1 feb 2012

in this meeting, the tech guy mentioned something about "earl" which turned out to be how he says "url". (i do that, he said. i make up words.) he was talking about shortening earls for inclusion in a tweet, and he was going on about how [insert here something i wasn't listening to] shortens the earls. some website that tech-boi frequents allows you to access a shortened earl for sharing. i said that twitter does that for you. he said, no it doesn't.

what?

exactly.

okay, maybe he means if you want to use it somewhere besides twitter, right? so i asked if he meant something like tiny URL. he said, what? i said, TINY URL! turned out he heard me the first time but didn't understand. why? because he had never heard of tiny URL.

what??

exactly.

he started to talk about how this thing i was describing could not work because it would have to really, really, really shorten the earl to make it short enough for a tweet. okay, we're back to tweets which i already said twitter shortens URLs for you, but he remained with the talking, going on about how when you have a earl that had a lot of references that it would be impossible to shorten it because you would lose the references.

what???

exactly.

firstly, what the hell is a earl with references? but secondly, what i said to him was -- yes, that is precisely what tiny URL does, in fact that is what it was designed for, in fact that is its sole purpose for existence, and in fact that is its name. tiny URL. he said he didn't see how it was possible to shorten a earl with references. i said, they store your URL in a database and provide a short one that redirects to their database which supplies the long one and sends you on your way. he looked at me like i was from the future.

what????

exactly.