Inter­est­ing terms heard at work over the past few weeks.  Some of them have spe­cial­ized tech­ni­cal mean­ing, in con­text, but have entirely dif­fer­ent mean­ing if heard elsewhere.

• Per­ish­able Skills — Skills that you have to prac­tice, oth­er­wise they get lost over time.  I am an Eagle Scout and used to know how to tie all sorts of knots.  These days, I remem­ber a handful–square, clove hitch, lark’s head, bowline–but, for the life of me, can­not remem­ber the figure-8 knot because it has been too long.
• Alchemy — Used to describe my tea mak­ing rit­ual.  I scoop some loose-leaf tea into a funky Ada­gio Teapot, fill it with water, wait, and later set that on top of my mug, releas­ing tea through a valve in the bot­tom.  Every­one else just drinks from the office cof­fee machine or uses tea bags.
• Soft Core — No, not porn.  A chip with repro­gram­ma­ble gates that can be instantly con­fig­ured to emu­late any num­ber of proces­sors via software.
• Endian — Not dots, not feath­ers, but some­thing as bor­ing as byte-ordering of the num­bers used by chips.

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Tagged as: alchemy, endian, perishable, skills, softcore, terminology