Random Rants

[Stephen Coates]

I hate it when people think WD40 is the answer to everything

Well it stopped the front brake squeaking on my Landlady's daughters bicycle on one occasion. I had to do a very silent rofl event.

Did it stop the bike from stopping as well as stopping the squeak?

[Kin Hell]

I hate it when people think WD40 is the answer to everything

Well it stopped the front brake squeaking on my Landlady's daughters bicycle on one occasion. I had to do a very silent rofl event.

Did it stop the bike from stopping as well as stopping the squeak?

Yes, indeed!

[Phantom]

WD40 FTW, and transparent silicone too for another kind of fixes.

[Kin Hell]

WD40 FTW, and transparent silicone too for another kind of fixes.

WD40 FTW..... ROFL & PMSL!

[Stephen Coates]

I want to rant about the overuse of abbreviations which (in my experience) seems to be very common recently. I found this topic here does a reasonably good job: http://www.foolsdesign.org/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=196

I'm not talking about commonly used internet abbreviations, like the ones Kin used in the above post, but less common ones which tend to be used where you don't expect them and where people (me included) won't understand them.

I sometimes end up reading documents which really should have a glossary attached (but often omit this).

I was reading through a document I found on the internet about a local radio station the other day and it referred to the abbreviations SW, AM, and MS. I immediately thought of Short Wave, Morning, and Multiple Sclerosis, but it turned out they were actually just people's initials.

On the subject of these MSs, when I was at college, I was reading meeting minutes which kept explaining that certain things were to be done by an MS. I kept thinking to myself, what the hell is an MS? Apart from Multiple Sclerosis, the only thing that springs to mind is Microsoft. It took me most of the year to figure out that this 'MS' is actually the initials of the director of higher education . There was another document which I got from college which I'm sure they wrote by using some random character generator.

Surely I can't be the only person who has trouble with abbreviations?

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Another rant for today.

I'm getting a bit fed up of people who seem to lack skills in both typing and spelling. I've recently been chatting with someone who seems to lack both a ' key and a . key, and misspells practically every word. His communication really is rather difficult to read. I would post a quote but I don't want to break any confidentiality.

This seems rather common, and I'm sure its getting worse these days.

There's also the issue of people who try and let their computers write for them, which seems to result in people saying things which are wrong, or don't make sense .

[Harrison]

I often fall into the trap of predictive text on here and other forums due to using a tablet a lot to post and it's predictive swipe typing being a bit to smart for its own good and trying to predict what you are writing, and not always noticing every work it inserts wrongly.

Anyway, regarding acronyms.. I totally agree. At Royal Mail (RM) they use a lot of them and some you would never guess unless told, and even then you might be left clueless as to their actual meaning. A great example is UTR.. we started to receive red sleeved yorks of packets from DOs (Distribution Offices) with red UTR labels on them a couple of years ago.. After asking various managers I finally discovered it meant Under the Roof.. but that still meant nothing to me.. until I spoke to some more people and uncovered that UTR meant another RM office had pre-cut, tipped and sorted the work being sent as UTR, so it didn't need to be processed and could bypass the initial process within the distribution centre and by moved directly to the next stage, speeding up the process. But UTR or Under the Roof is still a very strange name to give it IMO.

[Stephen Coates]

Do you manage OK typing on tablets? I've only done it a few times and I didn't get on with it too well, but they are big enough for a full qwerty keyboard, so I don't see the need for predictive text.

As for abbreviations, I have a document in the loft called 'DWP Corporate Abbreviations' (from the Department for Work and Pensions). It is a very long document. I should post it here just for the fun of it.

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Update: I just found a PDF of the file on the gov.uk site, which I have attached. Well worth a browse.

[Harrison]

Tablets and phones predict the words the same way and sometimes it can waste time when it refuses to accept a word being typed.

Typing on a tablet or phone is so slow compared to a real keyboard.

I do like swype typing though. Have you tried it? You need to know a qwerty keyboard well to utilise it more easily, but it can be much faster.

[Stephen Coates]

Never heard of it, but then I don't have any touch screen devices, and have plenty of mechanical keyboards.

[Stephen Coates]

Just seen an interesting way of distributing viruses. Instead of the usual zipped SCR files, which I often get, this time I got a zipped SHTML file, which loaded a website up in an iframe, and redirected to Google Docs which downloaded the SCR file .