn’t be too surprised that Firefox is ignorant of this word even if my sister is not. But sometimes the suggestions are pretty outrageous (see the last two offerings for ‘atlatl’).

Of course, I had to inform my sister that the onboard dictionary was unaware of the atlatl and that I was adding the word to the database, just in case I ever have reason to refer to paleolithic dart-launchers again. I find I spend a lot of time educating my dictionary, and there are times when we disagree. For example, on certain compound words:

I am a bit surprised that Firefox’s creators did not make the dictionary a little more web-savvy, given what most users are doing with this browser all day and night:

Related: Firefox seems to be ignorant of the string i + capitalized noun/verb, screening out iPod, iTunes, iPhoto, iSquint (well, okay), etc. Interestingly, ‘Yahoo’ and ‘Colbert’ gave no trouble.

At some point subsequent to the adding of ‘atlatl’ to my Firefox dictionary I typed the word ‘dumbassery’ and of course this got flagged, too:

Use of email in blog posts:
Banjeroo’s thirteen-year-old emails
A Copper Cylinder’s maiden post deconstructs an email from his brother
‘Deconstruct’ should be ‘reconstruct’, says Firefox.

How to: edit your Firefox dictionary
Download additional dictionaries (including Slovene and five varieties of English)

Thematically related: Violations

The fact that this photo was taken just moments later and a few hundred meters from the site of the previous Venice picture posted here is a testament to the infinite variety and rich contrasts that La Serenissima is heir(ess) to. Riva degli Schiavoni (Quay of the Slavs, appropriately enough). In the right of frame, the lagoon continues to rise as Venice settles majestically into the Adriatic whose bride she has long been down these damp, corrosive centuries.

Still sinking.

Previous screams:
Thanksgiving leftovers edition
Catalan version
Anthropomorphized ant edition
Ljubljana’s Stepford babies
Poorly-lomo’d coulrophobia

Just past the eight-week mark and Jeż has doubled his weight. Magda reports via SMS that he now tips the scales at just over 6 kilograms. In contrast, his brother still doesn’t weigh that much. The day of reckoning approaches.

Magda also notes that in this particular outfit he looks like Al Swearengen, which is a fairly chilling thing to say about a two-month-old baby. Yet it is true.

If an analogy were necessary, I would say that I have just completed the blog equivalent of replacing the transmission using a bent pair of pliers and a butterknife. I let the two-year anniversary of this site pass without mention, but that unmarked occasion rekindled in me the sense of the lazy, the Luddite, and the pessimist that arises whenever I think about updating the blogging engine that makes this site run. It’s been over 15 months since the last major update was released, and I’ve been avoiding installing it ever since.

It wasn’t an uncharacteristic sense of competence that finally convinced me to do the upgrade, but rather a sudden eruption of cranky bugs in the old version. The site’s appearance was taken hostage and WordPress claimed to have no idea where the necessary files were although I could see them sitting right there on the remote server. In fact, for the last week or so no one should have been able to see the site at all, according to WordPress 1.5. After trying to work out why, and fooling around for longer than seemed reasonable, I figured that if I was going to waste that kind of time I might as well waste it thoroughly and do a full data backup and upgrade to the just-released WordPress 2.1.2. The touted “Five-Step Upgrade” turned into a much more involved project than advertised, though I was more or less prepared for that (see ‘pessimist’ above).

I mention all of this not because of the radical redesign (the appearance, after much cursing and uploading, finally returns to the theme of the last year, and you shouldn’t see anything new), but to ask the help of our various readers in identifying bugs, if any; when I first assembled from chewing gum and coathangers installed the comment preview page there were some problems various readers alerted me to, for example, and then there was the famous lame-browser display issue more recently. So please drop us a comment (if possible) or an email should this upgrade in any way impinge on your isoglossia experience.

And I had hoped to have time to do some really important blogging business today, such as posting some amusing pictures of pugs or kitties.