SMS

I've been playing around with the SMS options on Fastmail.FM.

One problem I had was that long messages forwarded by SMS seemed to get truncated long before 160 characters were reached, so I tried out the various options.

Finally, I found a combination that would apparently forward the first 158 characters of the subject, and that was easily modified into a custom command to forward the first 158 characters of the body. (Though my first attempt sent only the word "$body$" since I had misremembered the magic variable "$text$".) I've no idea what happens to the last two characters.

So now, apparently that plays nicely with LiveJournal's text message facility -- when set up with a provider of "other", it'll accept a maximum of 100 characters, minus the length of the sender's username. So when I tried it myself, I had 97 characters to play with.

The message itself started with "(f:pne)", which has four characters in addition to the username, but eh. Even 104 is less than 158, so text messages sent through the LiveJournal interface should now reach me completely. (Only those on my friends list can use the feature to send me text messages, though, since each message forwarded that way costs me a bit of money on the Fastmail.FM front.)

I know, let's get this article into every Wikipedia possible!

I'm not sure which such article I first came across... I think some small town in Poland. Then it was the True Jesus Church.

Recently, while looking at someone's talk page on the Lojban (I think it was) Wikipedia, I saw a request to create an article for Almazán. And today, I saw an article on Uetersen on the Pennsylvania Dutch Wikipedia which had dozens of interwiki links.

*sigh*

I wish people would stop doing that sort of thing. Once or maybe twice might be interesting. Possibly even more, for things that really are relevant to many people all over the globe -- perhaps a country, or a world religion. But little towns?

I mean, it's kind of cute that so many Wikipedias have an article about Uetersen, since I grew up right next door in Tornesch (from when I was 6 until I moved out from my parents', who still live there). But I still don't quite see the point for an article about Uetersen in, say, Norfolk/Pitcairn, or Zhuang, or Kazakh. I'm sure many, many small Wikipedias have much more important topics they could use articles on.

And from a couple of translations I looked at, some were even in English. Or, at best, they're a one-sentence stub. And then, really, what's the point? Seeing that "Uetersen is a town in Germany, near Hamburg" is about as useful as omitting the article entirely. (Especially if there's not even an article on Germany in that Wikipedia!) It just seems like an attempt at one-upmanship along the lines of "My lemma is in more Wikipedias than yours".

You know what? I think I might not even mind if the person adding the entry to all those Wikipedias did it himself, with his own knowledge of the languages. That's quite a feat. (Especially if the entry consists of more than one sentence -- say, two paragraphs or so.) But asking volunteers on that Wikipedia to translate your stub for you seems so pointless to me. I kind of wish they wouldn't comply with such requests. Let the competitive guys learn enough of over a hundred languages that they can compose two paragraphs of grammatically-correct and idiomatic insert language here, and then they can insert an article on their favourite little village.

...I'm wondering what mood to pick for this entry. "Annoyed" doesn't quite fit; somehow, the topic doesn't seem important enough to warrant that mood. "Weary" might fit it better, perhaps, even though it's not a system mood and doesn't have a mood pic.

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Edit: When I told Stella about this, she seemed a bit amused and told me I was worrying over something that was not my problem at all. If someone wants to spam their town all over Wikipedia, why should that be my problem? If someone on the Lower Slobovian Wikipedia wants to help that person by translating their text into Lower Slobovian, why not let them?

Perhaps she has a point. I just can't make myself be un-annoyed at the whole thing so easily.

There may be reductions in headcount

Some people like to use the passive voice to obscure who, exactly, is doing the action. Others simply leave out a verb entirely and just go with a noun (and a copula).

Googleblog just had an entry in which they announce that they've officially acquired DoubleClick, and in which they say: As with most mergers, there may be reductions in headcount.

I wondered why they didn't just come right out and say something along the lines of "As with most mergers, we may have to let some people go", possibly followed by a brief explanation somewhere along the lines of "because we'd otherwise have two or more people doing pretty much the same thing", or whatever the explanation is.

It seems to me to match their sort-of friendly style -- and to be much better than the "there may be reductions in headcount" which sounds really cold to me. Analytic, even, as if they never think of employees but just faceless "headcount units" which are completely replaceable and exchangeable. Just numbers on a balance sheet.

Would it really have hurt so much to say "we may have to let some people go"? They needn't even use the word "fire" or employ phrases like "boot their lazy asses onto the street". But it seems to me to have been an opportunity to talk about people that they missed.