Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

For years now Flickr has been greeting newly logged in users with messages in different languages.  It’s a really nice touch with helps one learn something new each day, but without getting in the way.   While I do pay attention to these messages, usually they don’t puzzle me for more than a couple of seconds (as in “how do I read that?”).

Today, however, was different.  It was the first time ever that I was greeted in Lolcat.

Lolcat, if you don’t know, is a sort of broken, but funny, English language, which usually goes together with an image of a cat.  The name comes from LOL - an acronym for “laughing out loud”, and cat - an animal on the picture.

As I said, it was the first time I saw Lolcat used somewhere outside of a lolcat web site (like  i can haz cheezburger).  And I was surprised to see at Flickr, which is not exactly the most serious of web sites, but is still rather big and popular.

My second reaction to this Lolcat spotting was to write this post.  My first reaction was “Oh culz!!!”

There are plenty of excellent t-shirts around, but once in a while a brilliant one comes up, which makes all the differences.  Here is one at ThinkGeek.com - nanotechnology is huge !

The moment I saw that phrase appearing in my Google Reader (here is some info about ThinkGeek feeds), I wanted to buy this t-shirt.  Even before I saw the actual t-shirt.  Even despite my total ignorance of nanotechnology.  It’s just so hilarious and true and makes so much sense at the same time!

It came to me that geek t-shirts aren’t very well suited for gyms and other places crowded with strong people. Geek t-shirts tend to be a little offensive and aggressive. Here are a few examples:

• “Bow before me, for I am root.” - nobody cares enough to read all of it, and “bow before me” sounds offensive enough.
• “Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script.” - has the same problem.
• “I see fragged people” - “frag” is not a wide spread word, and it’s often misread as another f-word.
• “I’m blogging this” - “blog” is a very wide spread word, and it can get you killed. Especially by women.
• “You are dumb” - OK, you can ware this, but never ever answer the question “What does this mean?” truthfully.

It’s good to know that sports-ware manufacturers realize this problem. That’s why they make t-shirts with just their brand labels - “Nike”, “Adidas”, “Reebok”, etc.  These aren’t even real words…

I smiled after reading this post.  It reminded me of the fact that in our office, designers use my laptop to test web sites on Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.  We have two guys doing the designs, and one of the uses Windows Vista, which runs MSIE 7.  Another one uses, I think, Windows XP, but with MSIE upgraded to version 7 too.    I heard it’s possible to have several versions of Internet Explorer running on the same Windows installation, but nobody around here knows how to do it or cares enough to experiment.

But the funniest thing in this whole story is that my laptop is running on Fedora Linux.

Sidenote: it seems this is the third post for today, and the third one that is somehow related to Google. This is not intentional.

It’s a wide known fact that Google allows (or, depending on how you look at it, forces) its employees to  work 20% of the time on the side projects.  What kind of projects?  What do they actually do?  Where this time goes?  Here is an idea from the hilarious article at Cracked.com:

Google engineers are given “20 percent time” in which they are free to pursue their own personal projects. This incentive has produced such efforts as Gmail, Google News, and 20% more employee masturbation.