Die, Lazy Programmers!
May. 21st, 2008 01:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akirluI didn't realize the full scale of the annoyance I'd brought on my own head when I decided to change my last name upon marrying. It's a stealth thing, really. Because I figured, how hard could it be to spell "O'Brien"? Plenty hard, apparently. Hal periodically gets exercised about this.
For ordinary humans, the confusion lies in the final vowel -- often as not they misspell it as "O'Brian". For programmer humans the problem lies with the apostrophe. It seems that a great many programmer humans were not imaginative enough to recognize that apostrophes are needful and legitimate characters to include in database fields. Or too lazy to test the utility of their fields against outlier cases.
Programmer humans who work for credit card companies are evidently particularly unimaginative, and so only about half of the cards in my wallet actually contain a correct-down-to-the-apostrophe spelling of my last name. The rest don't have an apostrophe available. Compound that with the fact that credit cards spell out your name in all-caps on the card, and have different protocols for re-mixing the cases, and you find that one of my cards thinks my last name is "Obrien" while another thinks it is "OBrien". *sigh* But for the purposes of credit cards, I am grown reconciled to living with a state of error.
For the purposes of my real name, or rather my "Real Name", though, I would rather have my apostrophe. Regular Amazon.com users may be getting an inkling of where this is going.
See, I had decided I wanted to add a "Real Name" certification to my Amazon profile for purposes of reviewing. Which took a deal of fiddling to figure out how to do, because I am apparently not the demographic for which the Amazon user interface was designed. But once I sorted out how to get to the setting, I had a new joy in store for me. Amazon validates your "Real Name" by what is on the credit cards you have on file with them. And, for some reason, they only validate against a subset of the cards you have on file with them. And with unerring accuracy, the only two cards they offered me to validate against were cards that had no apostrophe. Naturally, since they're "certifying" the realness of my "Real Name", they won't let me edit my choices. So I have the option of affirming that my "Real Name" is either "OBrien" or "Obrien".
Fuck no. I realize I'm a bonehead. Nonetheless, I won't do it. Instead, I took the option of taking a "pen name" instead. My "pen name" is O'Brien.
Thus we see the real power of the pen.
For ordinary humans, the confusion lies in the final vowel -- often as not they misspell it as "O'Brian". For programmer humans the problem lies with the apostrophe. It seems that a great many programmer humans were not imaginative enough to recognize that apostrophes are needful and legitimate characters to include in database fields. Or too lazy to test the utility of their fields against outlier cases.
Programmer humans who work for credit card companies are evidently particularly unimaginative, and so only about half of the cards in my wallet actually contain a correct-down-to-the-apostrophe spelling of my last name. The rest don't have an apostrophe available. Compound that with the fact that credit cards spell out your name in all-caps on the card, and have different protocols for re-mixing the cases, and you find that one of my cards thinks my last name is "Obrien" while another thinks it is "OBrien". *sigh* But for the purposes of credit cards, I am grown reconciled to living with a state of error.
For the purposes of my real name, or rather my "Real Name", though, I would rather have my apostrophe. Regular Amazon.com users may be getting an inkling of where this is going.
See, I had decided I wanted to add a "Real Name" certification to my Amazon profile for purposes of reviewing. Which took a deal of fiddling to figure out how to do, because I am apparently not the demographic for which the Amazon user interface was designed. But once I sorted out how to get to the setting, I had a new joy in store for me. Amazon validates your "Real Name" by what is on the credit cards you have on file with them. And, for some reason, they only validate against a subset of the cards you have on file with them. And with unerring accuracy, the only two cards they offered me to validate against were cards that had no apostrophe. Naturally, since they're "certifying" the realness of my "Real Name", they won't let me edit my choices. So I have the option of affirming that my "Real Name" is either "OBrien" or "Obrien".
Fuck no. I realize I'm a bonehead. Nonetheless, I won't do it. Instead, I took the option of taking a "pen name" instead. My "pen name" is O'Brien.
Thus we see the real power of the pen.
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Date: 2008-05-22 06:04 pm (UTC)"dd-b" wasn't very interesting. The full name was too long. And I don't remember all that much any more. But I first started using Emacs using the original version written in ITS TECO, running under the "incompatibility package" on TOPS-20, and I've got Emacs windows from (only) two computers plus Xkeymacs running in front of me at this moment.
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Date: 2008-05-24 02:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-24 04:16 pm (UTC)It's dated 5-Aug-1981, which means this is quite likely the exact version I learned from; I started working at DEC Marlbolo in July 1981.
ER reads from file, so since there isn't a ^[ in my name, that and everything after it don't do anything.