Mike DeSimone

161 reputation

bio	website	arlut.org
	location	Austin, TX
	age	40
visits	member for	2 years
	seen	May 1 '12 at 20:24
stats	profile views	12

I do a bunch of things, from some big distributed C++/IPC stuff, to smaller embedded code, to hardware design, to system architecture, to PCB layout. My head's a mess.

Mad Scientists discover That Which Man Was Not Meant To Know.
Mad Engineers create That Which Man Was Not Meant To Have.
It's a subtle, but important, distinction: pure vs. applied insanity.

	161 reputation	bio	website	arlut.org	visits	member for	2 years
5 badges		location	Austin, TX		seen	May 1 '12 at 20:24

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Jul 24	comment	What does this mean: “Avoid oral calcium, dairy products, shark cartilage & exercise during the medication.” Remember that some antacids (calcium carbonate, specifically) are oral calcium, not just calcium supplements.
Jul 14	answered	“my friend” vs “a friend of mine”
Jul 4	comment	Which is correct: “home in” or “hone in”? "hone in" in wider use? Not looking forward to "nuculur" getting standardized...
Jun 23	comment	'Who all is'…is that grammatically correct? So it's basically a contraction of "Who are all the people coming to see the movie?" How does that work, and can it be generalized into something that can be applied elsewhere?
Jun 22	comment	Is it proper to use a colon followed immediately by a hyphen? That looks like a typo. The dash contributes nothing and should be eliminated.
Jun 22	comment	'Who all is'…is that grammatically correct? @Kosmonaut: The rub is that English doesn't differentiate singular and plural in interrogative pronouns, like it does with subjective, objective, and possessive pronouns. So unlike "y'all" which tries to replace the redundancy of "you" as plural pronoun, there's no comparable redundant plural interrogative pronoun. It's solving a problem that doesn't even exist; it may even be creating a problem to solve.
Jun 22	comment	Do you say 'white blackboard'? The cuerpo is even worse.
Jun 22	awarded	Commentator
Jun 22	comment	Do you say 'white blackboard'? Isopropyl alcohol, a component in most whiteboard cleaning sprays, will erase Sharpie, Magic Marker, and other "permanent" markers from whiteboards. This is because these markers are alcohol-based. (In my line of work, electronics, we can't use Sharpies to mark circuit boards because we clean them with alcohol, which quickly removes the ink. We must use paint markers or label printers instead.)
Jun 22	comment	Do you say 'white blackboard'? The markers are "dry-erase" to differentiate them from "wet-erase" markers, which are used on overhead transparencies and required a wet rag to erase. Wet-erase markers are also useful on dry-erase boards, for markings that you don't want to erase with the dry-erase parts. For example, for a status list, you could write the team members' names in wet erase and the status in dry erase. This makes it hard to erase the name when erasing the status.
Jun 22	comment	Do you say 'white blackboard'? @Jasper: Same here, hence "chalkboard".
Jun 18	awarded	Editor
Jun 18	comment	Does a comma have to be used before 'because'? Better would be to swap order along with keeping the comma: "Because he was afraid, he didn’t run."
Jun 18	comment	Is it safe to use the British standard for numbering in a novel with a worldwide audience? Fixed it. Thanks!
Jun 18	revised	Is it safe to use the British standard for numbering in a novel with a worldwide audience? rephrased; added 7 characters in body
Jun 18	comment	Billion and other large numbers I'm not sure about how close those ties are with America. In their locally-produced entertainment, if you have an English speaker, they're more likely to be an American if they're an antagonist and British if they're a protagonist. This isn't just soreness over the last war. Japan itself identifies more closely with Europe than America due to their similar feudal histories and the social classes that descended from that. Note that Japan and Europe are DVD region 2.
Jun 18	comment	Is it safe to use the British standard for numbering in a novel with a worldwide audience? I always thought that a quid was a unit of measure for alcoholic beverages.
Jun 18	answered	Is it safe to use the British standard for numbering in a novel with a worldwide audience?
Jun 11	awarded	Teacher
Jun 11	answered	“Daily conversations” vs. “daily conversation”