Work - Phone

All officers (commissioned, non-commissioned and academic) in my unit have been issued a cellular slavery device, carrying and answering which is mandatory. Stood half the day in the sun on god forsaken base waiting in line. Turns out their records indicate I'm not an NCO. Flashed shiny new NCO card I got especially for this occasion — no go. Faxed(!) a hard copy (!!) of my record over - all ok (!!!). World class authentication, that is. Seems our systems don't integrate too well with the civilian cell service provider's. At least free calls with colleagues should cut my phone bill in half.

Me - Haircut

Today I went to a barber and had him, besides the haircut, trim my beard, which was growing untouched since December (when I became an NCO and was allowed to grow a beard). I was unhappy with the unkempt look (think al-Qaeda), but I was afraid of change. I think my fear was justified. I hate the result. My consolation is that it seems to have a healthy growth rate, so I'll experiment more. People's reactions are the strangest thing.

FFDB - Quality of Writing

Have you read something that was obviously spell checked but not actually proofread? The way to tell is that all the spelling mistakes and typos are the kind that would fool a dictionary-based spelling checker (meaning they're actual words, just not the right ones, or words that would not appear in a dictionary even when spelled correctly (like proper names) so a person could still click "ignore" and not notice the typo).

Well, fan fiction that regularly misspells the Hogwarts houses and uses non-words like "comon" (as in, "comon dude, let's go") is painful to read, even if it has actual original plot twists (in this fandom?). So I want the FFDB to have a Quality of Writing score for stories. I just need to figure out the scale and how to make it difficult to abuse.

So far I have thought of these possible scores:

• Ready for the printing press
• Multiple editors, multiple passes
• Proofread by a literate human being
• Spell-checked
• Recognizable English
• AOL chatroom transcript

Please contribute!

FFDB/code - design

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Linguistics - Russians

It appears the Russian language has no distinction between "security" and "safety". Does it mean they are very paranoid and attribute all safety-related incidents to sabotage or do they understand the word to mean "protection from harm, caused by negligence or enemy action"? Think of the implications! To me, "safety officer" paints the picture of an anal-retentive civil engineer, and "security officer" of a counter-intelligence style paranoid ex-field agent. But it could also be so that the KGB's purpose would be more ambiguous…