I’d like to thank my clients, past and present, who provided such positive testimonials for inclusion in the new site.

Several people made approving comments about the talk, which was good (some even commented on last year’s talk, which, since this showed they still remembered it, was even better).  The best comment about this year’s though is probably @Innovimax‘s tweet:

Tony is a real 21th century XML Monk! He sponsored the Beer Station at #xmlprague and works on nicely printing bibles. #consideringJoining

(We did discuss his becoming a monk, of any order: I had considered that the asceticism aspect might be a problem, but he considered it to be a non-normative section of the specification.)

“Mentea” was the most popular choice in a poll of alternative new names among some clients and contacts. Their responses included:

• “rolls off the tongue”
• “seems like it would be challenging”
• “I like this one better just for the sound”
• “I like this one rather more”
• “strong preference for mentea”

In the event that you do find it challenging, it’s pronounced similarly to “idea”, i.e., like “mentee-a”.

“Mentea” is registered in Ireland, registration number 427521.

As Dave Pawson put it, it’s pronounced like “men teeth”,  but if you’re not a native speaker of English, you’re not necessarily going to know what to do with the “eith” combination.

A change has been on the cards since tcworld 2009 in Wiesbaden when, quite by chance and after several people had had trouble with the name, I heard two women at lunch, an Australian and an American, discussing their respective Norwegian husband’s accents then straying into a general discussion of how non-native speakers of English pronounce “th”. The need to change became obvious again at XML Prague 2010 last weekend when people there had similar difficulties.

Mind you, I have my own difficulties with non-English words. Also with some made-up words that contain a ‘X’ just to denote their XMLishness (though I’ve made up a few of my own in my time, including ‘xmlroff‘ and ‘xslide’).

The ground rules for a new name are:

• Has to be easy to pronounce by native speakers and non-native speakers of English
• Domain name has to be available
• Should be shorter than “Menteith Consulting”, because long names make for very long email addresses
• Doesn’t have to include a ‘X’
• Would be useful if I had some personal connection with the name
• Should not be slang for a body part or any intimate activity

‘Menteith’ is from the ‘Graham of Menteith’ tartan, so it fits the connection test but, sadly, fails the pronouncability test. There’s lots of Irish names that would fail the pronouncability test with native English speakers, and seemingly all the most useful Australian words are already taken as domain names. Then there’s the important question of whether a name has an unwanted slang meaning in any language of interest.

I could say ‘watch this space’, but it will be a while before I come up with a name to which it’s worth changing that passes all the tests.

To make life easier for my accountant when doing my annual return, I wrote some Perl scripts to convert the little that QuickBooks exports as files plus, via Excel, the data from a non-standard transaction report into what SAGE imports.  The account balances on the two packages now all match (though at one point yesterday, account balances in one were -2 times the balances in the other).

I am expecting that the accountant will find few enough things to correct that I won’t have to automate conversion in the other direction.

The original:

Hopefully the only reverse the company experiences:

Hot on the press:

Impressed by letterpress: