STC Eastern Ontario Blog

I’m sure most of you have seen this e-mail at some point. I can’t remember the first time I saw it but I remember the two last times because both happened at work, one quite recently.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

I don’t know what possesses people to just blindly forward things like that on to every one they know without doing a tiny amount of research. It takes only a quick Google search to find Matt Davis’ page at the University of Cambridge, which analyzes each sentence of the meme to explain why that particular paragraph is easy to read and why it isn’t as simple as the meme itself would have you believe. He also shows examples of the meme in other languages.

I received an e-mail today informing me that Sam Estwick, former member of the STC and editor of Stimulus way back when it first started, passed away on February 13, 2008, at the age of 92.

A celebration of Sam’s life will be held on Saturday March 1st, at 2:00 p.m. in Lupton Hall, at The Perley - Rideau Veterans’ Health Centre (PRVHC), 1750 Russell Rd, Ottawa.

In memoriam, donations in Sam’s name, to Perley - Rideau Foundation, Gloucester Senior Adults Centre, or charity of choice is greatly appreciated.

What a sad event. Mimi and I had hoped to talk with him last year about his history with the STC and technical writing in general but he was too ill at the time. My thoughts and wishes are with his widow, Louise, and his family.

Additional information about his life and career:

• Who’s who in Black Canada 2
• Ottawa Remembers - November 9, 2006

Dreamhost, our Web host for this site and my personal Web host, ran an automated billing process last night that apparently had the wrong billing date set. So, instead of cleaning up billing up to Jan. 14, 2007, it thought today was Dec. 31, 2008. This caused it to (a) automatically deduct/charge the money for those people who were set up with automatic payment and (b) send an email to each account holder telling them that they were overdue. I must have been one of the first to notice as I was up and on the computer at the time the emails came through. Luckily, we don’t have an automatic payment set up so all we got was the email (well, I got two, since I also got the one for my personal accounts).

See the story at the Dreamhost blog as well as their status site (the former is interesting for the comments and the latter is interesting because it’s written by Josh, the guy who screwed up) and at news sites like Infoworld.

People are pissed. I don’t blame them. If I’d woken up today to find my bank account emptied or my credit card maxed out because Dreamhost made a mistake, I’d be livid. As it stands, I’m happy that I don’t have automatic payments set (though when I did it was limited to I think $30 in any one calendar month).

And I am a little worried what the state of Dreamhost will be when the dust settles.

Check out the reviews on this lovely piece of classic technology.

They’re a bit pricey but don’t the reviews just make you want one?

Free Rice offers a multiple-choice vocabulary quiz — for every word you get right, they “donate 20 grains of rice through the United Nations to help end world hunger”. It adjusts to your abilities — if you get a word wrong, it’ll bump you down to an easier level; if you get three words in a row correct, you move up to a harder level. There are 50 levels, but they say that “it is rare for people to get above level 48″.

Hey ho ho ho.

For those of you who missed this year’s resource chat tonight, we missed you, and you missed some good leads to resources. One of the resources I learned of tonight was 20/20, a free screen capture software program.

Another program that I mentioned was The Gimp, which is free software for image editing.

There was also a book given away from my personal library (on web-based course ware development).

Consider coming out to the next meeting (theme is indexing). I’ve got a few more books to go that will be in line with the subject.

Think about your part/place in this revolution:

Saw this in Thursday’s Ottawa Citizen under Volunteer Roundup - was thinking if people wanted experience …

eMentalHealth is a website that could use your help, if you can access the Internet and want to learn more about site maintenance. They’re looking for checkers to ferret out typos, errors in fact and dead links, and communicate with the site administrator. You choose your time, day or night. Call Amy Martin at 613-723-1623 ext 264.

The latest issue of Reader’s Digest features an article called How Polite Are Canadians?:

“For our test, we travelled from Vancouver to St. John’s, to find out if the rumours are true: that courtesy is a thing of the past.”

Ottawa, with a score of 50%, ranked at the bottom of the 15 cities in which the completely unscientific social experiment took place. One of the testers remarked:

And although Ottawa scored as the least courteous city in this year’s test, at 50% it was still quite polite on a world scale and would have ranked 21st on our global test of 36 cities a year ago. Yet there was a tension in the air, especially at rush hour, when many people didn’t seem to have time to stop and help out. In fact, once when we dropped papers on the sidewalk, not only did everyone rush past without stopping, but the driver of a car wanting to get past us from the street and into the parking garage leaned on his horn while we scrambled to pick up our papers and get out of his way.

A colleague and I were talking about this Reader’s Digest article yesterday and I tried to articulate why I think the impression that Ottawa is rude is wrong. I’d tried to do that when I wrote a rebuttal to a Letter to the Editor in the Ottawa Citizen a couple of months ago but, well, I don’t know how well that went over.

The idea of extreme rudeness in Ottawa crops up regularly in articles, blogs, and discussion boards, not to mention in casual conversation. The first time I came to Ottawa, I left with the impression that the people were horribly rude and lacking in common courtesy. I resisted moving up here for more than a decade simply because I couldn’t imagine myself living among such coldness. Since moving up here, though, I’ve discovered that Ottawa is a city where you get what you put out. If you are friendly and open, you will usually get friendliness and openness in return (not counting drivers — road rage is universal LOL).

It’s as though the governmental nature of the city has crept into the bones of the residents so that they have to follow some unwritten protocol when interacting with others — if they’re unsure how to interact with you, they default to aloof (all the better to not to do anything that might offend). But rarely have I ever had my friendliness met with rudeness. So, for me, I get from the city’s inhabitants what I share with them.

What are your experiences? Do you think Ottawans are rude? Misunderstood?

Our kick-off meeting last night was a rousing success. There was a smaller turnout this year than last year but it was still larger than many previous years. It was fantastic to meet everyone and I hope you all enjoyed yourselves.

Thanks again to Don Monet of Cube Gallery for the venue — the Green exhibit is fascinating and I urge anyone who didn’t attend last night’s event to consider checking it out on your own.

And thanks to Carlos Barbosa and the staff at Big Daddy’s Crab Shack and Oyster Bar on Elgin. The food was awesome, and many people left with ample doggy bags at the end of the evening. And the Hurricane punch bowl was drained.