The Lexicographer's Rules

Yerida is a somewhat derogatory Hebrew term for emigration from Israel, approximately the opposite of making aliyah, or immigrating to Israel.

What is the connection? 1. Cycling’s unwritten code of chivalry dictates that riders not take advantage of the leader when he has crashed. 2. Fooled by a visual illusion, people drink more from short, wide glasses than thinner, taller ones, but they think they are drinking less.

1. Chase, my bank of ten years, has been installing new ATMs all over the place. The new ATMs have a different keypad configuration: the Cancel button is now where the Enter key used to be. Do you know how hard it is to untrain ten years of ATM usage? I’ve accidentally canceled dozens of transactions in the last few months. 2. Why are the multi-part deposit slips not printed in the same order? Sometimes the pink customer slip is on the bottom, after the white and yellow carbons (not real carbons, by still called that). Sometimes it’s in the middle. Bad print jobber? Inattention? Does it matter, anyway, whether I get the pink copy or the bank gets the canary slip?

While I was in France a couple of weeks ago, we happened to see on television one of those “funny ads from other countries” programs, what looked like an American show with a French host stitched in. You’ve seen these same shows in the United States. They are usually fairly entertaining, and at least in France, they blurred the product names and logos so it was really about the humor and pathos in the advertising rather than pitching more product. And of course, everyone claims to watch the Super Bowl only for the ads at half-time. So it occurs to me that someone at ReplayTV is missing the boat by dropping the advertisement-skipping feature of the company’s personal video recorder. You know what they should be doing? Remember AdCritic when it was free? ReplayTV has a chance to do the same thing: make people want to see the ads. I recommend ReplayTV try this: 1. Separate the advertisements out from the programming. Eliminate duplicates. 2. Allow ReplayTV users to view the ads, and rate them. 3. Upload those ratings (with the ReplayTV users’ permission) to a central server, and compile them. 4. Then upload a “best of” or “top 20” permanent listing in each users’ ReplayTV. 5. Users can watch that list at will by choosing from ads sorted by rating. They will watch them, and just like one of the ain’t-ads-great television shows, ReplayTV can slip a few real sponsors into the mix.

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF WISCONSIN HYPERPHRASE TECHNOLOGIES, LLC
and HYPERPHRASE INC., Plaintiffs, v. MICROSOFT CORPORATION, Defendant. ORDER 02-C-647-C Pursuant to the modified scheduling order, the parties in this case had until June 25, 2003 to file summary judgment motions. Any electronic document may be e-filed until midnight on the due date. In a scandalous affront to this court’s deadlines, Microsoft did not file its summary judgment motions until 12:04:27 a.m. on June 26, 2003, with some supporting documents trickling in as late as 1:11:15 a.m. I don’t know this personally because I was home sleeping but that’s what the court’s computer docketing program says, so I’ll accept it as true. Microsoft’s insouciance so flustered Hyperphrase that nine of its attorneys [...] promptly filed a motion to strike the summary judgment motion as untimely. Counsel used bolded italics to make their point, a clear sign of grievous iniquity by one’s foe. True, this court did not enter an order on June 20, 2003 ordering the parties not to flyspeck each other, but how could such an order apply to a motion filed almost five minutes late? Microsoft’s temerity was nothing short of a frontal assault on the precept of punctuality so cherished by and vital to this court. Wounded though this court may be by Microsoft’s four minute and twenty-seven second dereliction of duty, it will transcend the affront and forgive the tardiness. Indeed, to demonstrate the even-handedness of its magnanimity, the court will allow Hyperphrase on some future occasion in this case to e-file a motion four minutes and thirty seconds late, with supporting documents to follow up to seventy-two minutes later. Having spent more than that amount of time on Hyperphrase’s motion, it is now time to move on to other Gordian problems confronting this court. Plaintiff’s motion to strike is denied. Entered this 1st day of July, 2003. BY THE COURT:
[Signed]
STEPHEN L. CROCKER
Magistrate Judge

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