pirate jokes

Blackboard has launched a new language pack for its course management systems in support of International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19), the day on which people across the globe can use expressions like "ahoy" and "yar matey" without fear of retribution.

Talk Like a Pirate Day is celebrated by dozens around the world. In honor of this, Blackboard's Application Pack 3 now includes support for Pirate, not to be confused with Piratic or Piroglyphic. The company has also added Pig Latin to the language pack but has not announced plans for the Dog Latin support, popular amongst freshman Classics and Comparative Lit majors ("Dona mihi plus beerus").

The language pack supports the Blackboard Learning System Enterprise edition, Blackboard Community System, Blackboard Content System, and Blackboard Outcomes System.

In an actual quote, Jessica Finnefrock, vice president of Blackboard product development, had this to say: "Our product supports languages across the seven seas. With the Blackboard Pirate Language Pack, our clients will be able to provide learning on the go for pirates, privateers, and freebooters. Blackboard software has been internationalized for years, with the Blackboard Language Pack Editor available directly in the core platform. This makes it easy for our clients to swap the default language of the user interface for a new language."

In addition to Pirate and Pig Latin, the Blackboard Academic Suite supports Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Dutch, English (US), English (US K12), French, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish. Blackboard Community also supports Polish and Brazilian Portuguese.

The Application Pack 3 download, more information, and probably some pirate jokes are available at the links below ... yar

That pesky smiley face - you know, the :-) symbol that people use to tell you they're being light-hearted in e-mail messages - turned 25 on Wednesday, according to the man who says he invented it. Same with the frowny face, which he came up with at the same time.

Scott E. Fahlman, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, was part of an online bulletin-board group in the early 1980s. Online etiquette was still in its infancy, and no one was quite sure how to convey that they were joking.

"Given the nature of the community, a good many of the posts were humorous (or attempted humor)," Fahlman wrote in a column on Carnegie Mellon's Web site. "The problem was that if someone made a sarcastic remark, a few readers would fail to get the joke, and each of them would post a lengthy diatribe in response. That would stir up more people with more responses, and soon the original thread of the discussion was buried. In at least one case, a humorous remark was interpreted by someone as a serious safety warning."

On Sept. 19, 1982, Fahlman posted a message on the bulletin board stating:

I propose that (sic) the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

:-(

The idea spread to other universities and research labs, thanks in part to CMU alumni who continued to read the university bulletin boards.

And so the first "emoticons" came to be, followed by a wide array of shorthand ways for people to express emotions across cyberspace. As much a part of life as they seem nowadays, there are still some people who resist the notion.

"Many people have denounced the very idea of the smiley face," Fahlman wrote, "pointing out that good writers should have no need to explicitly label their humorous comments. Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain got along just fine without this."

On Tuesday, the eMusic digital download service began selling audiobooks, increasing the site's competition with iTunes.

"The biggest selling point for eMusic is also its biggest point of controversy," according to a report in The New York Times. "The site uses the MP3 format, which works on any digital player but lacks the technology, known as digital rights management, that protects copyrighted material from unlimited duplication."

The iTunes store dominates the digital-download market, with 71 percent of all audio downloads. The eMusic service comes in second at 10 percent, followed by such services as Napster, Rhapsody and WalMart.com.

Yesterday was "Talk Like a Pirate Day," so technically this is a little late - or 364 days early. But check out the YouTube video clip "Talk Like a Pirate Day: The Five A's" for a quick lesson on talking like a pirate from the authors of Pirattitude!, a comical instruction manual on tapping into your inner buccaneer.

The video clip gives tips on the proper usage of such phrases as avast, aye and arrr!