Happy Canada day to everyone back home! I'm sure you'll all be sending photos of the celebration. From phone calls I had it sounds like Ottawa was rain free for the fireworks, woot! Okay, back to my previously written post ;) By the way, no photos for this post. Kathleen took off to the Eastern Townships with the camera so all I have left is the old Canon Powershot that is ... wow ... nine years old now. I think my phone takes as good photos. Of course this thing lasted many a mountain bike crash and still works, that is *very* impressive.

I finally went in for my '40,000 mile checkup' as the doctor's assistant referred to it. That would be the post-40 doctor's checkup. When the secretary asked me why I was making an appointment I told her I'd just turned 40 and figured I should find out if I was going to die. She took it in stride, I'm sure she's heard it all before.

I always feel like I'm getting short shrift from doctors when I go to see them, because I'm not sick. We go through a litany of questions:
Feeling sick? No.
Out of breath? No.
Dizzy?No.
Nausea? No.
Diarrhea? No.
Breathing problems? No.
Muscle pain? No.
Blood pressure? Fine, I guess.
Exercise? Yes.
Liver or pancreas pain? No. Wait, how would I know if those hurt? I don't even know where they are.

As a friend of mine once pointed out, healthy people should only go see specialists. With the GPs you are probably one of the few healthy people they see, so to them you are a picture of health and that slight knee problem is nothing to worry about.

At least they took blood. I don't think I've had blood work done in two decades.

Change of topic.

I have come to realize that people are essentially lazy in their speech, they want to get their point across with the bare minimum of effort. The most obvious of this is the use of shortcuts in texting and instant messenger. Nobody wants to text out the word 'you', so you get U. Wait gets turned in to 'w8'. I'm still fighting the use of 'UT' for 'You there' and I still type out 'yes' for answers instead of simply using 'y'. Interestingly enough simply putting UT in an IM *implies* a question, so you don't even need to put the punctuation in!

I think if we get good enough at simplification in communication we may manage to get all the way to just grunting at each other. Think of the time we'll save!

Laziness / simplification works on spoken language as well. It used to bother me that people used 'Where you at?' instead of 'Where are you?' when they both have the same number of syllables, you aren't saving anything by speaking incorrectly. However, If you try to move your mouth as little as possible, and say both those sentences you will find that pesky 'are' word requires you to move your jaw far more than if you simply used the 'at'. The 'at' is an easy tongue movement and takes less energy, mystery solved.

This phenomenon also helps me explain why, even though I cannot do accents well, I can do a Southern States accent. I figure everyone can do a Southern accent. Why is that? Don't try to pronunciate and do the bare minimum effort with your jaw, lips and tongue. Ta-Dah, a Southern accent.

Which brings me to an area where I see effort going up, IT buzzwords. The latest one to be doing the rounds by the IT Architecture group is 'space'.
- We need to investigate the Web 2.0 space.
- I know somebody who works in the LDAP space.
- This is targeted at the Corporate Social Networking space.
Every one of those sentences can have the word 'space' removed, and it still makes sense (to those of you who know what LDAP stands for). Somehow this meme has managed to bulk up sentences, going against the shorter/smaller tide. Sadly it hasn't added value, it's the written equivalent of empty calories.

I was sent a copy of one of the IT Architect presentations on 'Social Networking in the Corporate Space' and there was some text in there that made me giggle every time I read it. I'll try and remember to put a copy in here.