A working life
Archive for October, 2009
NORWEGIANS: CONCATENATE!
Oct 30th
Those who know me know that I’m a bit pedantic when it comes to spelling and spelling errors. This morning, Aftenposten.no had an article about a common spelling error amongst Norwegians (article in Norwegian).
Molde FK, a Norwegian premier league team have made supporter scarfs for the upcoming Cup Final November 8th.
In Norwegian, as opposed to English, you should not have a space between Cup and Final. As the image shows, the scarf says “CUP FINALE“, but what it should say is “CUPFINALE“.
Molde used an external company, Scan Trade, to make the the scarfs. Scan Trade’s representative, Geir Tønnesland has the following to say:
We should have found the error before shipping the design.
I agree completely. It’s not very hard to proofread the text on a supporter scarf!
Further, Tønnesland says:
At the same time, we have short deadlines here.
Now that is no excuse. If print text on fabric for a living, you should know how to spell, besides – It’s like 5 words!
You might call me pedantic, but this is unfortunately not a unique case. This kind of spelling error (no: særskrivingsfeil) is becoming very common in the Norwegian language. It is one of the most common mistakes among Norwegians.
Why one shouldn’t split words
The main reason why two (or more) words should be concatenated in Norwegian is that splitting them completely changes the meaning.
An example is “Leie priser” that translates to “Fed up prizes” or “Not-so-good prices”.
The correct spelling would be “Leiepriser” that simply means “Rental prices”.
The organization Astronomer mot Orddeling (AMO) has many more fun examples of such errors.
They’ve also published a book, “Tunfisk biter i vann” (Tuna bites in water), with loads of examples.
Highly recommended Christmas gift!
WHAT THE FUTURE BRINGS …
Oct 29th
Options and their probability
I have a lot of question going on in my mind these days. I don’t think about them all the time, but they’re there. I’m in my final year of my Masters degree in Electronics – uncertainty is getting closer.
I don’t know what I will do or where I will be after June 2010. And that’s a scary thought.
I have three possible and probable options
- Find a job
- Apply for a PhD position at NTNU
- Stay a student and take classes I like
To find a job is the “normal” thing to do, and what I consider it to be the most probable. The more I’ve been working on my project this fall, the more I find it intriguing to apply for a PhD position here at NTNU, I like what I do for my project. But do I like it enough to continue for 3-4 more years? Again an unanswered question.
The last thing on my list is to spend a 6th year in Trondheim as a student. I’ve been thinking of taking classes I haven’t been able to take during my time here. I’d like to learn more languages and to get more formal knowledge of computer science.
This post is a bit hard to wrap up, many thoughts and questions have popped into my mind as I’ve been writing.
I will have to figure it out. I will.
STILL A KID!
Oct 27th
Skabaré at UKA (Photo: Last weekend was a fun one. Firstly I finally got to see UKA-09′s Skabaré, the show that I missed on my first attempt.
Skabaré was an impressive show and I had a great time. Unfortunately I found the script to be poor from time to time. Of course, some sketches were great, but too many of them were mediocre, mostly due to several bad punchlines.
Overall though, I’m very pleased. Skabaré is an impressive show. The overall quality was very good, the costumes, scenography to and the performers – it was all very professional!
Sunday was a relaxing day, and I spent most of the day in the sofa with Andreas and Ellen watching The Big Bang Theory before we made pancakes and went all “avantgarde” with the blueberry jam! I haven’t had that much fun with food in many years!
Sunday evening a whole bunch of us (Andreas, Stig, Robert, Øystein, Sindre, Jon-Andre and more) attended the SIT/UKA-09 happening in Pirbadet. Pirbadet is an indoor pool with diving towers and a water slide. It was really fun to be back in Pirbadet, I haven’t been there for over two years. I consider Pirbadet to be too expensive (115NOK/ticket), but this time only 50NOK!
We played around like kids, jumping and trying to go as fast as possible in the water slide (it’s fitted with a stop watch).
Still great fun to be a kid!
GOING SOLO
Oct 26th
Photo: Alone, but not lonely
Life is long, there are lots of changes, big and small. This time it’s a very small change in my life, but I hope it will remove some irritation that I’ve built up during the past months.
iPublish has been my blog provider the past year, but I’ve decided it’s time to change. I’m going solo. I’ve bought my own little space on the web, no blog provider limiting my possibilities.
The limitations that I’ve experienced while using iPublish, specially since they changed to WordPress MU is the reason why I’ve decided to leave iPublish. I don’t like the blog themes available, nor the support I’ve received when trying to contact iPublish Support.
The blog is WordPress based, using a slightly modified version of the Mystique theme.
I’ve very happy with the look so far and this is most likely how the blog will look for quite some time, hope you like it!
Photo by: Έλενα Λαγαρία (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
iPublish goes WordPress MU
Oct 24th
I started out with this blog using iPublish‘s own blogging platform and I’ve been using it for over a year now. During this year iPublish has grown very fast, and they’ve had serious issues handling their popularity, something that has resulted in unstable servers and sometimes lack of service.
About one and a half month ago iPublish changed their blogging platform from their homemade platform to the more stable and reliable WordPress MU, something they definitely needed.
Loosing my head!
Unfortunately, the switch was premature. Somehow iPublish has managed to skip the header images of each post. When asking Support about the matter I was told, that this error unfortunately had happened in some cases (the entirety of my 100 cases) and the best they could do was for me to log into the old control panel and download the images manually and paste them into the posts again.
Well, tough luck I though, I’ll have to do the transfer manually. When trying to access the old control panel I realized it is no longer available!
This domain (login.ipublish.no) is no longer registered with a customer. What!?
Reading between the lines?
The second thing that has caused problems to the transfer to WordPress MU goes all the way back to spring 2009 when iPublish had a control panel upgrade and removed their Introduction field in the “Add post” section. Two fields, the excerpt and the main text window were reduced to a single one.
This change had no significant change to the blogs as seen from the outside world, but what annoyed me then (and even more now) is that iPublish didn’t merge the text in the two fields (in their database), making text written in the Introduction field unavailable to the author.
At the time I pointed out the weakness, but no action was taken from iPublish’ side. The issue got a lot bigger when I realized that iPublish didn’t transfer the Introduction field when transferring to WordPress MU.
Now I have several posts with a title, but no text!
I cannot express how insanely idiotic this is, specially since iPublish never gave the user the possibility to backup their posts!
I have contacted iPublish Support about these issues, but have yet to receive an answer solving the problem …
