While Australians almost never use the stereotypical Crocodile Dundee flavour of Australian English, It seems Microsoft have seen a pressing need to adopt “dinky-di ‘Strine” (translation: native-born Australian spoken English) in the Australian version of Office 2007.

According to News.com.au “Words such as g’day, sickie, jackaroo, dag, dinky-di, ute, sanga, wuss and cooee were among the list of words selected by a panel of Australian experts, who considered them to be most relevant to everyday Aussies, Microsoft said.”

A panel of Australian experts??? Who on Earth were they? Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin? Was Microsoft paying by the hour? Is Microsoft satisfied with the manufactured outcome that it sanctioned?

As an Australian resident for most of my years (I migrated from the US at age 2), I can reliably attest to Microsoft being waaaaaay off base on this one. While “g’day” is a common form of the greeting “good day” and a “ute” is simply a “utility vehicle” (pick-up truck), most of the other words are not spoken by Australians in every day life. Or “any-day life” for that matter! It makes us cringe to hear words like “bonza, ridgy-didge, dob, galah, cockie, onya, and motza”, but fortunately we only hear them in media targeted at US and UK audiences.

Microsoft you’ve gotten it wrong again, and now you’re embarrassing yourselves as well as the “fair-dinkum Aussies” that you want to sell your product to. Crikey!

Wow that was a good one. Watching Jimmy Kimmel live and he gets bit by a snake and taken off in an ambulance. It was done in a way that we sat here wondering if it was real until we realized what he was up to. He then interviewed the Dr. from Grey’s anatomy from his fake hospital bed. It was funny but it actually had you wondering for a minute if he really got bit. Well done bit.

This case is interesting because it involves the use of technology first to join two people who did not belong together, and then to break them apart. First an Indiana man allegedly met a 13 year old girl on the internet. She claimed to be 18 and had sexually suggestive material on the site according to the website. They agreed to meet and fortuitously the man gave out his cell phone number to the girl’s friend. When police decided to track them down, they then used the ability to track that cell phone to find where they were driving and stop the car. It is impressive that within two hours of the girl joining up with the man, the police can access this information and track his whereabouts with sufficient specificity to stop the vehicle.

The new Google Notebook will be released next week. It is designed to be a scratch pads of sorts where a user can copy content from visited webpages, collect them and then access those results via the web. This could come in handy as I often email myself links I want to look at later. Instead I can snip and clip to my notebook. I may give it a try.

I have no idea if this site is for real or not. I somehow find it funny. You can ask … how did you wind up there? The answer is I don’t have a clue. I surfed there somehow and laughed and laughed. Good luck young fellow.

In reviewing the HTMLfixIT site content it occurred to me that we’ve done little or nothing lately to draw attention to Franki’s Statistical Hit Counter. This counter is the “jewel in the HTMLfixIT crown” in my opinion, and I’ve encouraged all of my clients to use it to analyse web traffic. It comes in two flavours: the advanced counter (which at $10 attempts to partially offset this site’s running costs) as well as a free version that we can all afford.

But seeing is believing, so please take a peek at the online demo and see what you think!