Life In the Land Of Geeks

An actual (slightly edited) AIM conversation I had this evening, after I encouraged my friend to say things more succinctly. I think it's a good thing I got out of CompSci:

Me: It's not glossing over, it's summarizing
Friend: summarizing = shortcut
Me: Not really
Friend: ok
Me: summarizing = packaging
Friend: summarizing = boring in my life
Me: Like a lingual .zip file
Friend: oh dear
Friend: stop
Me: You see, with both of us running English 2005, you can shorten a phrase into a smaller representation of it, and I, running the same algorithm in reverse, can take your reduced message and re-expand it into its fuller meaning
Me: Unless, of course, the original idea was compact (e.g., a JPEG), in which case you can't compress it much further.
Friend: stop
Me: Why? It's fun

My friend, by the way, is an IT major at RPI.