Comments for blog.limedaley.com/post/interesting-message-from-microsoft

Comment #2729

2011-12-30T20:08:30Z

That's probably it: not a feeling of uncertainty, but an uncertainty of feeling was what our guest must have been after. She said "uncertainty feeling," which I expanded a bit without thinking that those were only the single words (the last two characters to the right mean "feeling", "emotion", or "sentiment" in Japanese, too), and her "box of chocolates" expression probably was her attempt to circumscribe "unpredictable." Thanks for getting a second opinion - I think you can now safely say you know what Microsoft wrote you, and write Bill Gates an appropriate thank you letter! ;-)

Comment #2728

2011-12-30T18:07:15Z

A customer of mine says:

Those are Chinese characters. The writing is not the usual form so it could look like Japanese. The meaning is: "Sentiment which is hard to be predicted".

Comment #2727

2011-12-12T21:06:57Z

You're welcome, it was a fun little puzzle. I'd also sent it to a friend married to a Japanese who confirmed it was Chinese.

Maybe you can continue the tradition, and encode "Like a box of chocolates" in morse code on your next circuit board...

Comment #2726

2011-12-10T18:26:12Z

"You never know what you will get" sounds like a good Microsoft joke....

Comment #2725

2011-12-10T18:02:54Z

(and thanks for figuring it out, that's fun)

Comment #2724

2011-12-10T17:53:25Z

I haven't converted the blog over to UTF-8 yet, so those characters can't be displayed properly.

When the blog software was created, UTF-8 support wasn't widely used, and so pLog made various workarounds to get it to work in different languages. But, unfortunately, those workarounds made it so those of us using ISO-8859-1, et al. have a harder time displaying unicode characters.

Now (as of a couple years ago) that PHP supports UTF-8 well, all languages should be use that format, but there are issues converting all character sets to UTF-8 automatically, and so I haven't figured out how to do it well. I believe my blog would convert easily enough, because there aren't non-7-bit characters in it, but the European languages have a harder time...

Comment #2723

2011-12-10T17:38:36Z

Well. The characters displayed well enough in the comment box...

Here are links to pictures of the characters:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%96%99

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%83%85

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%84%9F

Comment #2722

2011-12-10T17:31:16Z

We had a Chinese guest today and showed her the writing. She confirmed that it's Chinese, but that it's not a complete sentence. Also, she confirmed the hasty scrawl: she couldn't make out the fourth character from the left. She said it meant something like "a feeling of uncertainty" or "you never know what you will get."

The characters, as far as I can identify them:

_ _ ™ _ Å

Comment #2721

2011-12-09T21:05:57Z

I'd say a hasty Japanese scrawl. Chinese doesn't really have much in the way of deliberate curves.

Comment #2720

2011-12-09T19:55:21Z

I'd say Chinese, not Japanese, but have no clue from there.

Comment #2719

2011-12-09T18:55:42Z

"Packed by No. 47" :)

Comment #2718

2011-12-09T18:31:47Z

That looks like Japanese.