Perk

Short for perquisite. A casual or secondary benefit.

I hate being wrong. Probably no one likes it very much. I know that being wrong is part of the scientific process and that many scientists delight in being wrong. I can relate to that. I tend to love new discoveries. But new discoveries also tend to be something I’ve intentionally questioned, perhaps even knew I did not know. I get frustrated when I discover that something I was absolutely certain was true simply is not so.

Bespoke

Created by request. Attributed to items created for a customer’s specifications or requirements, usually describing suits of clothing cut to a customer’s measurements.

A friend on Facebook recently asked why anyone would use bespoke when custom is a perfectly good word. The post sparked a flurry of responses about the faddish use of bespoke and its use to put on airs. I was reminded me that I looked up bespoke in the dictionary less than a year ago. My too-infrequently followed rule here is to write an entry when I look a word up in the dictionary, so I am responding here.

I hope you're right

2 years 9 months ago

As the old chestnut goes, there are three tiny words that every marriage needs to be successful. I’m not talking about I love you. I mean, maybe you’re right.

We are on the precipice of a highly divisive election. I fear that the nation is facing an existential threat no matter who wins. I’m more worried about what happens to the nation because of the election than I am about what any candidate might actually do in office. I have never before this election cycle had the sense that the election would result in violence, but this one looks to be a powderkeg.

What's in an alien name?

2 years 10 months ago

An oft-discussed topic among writers of speculative fiction, both science fiction and fantasy, is how to name characters, places, and ideas of extraterrestrial or otherwise non-human or alien origin. Naming is a difficult part of all fiction writing — it’s more difficult than one might think to make names for characters. Some (myself included) believe that character names ought to suggest something about the characters, the themes of the story, their roles in the plot, or perhaps stand in ironic contrast to those roles.

Status update: I didn’t expect it to be that much downtime

2 years 10 months ago

Whoops! OK, that was my fault. I was actually quite surprised at how smoothly and quickly the transition went. As it turns out, it appears to have taken longer than expected for the DNS to update. In fact, the problem may have been in DNS cached in my browsers. When I tested the site with a browser I had no problem accessing it. When I tested the domain with dig and ping it looked like my system was seeing the new records.

Status update: some downtime expected

2 years 10 months ago

As Monochromatic Outlook prepares to celebrate its 21st anniversary, we are preparing to transfer the splicer.com domain to a new registrar. This is a pretty simple administrative change, but it’s quite possible that there will be some time between the change in registration and when the new registrar publishes the name service information and as that information propagates across the Internet.

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