2003.08.21
If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and Earth will have to pause and say, 'Here lived a great sweeper, who swept his job well.'Doggone it, today I'm going to be the very best Sales Tax and VAT software programmer I can be.
Link of the Moment
It's a lot of material, but if you like funny and bitter office writing, check out Enter the Cow-orker, many many blog-like entries from the past 2 years or so about one Australian guy's awful, awful officemate. If you're in a hurry check out this entry, this one (which makes sense if you consider the last one, plus all the other overheard phoneconversations related previously in the site), and this one.
Product of the Moment
Heh. On (I think) right wing Christian radio they were advertising the TV Guardian, a product that promised to automagically bleep out swear words on TV. I was wondering what miracle of speech recognition technology the conservatives had come up with this time, but according to the FAQ, it depends on finding the written version of the offending phrase inside the Closed Captioning, so anything with no or spotty captioning won't work. (Heh, the front page has a chart with some popular movies and what percentage of the cuss words get blocked...they mention that even the family favorite ET has Elliot calling his brother, and her I quote the site, "#!*&#breath". The #!*&# stands for "penis", I always thought "penis breath" was a terrifically evocative phrase. I'd hate to deprive a kid of that. (Really pointless reminiscence: I remember an old Wittenburg Door issue during the height of the ET craze, showing a parody dialog from some church council talking about this movie and its use of the "P-word", and one guy keeps asking "What's the P-word?")