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Your, Yore and You`re

Just a short followup to my previous post There, Their and They’re:

“Your” is posessive like ‘Their’… “Your grammar is terrible!”, “Hahhaa… Jack and Jill ate all your pies”

“Yore” means ‘a time long ago’ or ‘days long past’… “Jamie Hyneman was born in the days of yore”.

“You’re” is simply short for ‘you are’… “You’re going to look like an idiot if you use the wrong Your, Yore, Their, There, You’re or They’re in there”

I don’t say this to be smug (though that’s a nice bonus), but because I’m blocking too many lazy (or stupid) people on twitter/facebook and missing out on too many interesting links and cute pictures of kittens :)

I Wish…

I wish I was half-an-inch taller, so I was 6 foot tall.

I wish I could wear a wide-brimmed-hat, without looking like a freak.

I wish I had straight white teeth. Not scary-white, just big-smile white.

I wish I could sing. I ‘can’ sing, but not well.

I wish I could be ‘free’ and NOT poor.

I wish the world was different,

Not much different, just a-little-bit-better different.

There, Their and They`re

Another pet peeve of mine, unsurprisingly, is when people use the wrong ‘there’ in a sentence. You can see it ALL THE FREAKING TIME on facebook and twitter (not so much on Google+, mainly I think because early adopters are not complete idiots).

And yes, I KNOW it makes me a pedantic, pretentious dick to really care about it, but when someone I know uses the wrong ‘there’, it makes me feel like I don’t want to know them anymore because they are an idiot.

Of course I make exceptions for non-native english speakers, but if you speak primarily english and use the wrong ‘there’ in a sentence. You are an idiot.

In pursuit of the goal to have less idiots in the world, in plain english, here’s my small contribution:

“There” generally indicates a position, location or declaration… “I put the book over there”, “Jack and Jill went there on holiday”, “There is only one syllable in the name ‘Bob’”.

“Their” is posessive… “I read their new book”, “Jack and Jill took their holiday in Spain”, “Their names are Jack and Jill”.

“They’re” is simply short for ‘they are’… “They’re writing another book at the moment”, “They’re going on holiday to Spain”, “Oh Jack and Jill? They’re great!”

So EVEN if it’s just facebook please, for my sake and yours; try to use the right their, there or they’re on there or they’re going to think you’re an idiot :)

The Power of “Thank You”

I’ve always been a big fan of the ‘Thank you’… all too often people go to extraordinary efforts to do something, or create something for the ‘greater good’, or to save others time or money.

Often these efforts go unrewarded for a whole host of reasons.

It happened to me today with a local recruiter, who simply sent me a message saying a local short contract that I’d enquired about was cancelled. So often these people in particular don’t do the little things like that which make forming an ongoing relationship a positive thing.

What did I do… I said “Thank you” as I do with everyone who contributes to building a positive relationship.

Next time someone does something for you, if it’s something big or even if it’s just a small thing, a tiny thing.

Pass them a “Thank you”, it will brighten their day, and yours too :)

Sittin’ Pretty (or… I Suck at Design)

For the most part, I’ve always been an ‘if it works’ kinda guy; I never really paid that much attention to how pretty anything I ever made looked.

When I was a kid, my family taught me all the crafty basics… how to knit (and french-knit), to sew, papercraft & papier-maché, to carve wood, to do a whole bunch of that type of thing.

My LEGO and Meccano builds were more making, from crazy train stations, car ports, models, and other random builds all the way to ‘functioning’ helicopters (they didn’t fly, but everything else worked).

Then later in school I carried that on, At A-level I studied design & technology, and electronics (didn’t score that great, but I enjoyed it). My main hobby then was CB-Radio and I made various bits of gear for that, rig-holders, antenna stands/fixings and did my own repairs (I’m pretty handy with a soldering iron for an amateur).

And of course I’ve programmed since a very young age, from ‘peeking’ and ‘poking’ my way to a BASIC USS Enterprise flying around my C64 blue-screen to puzzles, adventure games, dictionaries and the like. Right through to my university dissertation project (a 3D file management UI) which worked really well, but looked rubbish.

The Revelation

It never really occurred to me that any of these things needed to actually ‘look nice’; if they worked, I was happy. If that meant my CB lived in a grey-metal box or my pencil-case had 2 zips because I sewed the first one to itself, than that was fine :)

Now I’m playing a different game of it. I’ve been building picWorkflow for almost a year now (and picNiche for just over 3) and I have been getting the same comment, more-or-less, for much of that time: “It works fine, but it looks so [bland/plain/boring/crap/etc]”. Well, I’m trying something new and spending some time making it look great.

I’ve already improved on my initial picNiche design by trading my professional coding skills with a professional designer for a nice logo and basic site layout which has me going in the right direction, and there’s a whole bunch of new design elements coming soon (planned by the end of august) in the site to start bringing it upto the expectations people have of the modern web.

The weird thing is, that after weeks or even months of focussing more on the ‘looks’ I’m finally starting to understand… Things that ‘look better’ may not actually ‘work better’, but it’s much easier to get others to try out the working parts if it really looks like it will work when they try it.

It’s really not enough to say “It works well… trust me” :)