As everyone knows, I’m big on milestones in my blogging life… So I’m happy to announce that with this morning’s entry Deer Ticks, I broke the 200-post mark!
As I did back on just May 26th with my 100th post, I would like to once again thank you guys for being loyal readers. It’s because of you that I’ve continued to watch my stats climb and continued to post more frequently. Without your support and loyalty, I never would have hit such a milestone, much less this quickly… 100 posts in just under 3 months… Not too shabby for a small part-timer like myself.
So here’s to you my fellow babblers! May you continue to enjoy the expansion of the blogosphere, and may I make lots of cash and have insanely hot chicks forced upon me in the coming posts… OK, I doubt that’ll happen, but the first part didn’t sound too bad, did it?
Alright, I’m here today to discuss a very important topic, one which has plagued us all from time to time. If possible, I’m also going to totally ruin any reputation I had as a stand-up member of the blogging community. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can also get myself fired at the same time… I suppose that’ll have to wait for another day.
Alright, as you’ve no doubt already guessed from the title of this entry, my very important topic today is none other than butt sweat… No, I didn’t say butt sex, I said sweat! Honestly now, what kind of pervert are you?!
Regardless of what kind of pervert you are, on with the point… Which is… Oh shit, I think I forgot to come up with one before I started writing this. I guess one would have to assume I meant to imply how much I hate it when my butt starts to sweat. When your body gets to this point of utterly and desperately attempting to cool itself, you know it’s far too hot in the office building, and it’s time to turn the air up, even if the dumbass new DBA you just hired is freezing to death in the 80 degree heat. She’s not being a productive member of society, so she doesn’t count when the vote is taken…
But seriously, don’t you just hate it when your butt starts to sweat? God I know I do…
And no, I’m not drunk or stoned or tripping on frog sweat… I’m 100% sober… Unfortunately…
Lately we’ve had a problem at work. No no, it’s not spyware… Well, that is a problem at work, but I’m not going to bitch about it again, so don’t worry. No, this problem is far more dangerous. It doesn’t simply inconvenience a user and myself, but rather the entire company.
That’s right, you guessed it… It’s SPAM. Not just ordinary every-day SPAM, because we’ve taken care of that by now thanks to some great products by GFI. No, this is a special breed of SPAM… Inter-office SPAM. It’s also not just any ordinary every-day “hey, this was funny, I think I’ll forward it to a couple people here” SPAM, it’s… wait for it…
“Hey, this is old and total crap, but I think it’s relevent to public safety and I’ll forward it to the ‘Entire Company’ distribution list so that NO ONE misses this announcement!” SPAM…
In the absense of any actual procedure for disciplining abuse of email privilidges, we’ve had about a dozen pointless crap emails go out to the Entire Company distribution list in the past few weeks. From the total crap ICE (In Case of Emergency) number in your cell phone to the total crap 3-year-old virus notifications (which we have also protected against, thanks to GFI and Norton) to the bullshit “Hey, come smell this great perfume” (honestly, if some guy in a parking garage is asking you this, and you don’t realize there’s something wrong, you deserve to get raped), we’ve gotten it all.
Since our management has done absolutely ziltch to prevent it, I was thinking about sending this link to everyone, just to see if I get the point across.
Think it’ll work?
Google vs. Yahoo! - Translation Match, Round 1
I found a post over at Download Squad today, entitled Google wins at machine translation, which links to this story from CNet’s News.com.
From that article:
Well, even though their tests were in Arabic-to-English and Chinese-to-English, I thought I’d give it my own test in German-to-English mode, just because that’s the only recent real-world example I’ve actually got. Just for fun, we’ll also compare the results of a paragraph with Yahoo!’s translation (which is powered by Systran, which always makes me think of the line from “Pirates of Sillicon Valley” where Balmer goes “Fortran, ohh, Fortran!” in a mockingly sexual voice… Anyway…) . Here we go:
Original Content
Source: Cigarettes & Alcohol
Google
Source: Google Translation
Yahoo!
Source: Yahoo! Translation
Actual Author’s Human Translation
Source: Post Comments
Uhh… yyyeeaaahhhh… I can’t say either machine-translations are even close to what is claimed to be the actual translation / intent. Nor is Google particularly more accurate than Yahoo! (uhh, they’re exactly the same?). Anyone that speaks Chinese want to translate that same sentence from English to Chinese for us so we can perform the same test again, with the same specs as the cited test?
As with anything, we have to remember that any such test is purely subjective. Since human speach can be taken / intended in so many different ways, based on intonation and attitude, we can’t expect a machine translation to be perfect, can we? Boy I wish we could… I remember trying to cheat on my French homework in high school using Altavista’s service at the time… Yeah, that didn’t go over terribly well with the teacher…