Interesting Google Chrome spellchecker results

So I was emailing a friend the other day and wanted to make sure that they knew we were watching my brother's dog. She's a Weimaraner, which if you've never met one, they tend to be a little tiny bit completely nuts. When they're not sleeping, that is. When they're asleep they're only kind of crazy.

But I digress. The point of this story is not the dog, but the word. Weimaraner. Good luck spelling it from memory if you don't know it by heart. It's all chock full of Bavarian goodness, with nouns all over the place following no apparent rules. So of course I misspell it, and helpful as always, Google Chrome decides to offer a spelling suggestion.

Weimaraner = Pomeranian

That's just remarkable. In case you're unfamiliar with a Pomeranian, they are also a type of dog (as well as a region in Europe). A simple side-by-side comparison should highlight the incredible irony of this spelling 'suggestion'.

Here's my brother's dog, with a tennis ball for scale:

mmm... moldy tennis ball...

Here's a Pomeranian with a giant, over-sized coffee mug - no, wait, I'm sorry - it's a NORMAL sized coffee mug:

How about a nice hot cup of Weimeraner?

This little excursion also introduced me to a bunch of Pomeranian cross-breeds I have no idea about. You wouldn't think that the 'mechanics' of breeding a Pomeranian would work well with larger dogs. For instance, a HUSKY. Seriously, they have Husky-Pomeranians. They call them a Pomsky. I like Huskeranian better my self, it sounds more manly.

Although, if your dog looks like an Ewok, I guess it really doesn't matter what you call it:

Huskewokeranian

P.S.: Google Chrome is still trying to correct my spelling of Weimaraner, even thought it is spelled Weimaraner. It's just slightly off:

Brilliant. Truly exceptional.

Yep, just a little bit.

Things you learn through experience, part 2

As a continuation to my post from two years ago (yikes), I would like to present some more things that I've learned.

• If you have to sneeze, sneeze on a cat. It's lots of fun.
• When applying Tiger Balm, don't scratch yourself. I think you know where I mean.
• If, after applying Tiger Balm and scratching yourself, don't try to wash it off - you'll only make it spread around and get worse.
• Do not play tug with a dog using a 'barbell curl' motion. When the dog lets go, you sometimes end up uppercutting yourself in the face.

I think that's good for now. More later...

We're practically cousins

Today I found a genealogy link to the earliest ransackers of post Roman Empire Europe. Just for shiggles, I calculated my relationship to Charlemagne.

It's amazing - we could be first cousins almost!

Charlemagne, King of the Franks, Holy Roman Emperor (747 - 814) 

relationship to you: 1st cousin 8x removed of wife of 3rd cousin 37x removed

Okay, maybe not quite. I'm a little more related to Dracula.

Vlad Dracula III (1431 - 1476) 

relationship to you: 12th great grand uncle of wife of 31st cousin 9x removed

Of course, being descended from the Yngling dynasty of Swedish kings (cough, cough, awesome, cough), I can top all of that since the Ynglings claim to be descended from GODS.

Odin of Asgard 

Your 67th great grandfather 

Birth 190 in Nordrhein-Westfalen, Germany 

Death 260 in Lake Malaran, Uppsala, Sweden

Yep. That's right. I'm descended from ODIN. I need a giant hammer and some lighting bolts.

Hotkey rebinding... urge to kill rising

Let me just say this quickly and get it out of my system. For all you system engineers out there who 'improve' existing products, don't add a new feature that uses an existing hotkey and creates a conflict.

The target of my ire is the 'add to dictionary' hotkey in Word. It has always been there, since I started using Word back when we coded on clay tablets and drove cars with our feet. I think it would be pretty obvious that you wouldn't want to create a conflict with this control, as it is probably the most often used action by fast and lazy typists like myself.

Creating a conflict with the mapped key takes an operation that requires a half second to complete and turns it into a process where you have to move your hand off the mouse, which takes seconds, thereby massively increasing the time spent just moving from one control to another.

I did discover that if you click "additional actions" and go to "options", you can turn off the offending menu item, and it won't trouble you anymore. I did not find a way to rebind the key mappings, so this will work in place of that.

But it brings me back to the original point of my Brain Defrag for today, which is this - to the engineer who created the key mapping conflict in the first place:

The FBI emailed to tell me that I won $800,000! YAY!

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