Due to shifting values of currencies, I updated the language of the standard spam warning text, which I affix to E-mail messages sent to public mailing lists, and to other information, which I put in the public Internet.
At this opportunity, I also improved a bit the styling and added links to certain stuff which I consider to be Very Important.
The TDDPirate was red-haired (what the English call “ginger”) at his childhood. He remembers people being positive about his hair color.
He was startled by the news items Red-headed family forced to move after ‘ginger’ hate campaign and Is gingerism as bad as racism?.
Turns out that in England, red-haired people are singled out for teasing and harassment. And this is not an April Fool Day story either.
Thanks to peachuk for the links to the above news items.
According to Dale Carnegie, God gave humans two ears and only one mouth so that they’ll speak less and listen more.
For deaf people, it is two eyes vs. one mouth.
What about exterrestrials with two mouths and one ear? If they have a Dale Carnegie, he would have said to them that this is what they got because speech is cheap - they got two mouths - but listening is precious - they have only one ear for this.
http://henrykisor.com/blog/2006/12/14/sometimes-the-press-just-effs-up/ demonstrates just how funny can newspaper gaffes be sometimes. My all-time favorite is the gaffe in an Israeli newspaper from a generation ago. It was about a woman who owes 1000 nights to a tax collector (the Israeli word for night - layla - can easily be a misspelling for the name of the former Israeli monetary unit - lira, if both are written in Hebrew).
A week ago the Electric Company announced a power outage scheduled for Wednesday night, to last until 07:00 on Thursday morning, due to maintenance work on the electric power supply grid in my street.
The week elapsed and also the powerless night. At 07:45 the power has not been restored, yet.
I went to the grocery shop to buy my usual morning addictions (newspaper and bread).
The grocery shop was lighted by a candle.
The shopkeeper vented about the absence of electricity. I told him about the scheduled power outage and about the fact that we should have got power back by 07:00.
He phoned the Electric Company. After a brief conversation, he told me that they told him that power will be back ten minutes later.
We laughed, knowing that the promise for electric power was empty.
The time was already 07:50. I returned home with my morning addictions.
At 08:00, power was back.
Murphy’s Law has been busy in my surroundings during the last few days.
Pieces of plaster broke and fell off from the ceiling of my apartment’s bathroom.
The entrance door’s lock’s cylinder began to be problematic and I was under threat of getting locked outside of my apartment if this were not attended to promptly.
My car’s battery died when I visited my parents in another city.
I was sick in the same visit and was stuck there until Monday noon. I originally planned to return home on Saturday night.
When my car’s battery was replaced, the charging system was checked and it was found that the alternator overcharges the battery and needs to be replaced.
Overall, nothing serious happened. If my bad luck is to consist only of such problems, I’ll be content.
In addition to being the TDDPirate (without eyepatch, however; although I almost earned the right to wear one in an accident one and half years ago), I am also Omer because this is the name, which my parents gave me almost half century ago.
Turns out that the Urban Dictionary has an interesting definition for Omer. And I won’t mention here the definition of my surname.
The guy in another city to the southwest of my living place, who is sharing my name, must be very cool person.
In yet another trivia expedition, I came upon a Google Answers thread about turkeys. Turns out that the American businesses dealing with turkey meat (farmers and processing plants) have a Web site about their favorite topic, which serves to promote eating turkey meat.
It was casually mentioned that even though turkey is a traditional American food, the per capita consumption of this meat is actually higher in Israel than in USA. But the reference to this trivia is in another Web site Per capita Turkey meat consumption in selected countries.
MarkShuttleworth’s FAQ has the following passage in the answer to the question “What about the GCC 4.0 transition? Why did you adopt GCC 4.0?”:
“This was discussed with the Debian toolchain maintainers, who were themselves planning to adopt GCC 4 at some time (well, sort of involved the Ubuntu maintainer talking to himself, they are the same guy, …).”
Several minutes after reading the FAQ, I still find the above passage to be hilarious.
Note also Bug #1 in Ubuntu.
Few days ago I wrote about pangrams and today I saw in Slashdot another way to play with words - build them from chemical symbols. I think it would have been more interesting if chemical formulae and chemical reactions could be used rather than just chemical symbols. However I do not see any competitor to Perl Poetry.
