Today is a good day to PLOT!

Mister Peabody, set the Wayback Machine to three years ago, pick a spot during a really long product release cycle.  Partly out of boredom, but mostly to mess with development manager at the time, I had asked one of the developers to swap out the splash screen.  The product logo was thus modified:


Official

Battle-ready!

Appropriate text was substituted, changing our tagline from “Enjoy the view” to “Today is a good day to PLOT!”  Laughs were had, and it was removed before alpha testing several months later.

Fast forward to this January, when we are adding support for arbitrary system fonts.  Our sales person was headed to Japan and was hopeful he could demonstrate the UNICODE aspect.  Could I mock up something for him?

There was no graphic user interface to this, so I would need to create some scripts that selected the appropriate font and inserted a message.  Not having had any reason to do this sort of thing before, I just assumed I could scroll down the font list, look for one named Hiragana or Katakana, and paste in whatever result Google Translate offered for  “[My Company Name] 黄色の鉛筆しています!”

While looking for the nonexistent “Hiragana” and “Katakana” fonts, I came across “Klingon” that I had installed from ~3 years ago.

!

One thing led to another, and soon I had mocked up this image:

Klingon dilithium mining futures

accompanied by a press release with fake quotes from our CEO and the Chancellor of the Klingon Mining Operations complimenting each other’s honor and battle prowess and declaring “Today is a good day to PLOT!” before eating Gagh and swilling blood wine.  It’s probably a good thing if our CEO doesn’t know about this.  Capito?

3 thoughts on “Today is a good day to PLOT!”

  1. I think we can trace this all back to a gift certificates you and I were given as graduation presents from a certain grammarian. I believe with both purchased the Klingon/English dictionary, the rest is history.

  2. Ah, those were the days. I wish I had held onto that book as I’m sure it’s worth a couple of bottles of Raktajino.

Comments are closed.