albatross @ 197:
It's possible if not probable that I saw it here originally, but it seems apposite:
Codeulate: F*cking programming
abi@836 "After my lone defense of haggis"
You're not alone, just alone in your time zone. Haggis is wonderful stuff*,** it's just, as I said way upthread, "interesting"***. But then I also love blood sausage, and think the Argentine version is better than any European version because they eat it half-cooked, so my opinions on this sort of stuff may not be representative.
* as is the deep-fried Mars Bar, and its predecessor the deep-fried slider , which IMHO is the contribution to world cuisine for which the Scots should be eternally remembered
** and I know this deep in my bones because my Glaswegian mother beat it into me with a Glenlivet bottle
*** as witness the fact that this subthread refuses to die despite spending quite some time at depths which contain absolutely no oxygen
ajay@679
You're suggesting that haggis is not sufficiently "interesting"?
219, 230 re "build your own" movie soundtracks.
If you can find it, watch the movie Hercules Returns, which is based on exactly that premise. Severely taste-challenged (and Australian, which makes it worse), but very funny (for "I liked Clerks" values of funny).
It's worth noting that as recently as the mid 1990s I was encountering order entry systems in the US that couldn't deal with international addresses
And there are still plenty around that can't cope with the fact that not all countries use States or Zip codes.
Diatryma @ 185 (et al):
I have three languages (well, one and two halves, at least), but I still only have English and not-English slots: whichever of French and Spanish I used most recently completely overwrites the other. As of now all non-English is Spanish (whether I'm hearing or speaking it), but a few days in France and the Spanish would have disappeared without trace.
Fragano @ 192:
The language seems familar. Does your student write spam for a night job? (Sympathies on marking: I've just finished 150 stage-3 assignments, and now I have to go and explain to people who should be far enough through the system to have figured it out for themselves about reading the question)
Terry @ 138
I used to live in a proper house with a proper garage and workspace, and work somewhere that gave me access to a proper machine shop.
Now I live in an apartment and work somewhere where touching the tools if you're not a technician will get you shot.
I hadn't realized how much DIY I did until I couldn't.
Having said that, I've always hated plumbing, and having an excuse not to hunker upside down under the sink is nice. Be even nicer if I didn't have to PAY the guy who does it for me, is all....
Diatryma @ 133 on groups of friends:
Yes, but it'd be nice if every group of friends included some people of practical use too. Need a micropaleontologist? No problem. Molecular biologist? I can find you three or four. Plumber? Forget it.
Matt @112
Latin American cable TV (mostly US TV with spanish subtitles) did wonders for my Spanish. Doesn't help with pronunciation, but it's great for learning how to reduce what you want to say to its simplest foreign form (either Spanish has a really small vocab, or they just use a tiny subset for subtitling, I've never figured out which).
Greg @ 121:
Wonderful place*. Get off the boat. Nothing like the pervasive paranoia** you get in Israel, but a fascinating mixture of east & west with more history than you can shake a stick at. Pretty heavily touristed though.
Do your best to be at the Blue Mosque when the call to prayer goes off in the evening (at about a million dB). The noise scares all the roosting birds off the roof and they circle the minarets in the uplighting. I'm not Muslim (or even religious) but I've never felt closer to God than when drowning in a wall of sound in the courtyard of that building.
But yes, covering skin is, at a minimum, polite***, though hair covering and the full-on overcoat isn't necessary. They're pretty cosmopolitan by middle eastern standards, but it's still a muslim country, and some of the older folk blame westerners for everything that's wrong with "the yoof of today" (see ***).
* Istanbul that is. Can't speak for Constantinople, but if you've found a cruise line that goes there can I have their details? A passenger liner seems like such an irresistably right way to time travel
**except it's not paranoia when they are out to get you
***spray on clothes, on the other hand, seem perfectly acceptable, for the local girls at least.
lightnng @ 20:
I've heard the factor-of-10 thing used before too, and it sounds plausible to me. But the only study of it I've ever seen (from Boehm's Software Engineering Economics, which admittedly dates back to the dark ages) made it more like x100 across the whole project from Requirements to Operational, which is much less than x10 per phase*.
Does anyone know of more recent evidence on this one?
*unless you're skipping a lot of steps
Make that "how much hood could"
Bah, who needs to proofread properly anyway? Mutters off back into lurkspace....
miriam beetle,
How much good could a rangehood range if a rangehood could range good?
Sam Kelly @ 171:
"It is more efficient if you a) have an application that absolutely needs electricity to work".
If you absolutely need electricity, what's it more efficient than?
"b) can only get your power from something that won't cook your food or heat your house on its own"
Sorry, I fail to follow the logic here
"c) don't have to transmit it over long distances"
What Greg London said. Grid transmission is pretty efficient - thats
why they use stupendous voltages. Transporting food in trucks, on the
other hand, is not. Particularly when as in the real world it goes from
farm to storage to processor to warehouse to supermarket to your home.
"The ground rule is not to change the form of any energy "
Which is precisely my point - there's more mode changes in the food
chain than the electrical one, and while I'm not a biochemist I'd
hazard a guess that some of them are pretty inefficient.
"growing food helps condition your land for more food, and preserves a friendly local ecosystem"
Dubiously true for the high-intensity farming practiced in most of the developed world.
"while cooking also helps keep you warm"
And doing so is an additional energy wastage. Most cooking processes
have lousy efficiency and heat you whether you need it or not. The
waste heat from your stove is using exactly the same amount of energy
as if you turned the stove off and turned your electric heater on.
Probably more because your heater's not wasting half of it up a
rangehood.
"It's also far less vulnerable to problems outside your control than the electricity one is"
Now that one I'll buy.
Matt @ 142: "electricity use in and of itself is not unsustainable".
Absolutely: muscle power's still energy which as to come from
somewhere, and in terms of minimising our use of resources I'd have
thought that generate electricity -> transmit electricity -> use
electricity was a more efficient cycle than grow food -> harvest and
transport -> cook -> eat & convert to muscle power.
Providing, of course, that the generate electricity bit doesn't
involve growing trees, compressing them for a few million years, and
burning the resulting goo.
ajay @ 31: Maybe #3 in al-Queda is Kenny McCormick's day job.
abi: I can’t think of a single overriding image from the book, apart from the Ring itself
abi again: I really am trying to go for simplicity
So, as a few people have suggested variations on, what's wrong with just using the Ring? It's been done to death, yes, but it is the core image, and for a classic book, a classic motif isn't inappropriate.
If you don't like plan view, how about something along the lines of a 3/4 view with text? Makes it elliptical rather than the "circular" theme you seem to be thinking of, but your The Hobbit dragon motif would work well in an elliptical form too.
Scott Taylor @ 133
...they do not recall to mind the shear awesomeness of the early HP printers
This was a deliberate decision by HP, who were getting creamed by cheap garbage (Lexmark, anyone?) in the SBHO market. According to a product development text I'm reading at the moment the critical change came when one of their managers stood on a Deskjet while explaining to the development team the difference between a printer and a footstool. Pity - back when we had an old-style HP plotter at work I used to routinely use it as a ladder to access high shelves; it was one of its more useful features.
Which brings us back (from beneath) to Vimes' "Boots" theory
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