I’ve blogged before about differences between British English and American English so I won’t bore everyone with my discussion about it again. A blog I found recently written by an American expat in London had some good ones. Here is a link to her list of articles…Here’s a few that made me laugh:
Plummer Crack/But vs Builder Bum Pronunciation of Nissan Pronunciation of Nokia Dannon vs Danone Pronunciation of 6th Pronunciation of Michigan Pronunciation of Michelin Inverted commas vs quote marks Pronunciation of furore (I’m going to have to do more research on this) Saying — right the way through Merry Christmas vs Happy Christmas Shots or Jabs Bye (read more about this one at the bottom of this article)
I’ll conclude with a saying that a colleague (not co-worker mind you) loves to say: The US and UK are two countries separated by a common language!
Last night, whist watching one of my new movies (Cyndi got me Jingle All The Way for Christmas) I was mindlessly surfing the internet when I came across a blog written by an American expat living in London. One of her articles was a link to a Slate.com article on The Superiority of American Appliances.
The title intrigued me so I went to have a look. The main jist is that American appliances (called white goods in much of the rest of the world) are way easy to use (or have controls labeled in ways that are easy to understand) while European appliances are much harder to figure out.
I don’t have any good pictures to illustrate this for you (and flickr wasn’t very helpful either) but I think the same thing. Even here, in English speaking England, controls for appliances are complicated and machines do rather odd things.
Today at work, I had a minor moment of “holy cow I can’t believe that is how it is but I guess so.| With Mac OSx 10.7 (aka Lion), Apple is offering full disk encryption as an option out of the box. When you set it up at first, you get to choose the users who will have the ability to unlock the disk at startup. I had to add a few users to an already encrypted machine but couldn’t figure out how to add them to the FV2 disk unlock list. I found this apple kb about fv2 which proved useless. It didn’t mention anything about adding users. ARG. From the article, I thought I would have to decrypt and re-encrypt. Well, that process only takes about 10 hours and I wasn’t happy.
Before I started, I wondered if it added them by default. I rebooted and, sure enough, there they were. Why the documentation can’t say that is beyond me. So, if you are in this
10.7/Lion with FileVault 2 (FV2) auto adds any new users to the disk unlock list.
…our first power cut/outage in the UK. Actually, we had 3 of them. The electric went out and, at first, I thought it was us. I checked the breakers then looked outside. The breakers were ok and our neighbors didn’t have electricity so we waited. In about 15 minutes, it came back on. Then went off again in about 15 min. This repeated itself 3 times. Finally, it stayed on.
Cyndi and I joked if the Grizwold’s turned on their lights 🙂 This is part an inside joke because what passes for tacky Christmas lights here are nothing like tacky lights in the states.
How can passengers prevent their bags from going astray?
Have you ever seen theft?
What kind of suitcases get damaged least/most?
How do bags get lost?
How do bags get damaged?
What goes on behind the curtain?
Things he says I agree with:
We see open bags all the time because the zipper just started coming apart, and yes, things do fall out of these open bags. Sometimes, we see it and can put whatever came out back in the bag it came from, but sometimes there are just random items strewn around the belly.
Cheap bags that you buy at the discount store break very easily. If your handle is sewn on or is very flimsy, it’s probably going to break. If you travel a lot or pack heavy, make sure you buy a quality, durable bag.
Airplanes are only making money while in the air and no airline wants an airplane on the ground too long.
You might be amazed at how much manpower it takes to put a passenger aircraft in the air.
The important thing here: Airplanes are only making the company money when they are in the air. Everything an airline does is geared around that. Although with only one airline in the US actually making a profit, it might not seem as if they care about that very much ;^)
One thing he says I disagree with:
Speaking of wheels, the best bags to get are the “spinners” with four wheels on the bottom.
Have you ever used those things? I did once with about 30kgs worth of “stuff” in it. Holy how…that bag didn’t want to push straight on the wheels and it wasn’t designed to be pulled. It was a horrible bag.
If you were one of the people we mentioned this to before we left…our Jeep sold! It served us well for apx 10 years and hauled us around many many miles.
BTW…yes that is my smokin’ hot wife in the background ;^)
Well, 1.5 weeks ago, we finally got internet hooked up at our place. It is a long story but it involved planning, the BT guy showing up late, and having to reschedule to finally get this done.
Part of what we brought with us was an asus rt n16 to use with our VPN provider. The plan was to have the router make the VPN connection (we use StrongVPN…for $55/year with no caps or other limits) for us so the WDTVLiveHub we brought could stream Netflix to our TV. Well, we set it up and everything worked ok…most of the time. However, there were times when DNS requests wouldn’t resolve (even using opendns). Yesterday I gave up and installed ddwrt. So far, it seems to be working great….much better than with the stock firmware.
One of the extras I got with ddwrt was a graph that tracks our usage. Why is this important you ask? Well, instead of paying £7.50/month for internet, we are paying £25/month. That is a hunk of money (with the £/$ ratio at about $1.55 to £1). But, the £7.50 internet would have been limited to 40GB transfer/month. I figured we would use more than that, but wasn’t really sure. Well, after a day and a half of using ddwrt, I’m glad we did go with it. At the moment, we’ve sucked up 4GB off the internet….that was 1 movie for Cyndi and I, and about 4 30 min TV shows for the kids. Looks like we would have been way way over our cap.
[Update 2011-11-27 17:44:41] I just realized…ddwrt is only on our VPN router. it doesn’t count what we’ll use streaming TV with the BBC iPlayer and LoveFilm
I used to live in MO (Hermann, MO. Right here actually). I forget what year it was, but St. Louis was playing the Twins (if I remember correctly). We had to go out in the evening and twist our TV antenna around to watch it because it wasn’t on any of the stations we normally got from Columbia….it was on the STL stations. Then, after we were done, we had to go back out and turn it around the other way so we could watch normal TV.
1) Because of Android’s open nature, most handset manufactures have taken to adding their own “skins” onto Android. Do you know that HTC Touch interface? Yep…a skin. 2) Just like with other things, the manufacture has to update their skin whenever a new version comes out. This takes time. 3) Can you imagine Apple allowing people to “skin” IOS? Heck, no one else even manufactures the device.
While I agree it there is a problem, we disagree on where the problem lies. The problem isn’t Google or Android….the problem is handset manufactures who think the stock interface needs “help.” Just like those horrid, rubbish helper apps on a PC, you don’t need them. Make sure blame is placed at the correct place.
