Birthday Lunch

OK, so my birthday was several weeks ago, but that's no reason to stop celebrating. Fei Min's and Laura's birthdays are close to mine, so for the last few years, we've had a birthday lunch together. We didn't get a chance to celebrate Sharon's birthday earlier in the year, so we persuaded her to join us. Here's a photo of my lovely friends. We really enjoyed the sangria and desserts ... and oh, yes, we did eat some real food in between those courses.

Having lunch with two tech writers can lead to interesting conversation. We had a lengthy debate over whether single characters should be distinguished from multiple-character strings by enclosing the former in single quotation marks and the latter in double quotation marks. The conclusion was: it depends. It depends on whether you want to follow computer programming convention or write real English. I was gently admonished and will try harder in the future to follow the rules of English, unless, of course, I'm sending an e-mail message to one of my fellow programmers.