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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
Philip Newton's LiveJournal:
| Saturday, October 4th, 2008 | |
| 10:35 pm | Qibla Out of interest, I decided to figure out Qibla direction from our new house; the Wikipedia entry helpfully links to several online services to help you. (Interestingly enough, several of them showed me in Hamburg right off the bat; IP geolocation, perhaps? Certainly helpful as a starting point.) I was a bit disappointed to get various directions, even though I used pretty accurate coordinates (53.43434 N 9.985 E). A couple of places said 132.93° or 132°56' (same thing), but another said 134.71°/134°42" [sic-with second sign " not minute sign ']; they also disagreed as to the distance (4'369'168 m vs. 4'362'403 m). I think I'd go with what the majority told me (132.93°, 4369 km). FWIW, Bahá'í Qiblih is 129° and 3023 km, according to one site I found. And FWIW, "LDS Qiblah" would be -38.79°/-38°48" and 8'180'591 m to the Salt Lake Temple or -50.48°/-50°29" and 7'465'686 m to Independence Temple Lot (according to the one site that let me enter an arbitrary destination... but which was also the odd-one-out on the angle to Mecca so I'm less inclined to trust it). |
| Friday, October 3rd, 2008 | |
| 8:10 pm | SMTP and email RFCs I remember that at some point, many years, ago, I read RFCs 821 (on SMTP) and 822 (on the format of email messages). Later, RFCs 2821 and 2822 were released, which updated and obsoleted 821 and 822 (respectively), and I read those at some point, too. I was just made aware that these, too, have been obsoleted: by RFCs 5321 and 5322. Ideally, I'd like to read and digest those two, too, but I'm not sure when I'm going to (find|make) the time for that. (And let me just say that it's a pity those drafts weren't ready when the 4800's were being released or that they couldn't wait for the 5800's; I liked the fact that the 2821/2822 numbers were so mnemonic relative to the original 821/822 ones. Sort of like how ISO 10646 sounds like ISO 646. Though at least the numbering is exactly 500 numbers "off", which is a bit easier to remember than if they had been numbered, say, 5476 and 5477.) |
| Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 | |
| 10:20 pm | Putting copper in walls for fun and profit Stella and I talked a little about where to put electric sockets in our new house, and we thought we'd also ask the electrician to lay some Ethernet cabling while he's opening up the walls. |
| Wednesday, October 1st, 2008 | |
| 10:52 pm | Hebrew names I find it a bit... odd to learn of people who have an "English name" and a separate "Hebrew name", when their "English name" is, in fact, of Hebrew origin! (Why would they need a different one? Couldn't they just use the cognate as their "Hebrew name"?) One example is Michael, aka מאיר (aka, what's wrong with "מיכאל"?) |
| Monday, September 29th, 2008 | |
| 12:11 pm | either = auch nicht Amy seems to have twigged that I generally use "either" (rather than "also not") in sentences where she'd use "auch nicht" in German, but not to have cottoned on to the fact that you still need a negative word in there. Case in point: this morning, she spilled a little water on the sleeve of her bird suit and told me that the yellow hem was wet. I asked her whether the sleeve itself was wet, too, and she said no; she pointed to the birds and said, "This bird is not wet, and this bird is either wet, and this bird either". Which sounds fine in German: "Dieser Vogel ist nicht nass, und dieser Vogel ist auch nicht nass, und dieser Vogel auch nicht". But not so much in English :) (Incidentally, trying out post-by-email from where I'm currently stationed for work. No Web connectivity here for now.) |
| 8:11 am | Posted using sms_to_lj... note to self this bird is either wet v-neck |
| Sunday, September 28th, 2008 | |
| 9:26 pm | Lolcats So, I had a look at icanhascheezburger.com and paged back... and further back... and further back. And Stella eventually said, wow, you seem to have found the funnies page today; you've been laughing so often. What are you looking at? So, how to explain lolcats in German? ("Pictures? With captions? Like what do they say?" ... uh, mostly untranslatable puns, I guess.) Anyway. But the one that had me laughing most (so far) was this one:
That one literally had me laughing out loud for nearly a minute. It really cracked me up, it did. Heh. LOLipop. Current Mood:  amused |
| 7:08 pm | [Amy] What do you get when you cross entries 702894 and 757781? (The entries in question are 702894 on "want to" analysed as a unit and 757781 on Amy's auxiliary-less passive in German.) Answer: you get this sentence which she uttered last night - "I don't want to tucked in!" An auxiliary-less passive with "want to", again apparently showing that the "to" belongs with the "want" for her, rather than with the (elided in this sentence) "be". |
| Friday, September 26th, 2008 | |
| 9:26 am | What's the point of widescreen monitors? There's a new PC on offer at ALDI next week... and two widescreen LCD monitors. They've had widescreen monitors the last couple of times, too, but I don't like them—I don't really see the point, since I typically don't use all that much horizontal screen estate anyway (if the lines of text get too long, it gets harder for the eye to skip back exactly to the start of the next line) and would prefer more vertical space, but the widescreen ones have less vertical space than "standard" ones. What's the point, really? Perhaps for watching 16:9 movies, but who really uses their computer monitor primarily to watch movies? I'd have thought that it would make sense to optimise monitors for what people do most, not what they do occasionally. And what I do most is browse the Internet and play the Sims; your average user would probably add email (which is included in "Internet" for me, since I use webmail most of the time) and word processing, also text-oriented things which would probably benefit from a squarer or maybe even a portrait (taller than wide) monitor setup. (As for the Sims, I think the best monitor configuration is square, so that I can see as much as possible in each direction rather than having the screen subtend a wide angle horizontally with no corresponding benefit vertically.) What do you use? Widescreen, "standard", portrait (widescreen or standard), maybe even a multi-monitor configuration? How do you arrange your windows on the screen? And what would your ideal setup be, and why? (For example, I heard from a colleague who had two monitors for a while that she found it extremely convenient to have code and documentation open on separate windows. And perhaps that's some of the appeal for widescreen monitors? But I still think that the decreased vertical size is a handicap.) |
| Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 | |
| 9:17 pm | Amy's potty training ( Read more... ) |
| Monday, September 22nd, 2008 | |
| 9:44 pm | I say to-mah-to, you say to-may-to Amy has started saying gr/æ/ss for the green stuff on lawns, rather than my gr/ɑː/ss. When I asked her about it, she said that yes, she pronounced it with ash, just as Ben does (from the Ben and Bella DVDs, presumably; he speaks with an American accent, while Bella has a UK one). Ah well :) |
| Friday, September 19th, 2008 | |
| 1:12 pm | The things people set up web sites for... Pictures of Misty May's behind (Found in a comment to a Slashdot poll.) Current Mood: amused |
| 12:25 pm | |
| Thursday, September 18th, 2008 | |
| 11:01 pm | Random memory I remember how we took the ferry to England for the funeral of (I think) my grandfather. My father had booked "Commodore Class" cabins for us; they were the highest class available, but a cabin with a window is better than something two decks down with no window and close to the churning of the screw; it would probably let us pass the journey better. At any rate, the next morning, we wanted to go into the "7 Seas" restaurant for the breakfast buffet. At the entrance, we had to show our tickets, and when the person there saw that we had booked Commodore Class, he said we could use the "Blue Riband" restaurant instead: a smaller and classier restaurant reserved(?) for guests of the higher cabin classes. My father said that we'd rather eat in the "7 Seas" restaurant, though, but the employee would have nothing of it. Apparently, "can eat in the better restaurant" meant "shall eat in the better restaurant". So we ended up being waited on, which is nice enough, I suppose, but we all would really have preferred the buffet style where we could just take whatever we pleased and what we thought looked nice rather than having to place an order with a waiter. Noblesse oblige? *sigh* Current Mood: random |
| 3:36 pm | The things you learn: ZOMG I've occasionally wondered where "ZOMG" came from. Russian Wikipedia claims that it's because "Z" is next to the shift key, so trying to press shift to capitalise the letters and slipping would result in "ZOMG" instead of merely "OMG". |
| Monday, September 15th, 2008 | |
| 5:48 pm | Just the Answers A meme that's apparently spreading around the Support community:
I seem to have Maggie and Cassia down there most of all; interesting. Though even before I thought about the questions individually, I thought Maggie might come up a couple of times, simply because she's on my shortlist of totally awesome people I'm glad I know and wish I knew better. (Is that drama-inducing? I hope not; it's certainly not meant to be. If everyone were exactly the same measure of awesome, they'd all be average again. Different people can be awesome in different ways. "Not awesome" is not the same as "useless". Your mileage may vary. Take only under the direction of a competent physician. Void where prohibited.) Also, when thinking of some people, I think of older usernames first (e.g. cuddled, aquariumgirl). Fortunately, LiveJournal auto-redirects the names and displays the current username if you used the old one in an lj user tag, so I took advantage of that fact. |
| 1:16 pm | Random memory: "Brownouts, build another power plant!" In school, I occasionally played SimCity 3. I remember one of the messages you sometimes got alerting you to the current situation was, "Brownouts, build another power plant!". Only years later did I learn that a brownout is a kind of power outage (Though now that I think about it, if they had used a semicolon—as I think they should have anyway—, I would probably not have taken the word for a vocative.) |
| Sunday, September 14th, 2008 | |
| 11:50 am | Mindmap as of 2008-09-14  ( Click here to see! ) |
| Saturday, September 13th, 2008 | |
| 10:54 am | Woe is me! Amy always pronounces "hallway" as "hell-woe". |
| Friday, September 12th, 2008 | |
| 8:49 pm | C2-3 Our company is offering courses in Business English. To enable employees to assess their level of English a bit more objectively, they sent around a link to an online test which starts at a low level and lets you go to successively higher levels as long as you get enough points on the previous one. I decided to take the test, too, partly for a lark but also partly because I'm not too confident on my Business English specifically; after all, it's not the sort of thing you learn at home or school. The test told me that my score corresponded to level C2-3 (i.e. at the top [3 of 3 sub-levels] of level C2), "interpreter level". Well, well, well. (FWIW, my self-assessment before I started the test was C2 for passive knowledge [listening, reading] and C1 for active knowledge [speaking, writing], mostly because I'm unsure whether I can capture the full breadth of stylistic variation they called for in their brief description of each level.) |
