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Recently I received this in my inbox, source unknown. Now, I am not going to put up all kinds of office-humour mails here (I do that in dutch at zegdanwat.nl). However, I do enjoy the intricasies of languages; hence this post.
The English language has some wonderfully anthropomorphic collective nouns for the various groups of animals.
We are all familiar with:
a Herd of cows
a Flock of chickens
a School of fish
a Gaggle of geese.
However, less widely known is:
a Pride of lions
a Murder of crows (as well as their cousins the rooks and ravens)
an Exaltation of doves (Larks too)
a Parliament of owls
Now consider a group of Baboons. They are the loudest, most dangerous, most obnoxious, most viciously aggressive and least intelligent of all primates.
And what is the proper collective noun for a group of baboons?
Believe it or not …….it is a Congress!
I guess that pretty much explains the things!
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As the first post about the things I did in the past, how better to start with the oldest stuff I can still link to? In 2000 I was working in an internet startup in Santa Rosa, California. For that company I wrote a browser-based content creation tool. Very meta, eh? Using your browser to create pages that someone else can see in their browser. Nowadays, everybody is doing that. However, at the time it was an innovative idea. Sales reps could login on their own system and create pages branded with client logo’s, text and images tailored to their needs, etc.
The content of the created pages (text and images, video was nowhere to be found on the net then) was stored in XML files, while the layout was stored in XSL stylesheets.
As we found out how to store and edit XML and XSL files from within the browser (using JavaScript), I wrote up the process we went through, to display the data. Those articles got published on 4guysFromRolla.com a website on (web) development. At the time one of the primary sources of ASP (Active Server Pages) knowledge, at least for me.
The articles I wrote can be found here:
“Online content creation using ASP, XML and XSL” - part 1, part 2
“Using XSL Stylesheets to translate XML into HTML” - part 1, part 2
Besides those I wrote a handful of articles in ASP magazine. A print-magazine which is no longer around unfortunately, I do have a couple of hardcopies still though.