Deborah Pickett

Daylight saving time works by shaming your work ethic into getting up because the clock says 6:something instead of 5:something, thereby making you start your day sooner. A couple of years of always-on DST will blunt that pretty quickly and nullify any benefit.

I don't remember participating in the original survey exploring the familiarity of Jewish English terms among Australian and American Jewish and non-Jewish people, but I was informed that the paper based on the survey has been published, and it's highly illuminating for a linguistics nut like me. Generally, Australian non-Jews are less likely to be familiar with Jewish English terms (chutzpah, shlep, kvetch, menorah) than their American counterparts, with the exception of a small set of words that have entered Australian general speech (cobber, shemozzle, shtum, gazumped), which American Jewish and non-Jewish people don't use much. I love "barmi" and "batmi" for bar/bat mitzvah and I will now use these at any possible opportunity. Full paper: https://brill.com/view/journals/jjl/14/1/article-p42_3.xml Citation: Breslow, E., & Hendy, C. (2026). Was the Barmi a Shemozzle?: A Comparative Study of Australian and American Familiarity with Jewish English Lexical Items. Journal of Jewish Languages, 14(1), 42-86. https://doi.org/10.1163/22134638-bja10063 #English #Linguistics #Jewish #Yiddish #Australia #USA

Sometimes I feel like my generation is the last to correctly know how to alphabetize a list of names.

Always a joy* to see which important foreign keys the creator of this database figured didn't need to be indexed. Query that should take seconds is timing out after ten minutes because I had the temerity to join two tables.

All you people suddenly advocating for the abolition of copyright because it’s being inconsistently enforced, without offering an alternative for creatives to not be ripped off, have evidently never created anything.

Markdown syntax is awful.

Male colleague: I need to draw factory layouts with dimensions. I was looking at BRICsCAD, we use it elsewhere in the company, but maybe I could use Visio? It's got a free trial. Me: Visio doesn't do dimensions. You'll want BRICsCAD. Colleague: I'll register for the Visio free trial. <3 hours pass> Colleague, in hallway: Oh, by the way, Visio doesn't do dimensions.

FPGA is the professional golfers' association for Furries.

https://info.census.abs.gov.au/about/about-census-questions/personal-details “What was the person’s sex recorded at birth? […] If needed, a person can fill in a separate Census form to keep their answers private from others in the household. Find more information about [link]completing the Census in your preferred way.” I mean, sure, fuck you, ABS, but let’s play along… At that link: “To ensure your separate form is counted, we ask that you use the same name, date of birth and sex recorded at birth details as those recorded on the household form where possible.” So if you’re not out to your housemates, your private form won’t count. Massive slow clap for the people at our national statistics agency for their galaxy brain skill at thinking things through.

Speaking of trackers, it would have been 1988 and I came across a “music editor” for my Amiga through the usual channels (my big brother brought home a disk from school, I ask no questions). It came with some example tracks which I reverse-engineered. I painstakingly transcribed my own songs onto the software. This was long before I knew what a “sequencer” was, and before I had a four-track tape recorder. Eventually I upgraded to a proper, purchased, MIDI sequencer (Music-X). Reader, it was not until 2022 that I discovered that this software I stumbled across was a genuine modfile editor, and that there was a thriving community of musicians using this exact same data model for all manner of electronic musical creations. And I thought I was the only person in the world who knew what those weird hex codes meant. It’s like discovering that a secret language that you and your family used in your childhood actually has ten million speakers around the world. I can’t find any Amiga tracker screenshots now that look exactly the same as what I used. I’ll probably never know.

Panicked phone call from a Brisbane colleague: My computer just turned off, and so did two of my neighbours’. I set the onsite electrician on the case. His analysis: all three of them had under-desk heaters turned on full, and it tripped the breaker. He’s from Toowoomba so we had a chuckle about Brisbane people not handling the cold (“cold”) even a little bit.

Q8 is gonna have a lot of eggs. https://catfishing.net #752 - 4.5/10 🐈🐟🐈🐟🐈 🐟🐟🥚🐟🐈

Oh that’s not good.