Hmmm. An interesting take on “Desert Storm II”: http://www.idleworm.com/nws/2002/11/iraq2.shtml
Okay, here’s the Ugly Word for today: “architected”!!
“…Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney said Microsoft’s mobile software needs work, adding that Research in Motion does a better job of linking users to e-mail. And a key part of Microsoft’s phone software ‘has been architected for wired systems,’ he said. ‘They haven’t really rethought it for wireless.'”
Euuuuuuuuuu. Whatever happened to “built”?
My apologies, everybody…I didn’t realize that the Irish Times entry below was premium content. (mutter)
Anyway, here’s something everybody can get at that’s kind of neat. Kartoo.com is a search engine with a graphic display that shows you how various sites are linked to one another. Neat…
The city of Dublin has just rolled out a service that allows you to pay for parking (at designated meter) by using your cellphone. A comment on this from Kevin Myers, columnist for the Irish Times…
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An interesting article here on “The Disruptive Web”. Fascinating stuff…
Meanwhile, it still hasn’t snowed. Something threw off Met Eireann’s forecasts pretty conclusively, this week: I think it was that the weak high which had been sitting over Ireland, and was expected to be pushed aside by the fronts coming in from the west, got too high to be pushed. As a result, the band of rain which was supposed to run over us and turn to snow got broken in two and passed to the north and south of us. The south of England, the north of Scotland, and continental Europe got the heavy snowfalls we’d been expecting. All we got was a drop in temperatures, and some sleet….enough to make going difficult for the traffic trying to make it up the nearby hill, but hardly a blizzard.
…And now look at the map. (Courtesy of Digital Atmosphere.) Where this new high came from, I have no idea. Look at the wretched thing squatting there. And behind it there’s a warming trend coming in. More soggy Irish winter weather: damp, drippy, blehh. What joy.
I think I must not have had enough snowdays during my school years, or something. I feel so cheated, somehow…
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Meanwhile, look at this picture of Bubble: check out that expression. I swear, we’ve got a cartoon cat. …At the time, though, I think she was yelling for the Whiskas “Kitty Milk” that’s become so popular around here. I truly believe that there’s some substance which is the feline equivalent to crack cocaine or nicotine in terms of addictiveness, and they’re putting it in the Kitty Milk. Three out of four of the cats will do just about anything for it.
Every now and then, a particular word strikes me as ugly, or redundant, or useless, or sometimes all three, and then I get cranky for a day or so. The last word to provoke this response from me was “liaised.”
This morning I have a new one: “surveilled”. As in a CNN story this morning on possible dirty money in the (rap) recording business in New York: “…an individual was surveilled and videotaped…”
Okay, okay, it’s a predictable back-formation. But why this passion for using the amputated, still-bleeding stump of a longer word when a shorter, older, whole one would do? How about “watched”? “Followed”? Or even “trailed” or “shadowed”? …Or are those in some way too loaded / connoted for an “official” source trying to sound just as serious and important as it can?
(mutter) All right, maybe I just need more caffeine. Or I’m too much of a purist. I still think it’s ugly.
(sigh) No blizzard. They promised us a blizzard…and all we’re likely to get now is snow showers. Feh.
This one ought to go in the “Dumb Perp Stories” section under “Self-Referential Perpetrations”: Candy trail leads to suspect
From CBC Radio’s Dead Dog Cafe: Get your own Indian name. (“Red Indian”, as Peter would say. None of your Native [North] American stuff here.)
It turns me into “Celia Giggling Pickle”. It turns Peter into “Frederick Sticky Bunny”. Heaven only knows what it’ll do to you.
Meanwhile, Irish weather is taking a turn for the worse (depending on how you define “worse”). It’s going to snow! And about time…
I didn’t realize that this wonderful document could be found online. It’s an interesting read at any time (and sometimes a little disturbing…), but at the year’s turn, as the Sun starts slowly making its way back, somehow Balthasar’s maxims seem more interesting to me than usual — invoking thoughts of what went wrong this past year, hopes of what might be made to go right instead in the year to come…
We’re on our way down to our favorite of the two little pubs in the nearest village, with a double recipe of Miss Norma’s killer eggnog in tow, to see the New Year in with our neighbors. To all of you who read this (and those of you who don’t. If a blessing falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear it, is it still a blessing?…), our heartfelt wishes for a good 2003.
In this morning’s Irish Times, a front-page image: “The Brotherhood of the Turkey celebrating its favourite fowl in Licques, northern France, yesterday.”
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…Sigh. Normally this would strike me as silly-season stuff, but for me right now this kind of thing is welcome in the mornings as a distraction from the darkness of the season. I have always had a touch of seasonal affective disorder — nothing crippling…just a real hatred of the time of year (especially in this latitude) when the Sun retreats furthest south and the days are shortest. Right now, when I get up at eight it’s still dark, and I know it’ll be dark again by four. (See this morning’s screengrab from GeoClock, and look how low the terminator swings over Ireland at the moment. Though it could be worse…we could be Iceland…) Add to this the rotten weather we’ve been having, so overcast that the light level hardly makes it above late-twilight level all day, and I get, if not outright sluggish, just unexcited about doing anything but going back to sleep. Not a mood or a luxury I can indulge at the moment: I’m in the middle of Wizard’s Holiday and finishing The Empty Chair, not to mention getting ready to go up to the family in Northern Ireland for the holidays, getting the holiday cards out, and so on… I would really love not to be doing anything but the work right now — not to be having to think about presents, shopping, holiday logistics. But this would doubtless be considered by some to be heresy. Oh well.
Holiday cards — that reminds me. Here’s one that’s apropos. We print our own, these days — why not? the Epson photo printer is good for all kinds of things — and the image you see here was taken at the Solstice last year,
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when the Sun seems to set right across the road from us, in a direction we normally treat as close enough to due south not to matter. When printed as half of an A4 page and at its proper resolution, the image has a “stained glass” look that probably doesn’t come across here: if you’re interested, the image displayed here is linked to the full-size version.
…For you rabid image-processors out there, the original digital photo was imported into Corel Photo-Paint 11, where it was first “watercolored” using Segmentis UK’s “buZZ Pro 2.0” plugin, then slightly textured using Corel’s “emboss” effect, and finally had a “pure color” effect added, also from buZZ.)
The other card we did has holly on it — our property is surrounded by holly bushes and trees of varying sizes. Unfortunately these seem not to do much of anything about keeping the sheep out of the front garden when they get loose from the fields behind the house (which happens frequently). At least the sheep haven’t eaten all the plants in the rockery this year (as they did last year when they got in just before Christmas)….it’s almost recovered now, after having been replanted last spring. (Could I be speaking too soon? If those monsters get in again somehow while we’re up with Peter’s mum in Belfast, mutton is going to be on the menu when we get back…)
Girl captures, hogties intruder
Heh heh.