I mean Luck Oapostrophe The Irish to you. I've been struggling for years with the special character in my surname name O'Connor. The apostrophe, which originally took the form Ó, indicates that my father is the grandson of Connor. But many computer systems cannot handle the apostrophe because they view it as a string delimiter, and therefore get confused when it shows up in a name.

Cycle way back to my first computer assignment: write a program to read in a string containing your name and print it back out. Anyone who's ever taken a CS course knows this one. However, long after our classmates had left for Teds, only my good friend Scott O'Brien and I were left struggling in UConn's basement computer center. Yup, we were suffering from the dreaded apostrophe syndrome while the Smiths, the Jones, and even the McCabes were off drinking beer.

And I ran into the same problem recently while I was booking a flight on the Aer Lingus website - check this out:

Like the mantra of eradicating short date formats back in the yesteryear of Y2K, can't we Irish computer geeks band together to make the apostrophe a first class citizen? Eradicate the lazy string delimiter checking...

Well that's my wish for the day. Now this Irish geek is off to find some good green beer. Signed, Amy OapostropheConnor

I had a mini vacation in Vegas this weekend - took my sweet yellow Mini Cooper to meet its community. Met a yellow twin and lots of minis making personalized statements. Even a mini-meetup at the

The most paranoid reaction I got was from the poor hotel clerk who was helping me to get wireless working in my hotel room. I didn't figure out until later that he probably thought I would blog about a bad Internet connection - maybe I couldn't even post my blog because of it? I'm not a rampant consumer blogger though, and I'll confess now that I had inadvertently hit the wireless switch on the side of my laptop, so it wasn't even the hotel's fault that I couldn't connect.

It was interesting to see who commented when I wore the t-shirt while working at our Menlo Park campus: one IDC analyst, our analyst relations lead, an incredibly nice Sun communications manager (she introduced herself and exclaimed "what a great shirt" as I passed her in the courtyard), a Sun executive who really likes black t-shirts, and my product marketing buddy who really likes black shoes...