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Talk Like Pirate Day Needs To Walk The Plank

Dear victims of the talk-like-pirate-day meme,

I’m sure hilarity ensued for about 5 whole minutes when you turned on the pirate-speech plugin on your blog. Ha! It says “tryin’” where it used to say “trying”! Hilarious! And it inserts stock phrases like “ye’ll be sleepin’ with the fishes” and “by Davy Jones’ locker!” randomly into the prose! What a hoot!

Of course it does this for the RSS feed as well. Randomly altering the text in the RSS feed. Hmm, are the alarm bells going off yet?

NetNewsWire shows the problem explicitly:

Every time I refresh in my blog reader, it re-reads your RSS, this time with different random phrases inserted by the pirate-speech plugin. The post itself is marked as updated and so I get to see your post again, each time with the randomly-inserted stock phrases moved around.

Result: *plonk* (or whatever the RSS unsubscribe noise is).

In conclusion, please:

• Just dont. Talk-like-pirate-day was “so over” last year even.
• If you have to, don’t pirate-speech-ify your RSS feeds.
• If you have pirate-speech-ify your RSS feeds don’t mark old posts as updated when they haven’t been.

On disc vs disk over that side—this seems a bit ex post facto by Apple. I think you’re right: traditionally it’s been “disk” in the US and “disc” most everywhere else. Of course the US doesn’t care about how things are spelled anywhere else, but when (European) Philips first thought of the CD they called it a “disc”, and that’s how the familiar trademark is spelled. (Similarly, DVD used to stand for “digital video disc”). So it still comes down to: things the Americans invent are disks, things other people invent are discs.

Wow, someone looks at my delicious links!

As for the disk/disc controversy, well I guess a simple explanation was too much to ask for. I like the optical/magnetic distinction though because it’s based on the item itself rather than it’^Hs origin. Maybe Apple needs to extend their definition somewhat. How would they describe the shape of a frisbee, for instance?

“round”?

:)