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Saturday, 23 February 2008

Strangely paradoxical

Does your blogger underline your misspelled words as you type, or is that my firefox doing it? Either way, it doesn't recognize words like blog, blogger, or firefox, with a capital letter or otherwise. Funny, huh?

I've always thought that these things are really the boundaries of ideology - you know, like spell check and also predictive text. They define what can be articulated (the spell check just made me not use the word "sayable" - but my soul is full of defiance, aha!). For instance, my mobile phone (the second cheapest from the shop, an old Nokia which never dies) does not know how to predictively type "fuck" or "bitch" or "arsehole/asshole" - even though I do use them in the most predictable circumstances, and often. I feel like there's an invisible boundary trying to steer me onto the right road of expression. The same goes with Chinese predictive text (if you use 新注音), which tries to guess which character you want to use (each sound that I input in Chinese has a truckload of corresponding characters). I'm not sure how it builds its database of possibilities - but it recognizes some proper names and not others. For instance, it knows Frank Hsieh (謝長廷)... but not some other folk. However, it does pick up names as I go along - so if I entered my friend Ted's name, it will remember. Makes me wonder whether it started out with a list of names that the software developers reckon will always be often used, such as Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) perhaps.

An illustration of the ways in which our ideological framework is already carved out?

Who reckons I ought to go back to Uni?

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