Max Makowski: Right as Always

In the arthouse movie The Pigeon Egg Strategy, a team of assassins attempt to kill a children's book author who has written a story they feel is about them and thus has exposed their existence to the world.

Mostly, it's a movie about language.

Nonetheless, watching it explains a great deal about society, since this film was where I first encountered the concept of linguistic causation: things do not exist until there is established a way to define them, then suddenly their existence is everywhere.

Case in point: I lamented to a coworker the difficulty I had getting users to type "\\servername". Sometimes, they would type "//servername", and I stated that there was only a 50-50 chance of this happening. It was then that my coworker stated that this was incorrect, since it was feasible for a user to type "\/servername" or "/\servername". And my eyes were opened.

So yesterday I'm standing over a users shoulder as he opens up the Run command box and type "\\servername/path/to/folder".

Problems don't exist until they can be defined. That's why I don't like looking at the Event Viewer on a perfectly functional XP system. I'll only find things I don't want to know about.