Proofreading matters. For anyone who doubts that let me bring your attention to the PR nightmare that followed Penguin’s publication of The Pasta Bible. –>

But proofreading isn’t as simple as just clicking on spell check. Here are some rules to help you when proofreading stuff:

The Golden Rule — The role of punctuation is to make writing easier to understand

This is the overarching rule which trumps all others. Don’t add punctuation just for the hell of it; as soon as punctuation hinders — rather than assists — a reader’s understanding, it needs to go. Occasionally you are allowed to break traditional rules in the name of this über rule (examples below).

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For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

— John 3:16 (KJV)

I would say this verse is pretty much the crux of Christianity: that our souls might have salvation in the afterlife because God made the difficult decision to send His only son to earth to die for our sins. We should be eternally thankful for His sacrifice.

I have tried for years to understand and believe in Christ’s sacrifice. It’s a core belief of millions across the world, and if it’s true then the fate of my eternal soul rests on understanding it (I’m not big on blind faith), but to this day I still can’t get my head around it. As it’s Easter I’m posting this as an open letter to Christians everywhere, asking you to help me understand the core belief of your religion. To understand God.

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I love Sons of Anarchy, but I’m just not sure I can overlook this…

And don’t even get me started on the missing apostrophe in Hells Angels…

“If I believe in a peaceful version of my religion, and it’s not hurting anyone, so then why do you still think that’s bad?”

Put it another way: let’s say you believe in a peaceful interpretation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. You follow the ‘good’ bits and ignore the ‘bad’ bits. You would never dream of harming another human being or anything like that, and regard all those who do as “extremists” and people who have “taken Hitler’s writing out of context”. Thus, you proudly wear your Swastika, state your political allegiance as “Nazi Party” on the census and live a perfectly good and moral life.

You raise your children with the same beliefs and values you follow, and they too grow up to be nice, moral Nazis who assert that anyone who gases Jews is a dangerous extremist who gives your political party a bad name, and that it is wrong to judge all Nazis just on the behaviour of a few fundamentalists.

A few years down the line, a large percentage of the country regard themselves as Nazis. The vast majority of those would never dream of condoning anything bad, and if questioned on the specifics of their belief will say something along the lines of: “Oh, well I believe that to be a good Nazi you just have to be nice to people and go to the local Third Reich meetings once in a while.”

The result of this is that the Nazi Party hold serious political weight. It would be a disastrous move for a politician to publicly state that he disagrees with the Nazis. If he attempts to point out that there are some very horrible ideas in Mein Kampf and there is clear evidence that teaching people that this book is a fine example of moral fibre increases the number of those who commit atrocities directly attributable to its teachings, he is told: “Oh that’s just the extremists – MOST of us would never dream of doing that.”

So it is generally accepted that Nazism is fine, morally admirable and generally a great thing because a lot of the people who bear the flag are at heart nice people. Nazi charities are set up, and they give millions to charity. Copies of Mein Kampf are placed in every hotel room in the country, and children are raised to believe that they are ‘bad’ and ‘wrong’ if they question the teachings of Hitler.

Do you see what’s wrong with this picture?

The moderates are the dangerous ones, because they make unacceptable ideas appear acceptable.

If you run more than one operating system on your machine, you’re no doubt aware of the dull default bootloaders that assault your eyesockets every time your machine powers up.

I’ve just discovered BURG (it’s GRUB backwards, and rather loosely stands for “Brand new Unified loadeR from GRUB” — they might as well just call it “Beautify UR GRUB” really). Despite the poor acronym, this is an absolute must-have for any machine running more than one operating system: it brings a much-needed GUI to replace the aged text-only interface.

Here are some screenshots to give you a taste of what it can do:

Big thanks to OMG! Ubuntu! for making me aware of this neat little tool. Click the link to get it and for a simple walkthrough on how to install it.

UPDATE: For Ubuntu 12.04, follow this guide.