Christopher Mackay's Blog

So, some guy decides that his accumulated FedEx boxes are strong enough to make furniture from, posts picture on his web site, and FedEx’s lawyers send a cease-and-desist, citing the DMCA…

This secures FedEx a solid nomination for Most Clueless Company of the Year…

• fedexfurniture.com
• Furniture Causes FedEx Fits (Wired.com)

Recently I received an RFP from an agency looking to change hosting providers along with their web site. It looked like an attractive job until I came to the lines that read something to the effect of “must use Windows 2003 Server”, “must host an MS SQL environment” and “must be prepared to migrate to .NET”.

I tossed the RFP. What a waste.

Then I came across a great quote on Paul Graham’s web site, from a talk he gave at OSCON 2005:

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

There are a number of words that I see or hear people using on a fairly regular basis, and I don’t know if it makes me want to cry or scream.

I’ll be the first to admit that reading Lynne Truss’ Eats, Shoots & Leaves made me smile and nod a lot, so clearly I don’t have a life. But it also made me realize I’m not alone.

Now, this isn’t a list of the usual suspects (a lot/alot, they’re/their/there, etc.); these are more insidious:

• Performant. Robert Scoble is the latest I’ve seen use this word. Internal development builds of Windows Vista are apparently slow on older hardware, so he says that “the teams are working to make everything more performant”. Sorry, Robert. There’s no such word, even if it eventually makes its way into MicroSpeak. The word you’re struggling to find is faster, Robert.
• Client. I’ve heard people refer to their clients as “Client” (see creative is not a noun). Not “my client”, or “our client”, but “Client”.  E.g., “Client wants to change the logo”. I find this term impersonal and disrespectful.
• Quality. I can’t believe how many people use this word as though it could only refer to high quality. “Quality Products Since 1975.” It’s an ambiguous statement at best. My rule is to always mentally add the word low; “(low) Quality Products…” This will never change, though. It’s far too late. Together with “real good”, it signals the beginning of the dummification of English.

Some welcome news regarding web standards from Chris Wilson of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team.