Technically Speaking

This Morning’s Deseret Morning News included a special section that featured the players from the Utah Jazz basketball organization sponsoring a “No Books” day at school. The section included a number of activities for kids, and included educational advice from the players for Utah’s kids.

Problem #1: This is supposed to encourage our children to achieve academic excellence, yet March 8th is a “No Books” day? How does that work?

Problem # 2: Does anybody realize that the majority of these players are college drop-outs? And we are encouraging our kids to take their educational advice?

Personally, I’d rather my kids got educational advice from the two students who scored “perfect scores” on this year’s ACT test. (Incidentally, one of the students is the son of one of Christina’s German professors at BYU.) I mean, really, who do you want your kids to emulate? Professional whiners (the Jazz can hardly be called “professional basketball players” this season) or educational top achievers?

But what do I know. I’m just a college graduate… Bring on the ACT pros!

If I needed another reason for why I don’t mention my company’s name in my blog, then here it is:

A CNN.com article today talks about people who have been fired for violating company policy on their blogs. Not that I ever have come close to violating company policy on my blog… but in any case, I think it is probably a good thing that X company doesn’t get mentioned by name. It’s not worth the potential trouble…

P.S. – I find it very funny that the Blogger.com spell check doesn’t recognize the plural form of the word blog.

I never make mistakes. I mean, once I thought I made a mistake, but I was wrong.

So, I guess there is always a first time for everyting. Never let it be said that I’m too proud to admit I’ve made a mistake.

So today I realized that I’ve been spelling a word wrong since the end of January. I am supposed to be documenting a feature in the software called “Role-based timeouts.” Basically users of the system are assigned various roles (e.g. student, instructor, or administrator) and this property in the system lets users with different roles have different allotted times to be idle in the system before their account is logged out automatically.

Anyway, so for more than a month I’ve been calling this property “Roll-based timeouts.”

It was only today when I was finally writing the documentation that I realized that roll-based timeouts were not the same as role-based timeouts.

I’ve sent e-mails to developers and programmers about this; I’ve kept logs where I’ve written this wrong. I have a folder with the wrong title on it. I have used the wrong word in all communication on this project.

Since we aren’t bakers here, I think that I’m going to have to start calling them role-based. Either that, or I’ll have to start looking for a job as a baker, because I apparently can’t spell well enough to be a technical writer!!