September 2008
Monthly Archive
Funny that McCain and Obama didn’t mention Canada or NATO
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 27 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Canada, politics, USA
I don’t really want to start commentary about the US Presidential race, since so many other people are already saying so much. But I do want to mention one thing that struck me, as a resident of Canada.
In last Friday’s debate (Sept 26, 2008) between John McCain and Barack Obama, they talked about the outlook for the war in Afghanistan. They both described it in purely US terms, as if the US was fighting that war alone.
Unicode Doggerel (“I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme”)
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 10 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: culture, meetings and conferences, Unicode
This was fun! On Tuesday night (9. Sept 2008), there was a tribute to the 20th anniversary of Unicode at the 32nd Internationalization and Unicode Conference. I wrote this in a creative fury on Monday afternoon. The anniversary celebration was at an evening reception. It was very funny and enjoyable. Several other people contributed amusing tributes. My song appeared to be well-received. I hope you enjoy it.
(Sung to the tune of “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, by Gilbert and Sullivan.)
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme,
a million scalars, astral planes, and UTFs like six-&-teen,
and UAX and UTR, collation, bidi, properties,
I am the very model of a modern text encoding scheme.
Jim is a panelist at the Internet Marketing Conference, Vancouver, Sept 12
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 07 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: culture, i18n, language, meetings and conferences, Vancouver
I’m going to be a panelist at the Internet Marketing Conference Vancouver 2008, which runs from September 11-12, 2008. The panel is called “Writing for the Web“. It is full of experts on writing — and then there’s me. I’ll be approaching from the topic crosswise, talking about international and multilingual issues. In other words, how your writing is affected if it will be translated, or is part of a multinational project.
The panelists are an interesting bunch. I’m looking forward to meeting them. They are:
- Crawford Kilian, author of “Writing for the Web 3.0“. My spouse sweated bullets to write two books, and they shared content. Crof has written 30.
- Elizabeth Southall, Powerhouse Copy. Just reading her website makes my jaw drop. The lady knows her copy.
- Tom McNamara, McNamara Communications. Writing for the web since 1995, which is about as long as we’ve had the web.
- Monique Trottier, Boxcar Marketing, which is a Vancouver-based internet marketing company.
- Moderator: Michael Straker, VKI Studios, which is an Internet marketing and website usability firm.
- Jim DeLaHunt, Jim DeLaHunt & Associates. That would be me.