I know everyone must be tired of me posting about my grief (God knows I am) but I am so fucking tired of crying. I am so god-damned angry. We loved each other! We wanted to grow old together. Is that too damned much to ask? I am so tired of grieving, but it’s not over yet. I miss him so much.
Because all decent publications have a standardised style. Ours mandates the use of British/Australian English. It looks sloppy and unprofessional to have some stories in British/Australian English, some in American English, and some in a mixture of the two. And since we’re in Australia- and not America- we’ve chosen British/Australian English as our standard. That’s why we can’t just leave the stories in American English. It’s not something you can really appreciate until you’ve worked in the media or as a sub-editor with a multi-cultural writing team.
Usually “First year” student, IME.
Brynda, I’m sorry for your loss. I can’t even begin to imagine how terrible it must be for you.
Honestly, when we had satellite TV, it sucked for that reason. We rarely got “pixels and garbled audio”. We’d get that for a minute and then just a notice that said, “no signal”.
It went out a lot more than they said it would. It’d go out in a thunderstorm, during a snowstorm the dish would get covered and lose a signal. Great! We can climb on the roof to brush it off. Don’t knock it out of alignment, though!
We’d get no signal when the skies were nicely blue here, but there was a big storm in freakin’ Indiana (I’m in metro Detroit). And then there was the lovely ice rain we got that coated the dish in a thick layer of ice. What are you gonna do? Climb up with a hair dryer on an extension cord? Can’t chip it off or the dang thing would be out of alignment.
Yay!
I was going to suggest that whoever starts the next mini-rant thread be sure to lace the OP heavily with over-the-top fury and loads of vile language. 
Speaking of daytime running lights… I can see their uses but the original theory is totally flawed. The study i saw was from insurance records and it said that people who always drove with their lights on (before automatic running lights) had significantly fewer accidents. Well no kidding! People who are so concerned about safety that they always have their lights on are going to be safer drivers all around. Serious need for a control group there. I hate “scientific” studies with obvious, crippling flaws being touted as proof of anything.
Sorry, my cussing skills are much better in Spanish, so someone else please handle it. Feels good to be back in the Pit… toasty…
I hate employers who require freelancers to use a specific piece of software which the employers themselves can’t use. I’ve got a customer that not only didn’t try to verify that any of the files I was sending were OK until she’d received my bill, she doesn’t know how to open them in the program she required me to use. I suspect that (apart from using pirate versions) she only meant to use that requirement as a way to make sure she got “a techie.” I also had to explain to her how to save a .doc file using MSWord’s latest (pirated) version.
Oh goody! It’s back in the Pit, just in time for me to complain that someone just stepped on my toe.
And I’m so cross!
Fun fact - damage to the common bile duct is a frequent complication of gall bladder removal.
http://www.laparoscopicsurgeryinfo.com/risks.htm
Yesterday afternoon I was racing to get home after a haircut to meet my family for dinner.
Guess I forgot to lock my car doors.
Someone got in. I thought I heard people noises pretty late but I figured it was my neighbor, she comes home late a lot.
I leave nothing to steal in my car ever so the thieves didn’t get anything. Which I guess pissed them off cause they dumped my ashtray out all over my seats.
This is the first time this has happened but now I view my neighborhood a bit differently…yeah it was my fault for forgetting to lock the doors but also an open car door doesn’t mean you’re allowed to come in and try to steal shit then trash it. So now I am nervous my neighbors are criminals.
I guess this is my lesson to be more careful and it could have been a lot worse (broken windows, stolen car, more damage than ashes everywhere) but it still has me a bit freaked out.
I wanna know what the <bleep> happened to autumn, dammit.
At the end of September, we were still hitting 80 here in Indiana. Then the weather changed, and it’s been a rare day that we’ve reached 60 degrees. The last few days have been the worst - cloudly, overcast, rain, and temperatures in the mid-40s.
Autumn’s always been my favorite seasons; cool days, crisp nights. This crap’s like the middle of winter.
I have daytime running lights, but it was still irritating. Not seriously, but enough for a mini-rant thread.
On the other hand, I could almost start a full-blown pit thread about the damn door dinger. Last winter, the first day it got really cold, it decided that it would chime every time I opened the driver’s door, lights on or off. It still does this. I had to get jumped three times before I learned an OCD-level paranoia about whether I turned the damned lights off. I don’t have the money to fix something this non-essential.
Thankfully the hotel I work at has nice bell service guys who can jump a car.
After reading the speakerphone rant upthread, I am reminded of the fact that at least seven people in my office of fifteen will (a) take support calls on speakerphone - ARGH - and/or (b) make calls to each other on speakerphone - ARGHARGH!. The office is not large, no one ever closes their office door (for those who have offices), and my desk is equidistant to two of the worst offenders. Hearing a conversation in stereo, when left and right are lagging just a titch behind each other, is a new and exciting kind of distraction.
By which I mean ‘makes me want to stab a butcher knife into the centre of each phone speaker’.
On a motorcycle?
I wouldn’t put it past a few of them! 
And they’re cute, too. Sometimes I love my job.
Well, I have, and we printed the articles just like that. In fact, since we prefaced each article with the author’s nationality, it made them a little special. Really, it doesn’t look sloppy or unprofessional at all.
Except that’s not the style that’s been agreed on. This publication is being produced as part of a university course and one of the goals involves teaching students about style guides, which in this case includes the use of Australian/British English. If the course was being taught in the US then naturally American English would be the standardised style.
The ironic part is that the ESOL writers are actually pretty good about using the correct version of English (because they changed their spellcheckers to Australian English). It’s the Australian students who can’t be bothered to change their spellcheckers that are most concerning.
Or, to put it another way: Major Newspapers- good ones- do not have news stories written in several different National varieties of English. They pick one and use that, and it is the job of the sub-editors to make sure that a news publication is consistent in style throughout.
Now, if we were taking copy from international writers via e-mail for a sort of Time or Newsweek style publication, then this wouldn’t be an issue at all- as you say, we’d either leave the nationalised spelling as- is with “John Smith in Seattle”, “Jan de Vries in Cape Town”, or “Xiun Wu in Shanghai” on the byline, or change it to whichever English version we were using and not mention it.
But Australian students, at an Australian university, who (one hopes) went to Australian schools really should know that “Colour” has a “u” in it, “Tires” are what happens when someone runs out of energy, and first year university students are not called “Freshmen”. Especially when they’ve been given style guides which highlight some of these things and explain the alternative words/spelling to be used instead.
Like I said, ESOL students get lots and lots of leeway, for obvious reasons. But Australian students- especially final year Communication degree students- really should know better.
As you’re right, it’s not a staggering amount of effort to change it (simple Find/Replace in MS Word), but the entire point of Mini-rants is for people to have a vent about minor inconsequential things that are irritating them at the moment.
Under the circumstances, I think you would be justified in turning back wrong-style work to the authors, with a note that the goal is to help teach the readers about style guides, not to sharpen their irony-spotting skills.
Ms Hook and myself just got back from Moab, Utah yesterday. The weather there was perfect, 70s and 60s in the day and low 50s at night. We hiked all over Arches National Park, spent 3 days driving the White Rim Trail without putting a mark on the truck, hiked around Island In the Sky, had a totally wonderful visit with one of our best friends. Don’t think you could have ordered a better time.
THEN, on the way home it had the og-freaking nerve to sprinkle on us!!! JesusShitTheBedWideAwake would it have been too much to have kept the perfection coming, what would that have hurt, huh?
I discussed this with the tutor, and that’s initially what we did. Now, unfortunately, deadlines are looming and it’s easier for me (or one of the other subs) to change it in a few seconds than send the work back to the author. And the goal is to help the writers understand style guidelines, not the readers.
I’m beginning to feel sorry I even mentioned it.
Mini-rant time:
Great match on this afternoon on ESPN2, Brazil and Ghana for the Under-20 World Championship. No big deal, just a youth tournament, but great to see the stars of the future play a hell of a match. Match goes deep into overtime, and is decided, dramatically on penalties.
Of course, the overtime match pre-empts the scheduled programming, which is AssHat Jim Rome. Obviously steaming that OMG socker, even worse, teenage soccer had cut into his time, he segues with a douche-tastic “Hoping it would never end. Orange slices on me, fellas.” Great, orange slices joke. Haven’t heard that one before. If you’re going to be an asshole, at least be, you know, a funny asshole. Like Letterman or something.
Don’t know why I expected to hear some creativity from a guy’s whose whole “act tough and be a douchebag” routine got old for everyone in the world at about middle school. Of course he went on to talk about the most real of sports, football, where the half of the players are 300+ lbs, and it takes 112 players over three hours to get through sixty minutes of game time (can’t forget the commercials!). Ugh