Month: October 2005

Surfs Up

I got this email from another tech friend:

I got a real kick out of your article of the 26th where you talked about urban legends, hoaxs, and well-meaning friends; you have no idea how much garbage I receive from less technical friends warning me of some impending disaster about to befall me or my computers, and I agree that research as to the truth or fiction of these warning is very important.

I especially enjoyed your closing phrase, “check them out before you flood the ethernet with more garbage”, and chuckled to myself at the thought of all these networked users running amok on the internet with no firewalls in place, allowing their “ethernets” to receive whatever the web dumps onto their systems! “Surfs ’em right”, I say!

And then he took me to task – tongue in cheek, I hope – for one of my made-up words:

What a hoot! In Caveat Lector Dictionaria/Encyclopedia, “Talk about derivated words. I feel betrayed.” Now *that’s* funny!

And he included an online dictionary link to here.

Scribble Scrabble


My Scrabble© Score is: 20.
What is your score?

My friend Phil sent this to me because he knows that I like to play Scrabble. Also, he’s the Executive Director of Information Technology for the Pasadena Unified School District — computer code and internet, words and spelling — makes sense to me. Anyway, I come by the Scrabble affinity naturally as my mother is a Scrabble Queen. She even knows words that the English allow but are not found in our American Scrabble dictionaries. Many years ago Phil and I played a game of Scrabble with my mother, and all I had on hand was a regular dictionary. We doubted many of her words — jo comes to mind — but later found them all to be valid in the official Scrabble dictionary. She won, of course. I prefer to remember the day I beat Phil at Scrabble — I was in the hospital, dopey on pain killers….he must have let me win, but swears he didn’t. If you want to read up on the rules, go here, or visit The Official Worldwide Scrabble Home Page