Will Chatham

I have been spend­ing a lot of time doing these things lately (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• Work­ing. We are set­ting up four Dell 6650 servers for our new J2EE-compliant web appli­ca­tion plat­form at the AFCCC. This is excit­ing stuff. We installed Red­Hat Enter­prise 3 AS on two of them today, and will fin­ish up the oth­ers tomor­row. We have also spent a lot of time in meet­ings to plan the new web site
• Play­ing Magic: The Gath­er­ing. Yes, I am a geek and proud of it. Magic is the game to end all games.
• Being with the fam­ily. Since the new job started, I get home shortly after 4 every day, which has allowed me to spend much more time with Gray and Alicia.
• Side Work. Still help­ing out with Puck­ett web stuff and Ingles web stuff. Also work­ing on some web design for other clients, and just fin­ished set­ting up my new ded­i­cated web server for host­ing them.
• Plan­ning the addi­tion. The con­trac­tors started on our house addi­tion yes­ter­day, and things are mov­ing along quickly. I can’t wait to have a big­ger kitchen, a bath­room down­stairs, and a new study with a bay win­dow. If all goes well, it will be done by Thanksgiving.

It has been one week since I started my new job as a con­tracted web devel­oper work­ing with the Air Force. So far I like it a lot, and I don’t forsee that chang­ing any time soon. I went in a lit­tle intim­i­dated by the mil­i­tary aspect of it, not hav­ing spent any time in that envi­ron­ment before, but I quickly real­ized that it’s noth­ing to worry about, and that the peo­ple there are very nice.

Work­ing down­town is great, being sur­rounded by all the good restau­rants, and being about 1.5 miles from home. The money I am sav­ing on gas will be amaz­ing. I was putting over 30 miles a day on my car; now it’s barely 3. I looked at used bikes the other day, but I think I will save that adven­ture until spring rolls around.

Noth­ing too excit­ing to report oth­er­wise. I’ll post some more inter­est­ing stuff here soon.

This is why I love the internet.

Some­thing I have had in the back of my head for a long time, but always for­got to do, was to look up the ori­gin of [sic]. That is, the edi­to­r­ial com­ment you see used in writ­ing when the author is quot­ing some­one who has mis­pelled a word or not used proper grammar.

For exam­ple, if I was quot­ing George W. Bush on this web site, I would say:

“This has been tough weeks in that country[sic].”

–George W. Bush, Wash­ing­ton, D.C., April 13, 2004

The [sic] implies that it was the per­son quoted that made the gram­mat­i­cal mis­take, not me. Con­sider it a gram­mat­i­cal pass­ing of the buck.

Today I finally remem­bered to look up [sic] and see if I could find out what its ori­gins were. I searched Google for “what does sic mean?”, and the first result I found was quite a suprise. The page I was lead to told me that SIC stands for “Stan­dard Indus­trial Clas­si­fi­ca­tion”, and relates to bar­code technology.

How­ever, if you go on to read the com­ments from other peo­ple that fol­low, you find a rare gem of inter­net cul­ture, where peo­ple have all found each other under the wrong pre­tenses (search­ing for the mean­ing of [sic], not SIC), and have estab­lished a dia­logue that spans a cou­ple of years. There are some rude com­ments, but it’s pretty inter­est­ing to fol­low along and see what happens.

It is also impres­sive that the own­ers of the site have real­ized what they have inad­ver­tently cre­ated, and have decided to let this go on for so long.