Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Back in time

Ever wondered what the eBay website looked like in 1997? Remember when you re-designed that website and now wonder if you could see a 'before' and 'after' although this took place in 2000? Waybackmachine is the solution:

Archive.org

It really is quite interesting... and scary to think that all those mistakes you made in the past are still out there. For example, use the system to show you www.cd.co.uk in 1999 and then again in 2000. That was my first re-design for an employer.

Enjoy

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

European English

Many thanks to my sister for informing me of this important development that I would like to share with you.

European English

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".

In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Friday, April 06, 2007

Political Correctness

Germans do like anything English. Or American, depending on which school you went to. Political correctness is obviously one of the thre pillars of the British spirit and thereby extremely popular with my fellow country men and women. The wonder of Internet TV allows a whole program to be dedicated to the German approach. Have a look at www.mypctv.de to see what I mean.


Oh and in case you were wondering, the other two pilars are arrogance and ignorance, of course.