Curiosities - 5

“It’s a Sony!”

This camcorder relies on a docking station to provide connectors for power, FireWire and USB. However, the dock didn’t get a tripod mount. So, you have to commit something like that to get a live DV stream. In addition, the camera is only loosely attached to the dock, making an additional rubber band necessary.

This is the most extreme example I came over so far for why I refuse to use the German language in all technical or scientific texts. Most of my technical postings in this weblog are in English to serve help-seeking people from all places in the world; the “inter-” in “internet” stands for international, btw., and the international language for technical or scientific texts is (US-)English. The common programming languages are made of English words (if, else, while, true, false, whatever) and rely on the English keyboard layout for easy insertion of special characters ({}, [], \, /, etc.). The German localization of menu entries in all kinds of electronic devices is pervaded with weird abbreviations. That’s why I operate everything, from PC to digital camera, in the original language. (And I prefer TV series and movies in their original.)

Now look at this screenshot of a German-localized cell phone:

“Alle Radiofunk. w. ausg. Sie können nur Anw. verw., b. den. k.ein Funksen. z. Eins. kom.” ¿WTF? Funny, the Germans are dumb enough to not understand any English, but they’re smart enough to understand the meaning of that text and of the term “Flight mode”. (Btw, this reminds me of a TV ad about a brand called Splendid, where they say “Das find’ ich echt splendid!” as if anyone of their target audience knew its meaning.)

Interesting that a Google guy/gal uses an ancient Firefox on an ancient crappy OS (Win XP). Testing purposes? And interesting also that this was a targeted search.

Apropos, I tried to re-establish Yahoo! as my default interface to the web. It turned out to not deliver the results that I expected, but Google did. Another argument against Yahoo! is that they’re flirting with Microsoft; too bad that Yahoo! 0wns Flickr.

Sehr geehrte OnlineBanking-Kundin, sehr geehrter OnlineBanking-Kunde,

aufgrund technischer Arbeiten und den damit verbundenen Tests kann es in der Zeit von Samstag, 8. August, ab 12:00 bis Sonntag, 9. August, spätestens 20:30 zu Einschränkungen bei folgenden Dienstleistungen kommen:

-) Barbehebungen bei den Geldausgabeautomaten im SB-Foyer
-) Barbehebungen bei Bankomaten
-) Bargeldloses Bezahlen bei Bankomatkassen

[...]

Wir haben für Sie Geldauszahlungsstellen eingerichtet. [...]

Bundesländer:
[...]
NÖ-West – St. Pölten, Kremsergasse 39
NÖ-Süd – SCS, 2334 Vösendorf, SCS-Allee 175

Ja, genau!

Also bis spätestens morgen 12 Uhr das Geld fürs Wochenende abheben!