Seen on a conference’s promotional website:

“[This event]… is also a voluble* occasion to exchange personal experiences gained in the sector…”

Gee, it must be a noisy event. Isn’t it a great image, though? Hundreds of people all volubly sharing their experiences with one another? Of course, they meant valuable.

*Voluble: marked by a ready flow of speech; “she is an extremely voluble young woman who engages in soliloquies not conversations.”

Today’s word: upcycle.

Upcycling is the practice of taking something that is disposable and transforming it into something of greater use and value. (Wikipedia)

Seen in the context of some new trials being done in manufacturing upcycled cell phones.

Today’s word: zeptoliter.

A zeptoliter is a sextillionth of a liter, or one-thousandth of an attoliter. But you knew that.

One country’s bar association has decided to forbid its members from working with attorneys from a second country (for political reasons). A law firm in the second country received a letter from their colleagues in the first country, explaining that they were severing business ties, having been advised by their bar association that “lawyers doing business with [second country] will be dismembered.” Yikes. They meant disbarred (from membership). I hope.

An absolutely true story, by the way, heard first-hand.

Read in Harold Nicolson Diaries & Letters 1939-45:

Nether Wallop: An RAF station on the Hampshire-Wiltshire border.

England never ceases to entertain with its place names. But Nether Wallop? Sounds like something I’d threaten my kids with.

It turns out that there are three Wallop villages alongside the Wallop Brook: Over, Middle and Nether Wallop (wallops of increasing intensity, I guess). Nether Wallop was the site used for filming a BBC television adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple series in the 1980s.

What do you think of this image?

Is the placement of Barack Obama’s name an intentional, if subtle, slap? Or just a [Freudian] slip-up? (Note that the context of this image has nothing to do with politics; it’s a graphic depicting a search interface.)

In Nature news:

“Experts suspicious of ’splatellite’ plan.

“The US government’s decision to shoot down its errant spy satellite has met with concern.”

I like the splatellite bit, although “splat” might not be the sound I would intuitively associate with a satellite’s crash landing. Unless it landed on an alligator, maybe?

What happens when your content or feature set starts to exceed the capabilities of the environment in which it exists?

Some environments (operating systems, application environments, communications protocols…) are remarkably resilient, and can hold up under all kinds of unanticipated pressures and demands (think Ethernet — how many years has it been?).

Some environments are flexible (think Java, Bluetooth and Flash), but show signs of strain if hacked too far. At some point, your demands that they perform jobs for which they were never built overwhelms, and they crash and fall apart. Imagine that happening to the above file folder. Nasty, huh? Even worse when it’s your application running in the real world.

Some environments (I won’t name names) are rigidly insistent on your obedience, and demand that you follow their rules or else.

This comes up occasionally, when we try to demonstrate 3D capabilities on devices whose manufacturers never dreamed of 3D. (This also comes up when a remarkably gifted child is being taught by a narrow-minded teacher!)

The best environments, of course, are those whose builders created something open and non-controlling (as Ethernet is), rather than attempting to impose a standard. Those are the infrastructures that last and last.

Seen on exhibit at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona:

A funny thing happened on my way to the CNET blogs today…

I saw the following ad:

Huh? That’s really funny! Now, I never, never click on banner ads. Never. But this is too good to resist.

Yes, I did it. I clicked.

And, believe it or not, I’m going to recommend that you check out the advertising page, too. www.stayathomeserver.com (is that a great site address, or what?!). The page opens with a tongue-in-cheek video news report, and then… well, just check it out yourself. And don’t leave without reading the whole book, it’s a total riot. A spoof on those books that help you discuss sensitive issues with your young children (like intimacy, non-nuclear families, handicaps).

Can this possibly be the same Microsoft that just last week sponsored Telecom TV at Mobile World Congress under the ad line, “We call it… Telco 2.0″? [brief pause to stifle gag reflex]

Maybe advertising this good means I’ll have to stop laughing at Microsoft. Heck, I’ll have to stop laughing at the ad, first.