Poppy at the Seaside

Poppy at the Seaside
Originally uploaded by Geffa

Just before the new year we visited the local seaside with the latest addition to out family.

Poppy, a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, is just over 5 months old now.

She was very bemused by the sea and kept cautiously paddling in the shallow pools.

More Dooberrys (or even Duberrys!)

As a supporter of both Newcastle Utd and the generic placeholder word Dooberry (see earlier posts) I was completely bemused BBC report on the Reading v Newcastle game discussing the only Newcastle goal.

"Emre's low delivery went through a crowd of players before bouncing on to the stomach of the unfortunate Duberry and into the goal."

A classic in my mind.

Add your free link. Spread the "WebWideWord"

The purpose of this blog entry is to promote my new website "WebWideWord"

The idea is to try and generate the world's largest word grid. A word grid is a series of interconnecting words in a style similar to that of a crossword, although the symetrical nature of most crosswords is not enforced in the grid nor are there any clues.

You enter your word from the "Add Word" button and associate with it the URL you would like it to link to when clicked, the colour you wish it to be displayed in when the mouse is hovered over it and the tooltip text (little pop up box) that appears when the mouse is hovered over it. Once you have entered this information you position your word in the grid so that it fits in with the other words around it. Then click and your word is saved. Subsequent visitors to the site will see your word in the grid. What's more, there is no need to give me a reciprocal link for this service although any such links or blog mentions would be more than appreciated.

If you like what you see then please tell your friends. If there's anything you don't like about the site or feel could be improved, please tell me.

Finally remember the motto - Spread the "WebWideWord"

Now a Dog Has Nine Lives?

At the moment we are thinking of buying a dog as a family pet.

Being well prepared I decided to get a quote for pet insurance. I picked up a leaflet at my local Marks and Spencer store and decided to visit their website for the quote.

After entering a few details I was presented with a, quite reasonable, quote. I scanned through the terms of the quote and was very amused by the one for 'accidental death'.

See if you can see what's funny in the image below. I will point out that the quote was for a single animal.

Musical Memories Revisited

I often recall my parents listening to music when I was a child some 30+ years ago. I remember the sounds of the likes of Jim Reeves, Millican & Nesbitt, Peters and Lee, Neil Reid, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers playing on an old record player.

This sort of music held no attraction for me but I lived with a latent fear that when I reached my forties that I would wake up one morning with a desperate urge to track down Jim Reeves' Greatest Hits or something similar.

Fortunately (Sorry Jim) this has never happened. My musical tastes, whilst very varied, have not touched upon the tunes my parents enjoyed. With teenage children I have enjoyed discovering new artists and, in turn, introducing them to some of my music. I am pleased to say that they haven't (often) looked upon my music with the level of disdain that I probably used to all those years ago to my parents, although Jethro Tull almost causes it.

Imagine my surprise the other day when I heard, coming from my child's bedroom, 'Jolene' by Dolly Parton! My mind flashed back all those years to hearing my parents playing the same song.

Fortunately though, there's no sign of Jim Reeves yet!

I Found my Thingamabob on Dooberry Hill

I love the way when our memory fails us when trying to remember a word that we just insert a standard placeholder word that can mean just about anything and we expect the listener to just understand what we mean.

There are number of such words in common use; Wotsit, Thingamabob, Oojimapflip and, my own personal favourite, Dooberry. My favourite use of this was describing yoghurt coated blueberry sweets to my wife as 'blueberry dooberrys'.

A quick google reveals that there are many discussions on these words. Dooberry is referenced in the urban dictionary although, as of yet, I have been unable to find the origin of the word. The Slang Dictionary covers oojamaflip and mentions that it is often used to refer to the television remote control. Oddly, this has been renamed as the 'zapper' by my family or 'Frank' by me when I'm trying to confuse them :)

But the final word must go to the wonderful threads on this forum post as it has introduced numerous more words to use when I can't remember the word I'm looking for.

The only problem now is I can't remember the wotsits to replace the thingamabobs I couldn't remember in the first place, if you get my dooberry!

I'd welcome your comments on your favourite placeholder words.

Context Insensitive Ads

The number of ads on websites is ever growing as people see it as a potential way to earn a "fast buck".

The majority of these ads are supposedly context sensitive so that they are targeted at the subject matter that is being read. This, more than occasionally, goes a bit wrong.

A web page arguing against a certain topic can find itself, absurdly, carrying adverts for the very thing that it's arguing against. This can sometimes cause amusement. Such was the case on a colleagues blog at psionmark.blogspot.com where he posted an amusing rant about the incorrect use of fog lights. The ads following this article were all trying to coerce you into buying additional fog lights to fit to your car.

Sometimes the ads can, however, be almost in bad taste as is the case in this example discussed here.

Perhaps the context sensitive ads need to become a bit cleverer. They need to determine the context of the article in a more exact fashion. In the example of my colleagues website, they could have determined that the article was indeed about motoring safety and generated ads for products in this area, such as advanced driving courses.

So next time you are on a website with ads, rather than just ignoring them, take a glance and see if they really do fit into the context of the site.

In conclusion I find most amusing the ads when reading a Gmail message. They attempt to glean some context from the body of the text, sometimes with hilarious results. An email from a colleague informing me of little more than he "was on holiday and having a relaxing time" resulted in a number of holiday specific ads (fine - I can see the context there) but mixed in there was an ad for pregnancy testing kits. I still haven't quite worked out the link there ;)