ThePickards
standards, accessibility, and ranting and general stuff by the web chemist

…no, this isn’t the cue for some sort of set of racist jokes about how “all them foreigners talk funny, don’t they”, it’s an idea for a blog post.
Basically, the idea is to write a blog post for Sunday 1st June — about whatever it is I would fancy writing about in a particular day […]

Read: Foreign Language Day »

According to the NCC, software licences are unfair, partly because they’re virtually incomprehensible, and partly because you don’t get a chance to see what the conditions for using the product are until after you’ve bought it.
Well of course that’s unfair. I said exactly that about 18 months ago when I launched my personal campaign for […]

Read: Software Licences are unfair »

Last year I wrote a post (for St George’s day) called For England and St George!. I’m tempted immediately to re-hash it in the light of The Goldfish’s recent post on Britishness. But that wouldn’t do The Goldfish’s post the credit it deserves, so instead I’ll just re-hash the title!
The Goldfish feels that the […]

Read: For England And St George! (again) »

Okay, some of you might remember that a few weeks ago I mentioned a hypothetical situation involving a 5-a-side team which lost 22-0.
Well, after that game, they got a proper goalkeeper, and lost the next match 5-1 before winning their third 6-4. Unfortunately, this hypothetical team’s entirely hypothetical goalkeeper then picked up rather too many […]

Read: 5-a-side jargon busting »

No, that’s not an Al Qaeda operative, it’s a command from IDEA who in the back end of 2007 posted a list of 100 words public bodies shouldn’t use as recommended by the LGA.
Yes, I know I really should have commented on it at the time, but I wasn’t aware of it before, and […]

Read: Bin Jargon »

I had an interesting — if rather bordering on lexicographical — discussion at work today over the use of the words “alternate” and “alternative”. Well, I thought it was interesting, okay?
Basically, our team have some chocolate advent calendars for December and someone had devised a rota to determine who is going to get what sweets […]

Read: The Alternate Alternative? »

No, we don’t know either. But we ended up having a discussion about it at work and came up with the following:

Wor Net
Gannin’ Inter Net
Mint-Ranet
Alr33t Pet Net
Wey Aye Web
Geordipedia
Haway Home Page

With a possible alternate variation of Alreet Pet Net for the non l33t-speakers. There was also a concern that for people not familiar with Wikipedia, […]

Read: I say, I say, I say, what do you call a Geordie Intranet? »

Aarrr, that be right, ye scurvy dogs! Today be Talk Like A Pirate Day again where the whole point is to lay about ye with your belayin’ pin at those landlubbers ye want to get to walk the plank.
So, grab yourself a lusty wench and a bottle of rum, and go get your timbers shivered, […]

Read: Talk Like A Pirate 2007 »

I just thought I’d write a few thoughts about some of the abusive messages I’ve been receiving on my site recently, let you know what was behind them, how I feel about them, and what my thoughts are regarding different sorts of comments on my site.
…If I was you I would climb down off your […]

Read: Abusive Messages and Commenting Policy »

For those of you who can’t translate the pig latin above, it’s the motto of Roger’s Profanisaurus — self-described as “the ultimate swearing dictionary” — and it translates approximately to:
Swearing is big and clever
Which obviously is a parody of the oft-told parental advice that sets out precisely the opposite.
I swear sometimes. I’m far from being […]

Read: Sweariwordum Est Maximus Et Sapiens »