The lighting in my cubicle isn’t that bad!

This goes way beyond “not funny”, all the way to “incredibly stupid”. Does someone do even basic quality control on your source images? I’m thinking the answer is a rather firm No.

[Update: Just saw one go by where one word was in cyrillic and the other in hebrew; sadly, I clicked refresh before I could stop to grab the screenshot.]

Presenting some random guy’s download from Project Gutenberg as if it were the Kindle edition of an in-copyright book by a respected translator is not acceptable. I can’t safely order anything from your listing of Jay Rubin’s translation of Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories, because there are clearly several different books here. Even the featured editorial review refers to someone else’s translation. Worse, the page changes slightly each time I reload it, apparently due to different indexing on different servers.

If I ignore the official link from his author page, and search by his name or by its ISBN, I find the real book here. But if I trust your listings, I’m screwed.

(yes, I sent in feedback; hopefully someone will clean up the mess)

Auto-correcting my already-correct spelling of a search (even when I’m refining a search by adding additional keywords after already overriding your miscorrection) is annoying, but auto-correcting it to something that you have no search results for at all? STUPID.

The most reliable miscorrection I’ve found is the Japanese version of the LaTeX document processing system, which goes by the name “pLaTeX”. This is always corrected to “playtex”, even if the other words in the search are so specific that there are no Playtex associations possible, such as 傍点, the marginal dots that are used for emphasis in Japanese text.

Searches for LaTeX often include rubber gloves and fetish items, but the TeX community has been online for so long that they don’t dominate. In fact, I suspect horny rubber-lovers are often frustrated to find themselves receiving advice on pagination, hyphenation, and “how to make your font bigger”.

Please start a new blog for your knee-jerk political scapegoating. It detracts from your knee-jerk Apple fanboyism.

I hate blogfights, so here’s a picture of a pretty girl in a bikini.

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The following sentence in Laura Rowley’s article on the student loan crisis should have been caught and fixed:

Indebted grads are also less likely to go to graduate school, delay getting married, having children and saving for retirement.

Sadly, I suspect that this is the “fix”, and the original was clearly written in English.

Text-based captchas have gone from distorted words to random strings that once appeared somewhere online, often distorted to the point that multiple letters overlap completely. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to hit the “give me another one” button on popular systems, because the first several choices were impossible.

Today’s new low: “ryōhei,”. I haven’t tried to type this in Windows recently, but on a Mac, it can’t be done from the standard US English keyboard. You either have to look “ō” up in the Character Viewer, or switch to the Extended keyboard definition and remember that you compose it with Alt-A.