Four Random Things

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. At Ask a Manager is a post titled "Scolding Strangers, Kids Using Corporate Lingo, and Other Ways Our Jobs Follow Us Home," which you may find amusing.

Within, Alison Green shares reader contributions, such as:

I teach English as a second language in Toronto, the most multi-cultural city in the world. I have to stop myself from saying "Speak English!" when I hear other languages outside of school.

I originally read this with some mild puzzlement and memories of irritation with others for doing things like this in the past.

You're not at work, I recall once saying to a friend using work lingo on an unsuspecting layman.

Intending to ... circle back ... to this because I was curious as to whether the multilingual or others used to code-switching were better at avoiding such lapses, the above example is the first I laid eyes on.

I guess I learned some patience instead...

2. While I do recognize Steve Jobs as a great innovator, I am not a great fan of Apple's software, and someone has supplied the ideal quote for me to explain part of why:

If Apple products were so intuitive, I would intuit them.

The other part is my general gripe with closed-source, proprietary software, at least in the way it gets produced (read: changed unnecessarily and often for the worse) in our modern culture: Any work flow or store of knowledge you might develop is at risk of being decimated by some unforeseen change you may or may not find helpful.

I like learning new things and building on them; I hate learning basically the same thing over and over again.

3. A bit related to my rare desire for changes in software to be confined to improvements is an interesting blog post praising the "beauty of finished software."

Among other things, you will learn that George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire, which was the basis for the television series, A Game of Thrones, using Wordstar 4.0. Says Martin of his 40+-year-old word processor:

George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Ice and Fire with this word processor. (Image by Posi66, via Wikimedia Commons, license.)

It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesn't do anything else. I don't want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I don't want a capital, if I'd wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.

The blogger discusses his concept further and rightly points out that Unix-like software has many commands that exemplify it.

4. On a walk before our big move, I enjoyed reading a PBS story on "the lucrative world of undead brands."

The piece explains how it is that you keep bumping into brands and wondering things like Didn't they go bankrupt a year or so ago?

Good News: You're not necessarily out of touch or misinformed:

In simplest terms, the business model works because "not everybody knows the store is closed," says James Cook, director of retail research at the commercial real estate firm JLL. "People are Googling that brand all the time."

Right now, online home-goods retailer Overstock.com is trying this with the intellectual property of bankrupt Bed Bath & Beyond, shedding its old Overstock self and relaunching under the newly purchased Bed Bath & Beyond name. Buyers of the Toys R Us brand have tried to keep it alive through several iterations.

One company in this business, Authentic Brands, reported nearly half a billion in revenues in 2020, of which about half was profit.

-- CAV