01-X-2002.
Go keeps making these spoof ads and sending them to us...
(From UA)
The other day I was buying tobacco, in a Native American's shop*, and another customer asked me
- how much is there in one bag?
- Two hundred grams.
- How many cigarettes is that?
- Well a regular cigarette is one gram, so that's two hundred cigarettes.
- Wow, never saw someone who can do metric so fast.
The above dialog happened in Smoking Joe's smokeshop. Bob, who ran the shop, died next spring. The lady who took over the shop posted a little note about him being in the "happy hunting grounds".
Which was a bit of a surprise. The phrase was always "eternal hunting grounds" in Serbian, probably influenced by someone christian who first translated it almost a century ago.
Further, related to it:
>I also use terms like, "Miles per gallon".
Which gave me the reason to use Excel... one of those things I can't possibly calculate in my head. Because miles-per-gallon is very counter-intuitive for me. Liters per hundred kilometers, now that's something I understand, simply because of years of use. So I'm tracking my car's consumption in both units, just to get used to these weird Anglo-Saxon ways of measurement.
One of the few things I was happy I didn't have to convert from metric was the phases of the moon. Pretty much everything else comes in those weird, illogical units of measure :)
>Even more mysterious... if England is on the metric system, why is Ale sold in pints?
a) tradition
b) tradition
c) large stock of old bottles
Did I mention tradition? And, of course, yes - tradition.
>It's so easy to understand (neither do I :).
LOL
feet? yard? gallons? pounds??? Stop, you´re killing me!!! :)
Billion which equals european milliard (or milliyard - 0.91 mm). AM/PM (try to find a mirko which knows the day has 24 hours). Measuring tapes of "Euro" brand which measure inches only. Names for paper sizes, where A4 paper is exactly one foot long, while "Letter" is a much rounder number - 11 inches. NTSC. 110V/60Hz. Proof units for alcohol. Weapon caliber measured in number of balls of that size which can be made out of one pound of lead. Fahrenheit. Land and nautical miles. Distance measured in bolts of cloth, cables, chains, ells, fathoms, furlongs, hands, nails, palms (any body part forgotten?), skeins, rods, ropes, spans (in serbian, I translated this as pedalj), yards.
You're dead :)
Then it went into making arrangements to meet, if Berix lets me have that much fun, at whilfest. But then, „This fall was very dynamic so far, and the plans were changing at a regular rate. Unpredictability is the only constant :).“
In other news, Boća sent some pictures of himself on Sveta Gora (holy mountain, the set of monasteries somewhere in Greece, where all orthodox churches have some of their own; if there's a pilgrimage among the orthodoxes, it's to go there - applies to males only, though), expecting to go there with Škrba next time, under the condition that he gets baptized meanwhile.
Vanji sent pictures from grapes picking, his and dad's moba.
Some guy from FuzzyCatSystems asked for a translation of a few terms into serbian and hungarian, mostly things like „field“, „table“, „caption“ and a few others. I did that, with this comment:
Note that in these languages there is no proper case for captions - in fact it looks quite ridiculous. Caption has the same rules as a normal sentence, except the final period is omitted. Also, the names of the days, months, seasons - lowercase. They are neither persons, named works (as books, symphonies, statues) nor places.
Identity field didn't exist while I was programming in these languages :) so I never heard how do they call it. I suppose it would be some mint like "ident polje" (ident mező) but can't be sure. Also, I was working in Hungary when VFP3 just came about, and we briefly played with the beta, so nulls were of no importance (we lived in FPD2.6, which was the latest and greatest at the time) and did not need a word of their own.
On third I drove to Fairfax to join a meeting of the PA fox group again**. Even made a few shots and sent them later (well, posted them on my site at Earthlink). Berix didn't go this time. I've seen a technical mirror I never saw before (nor after) - neon lights with a dimmer.
I knew most of the guys from the last time. It's a bit puzzling that a pennsylvanian group would meet in Virginia, but there it is. From the invitation for the previous meeting (on mayday) I see I know several members, including former or fictional - Nina, Walter, Rick (his wife, actually), Rob McBleam, Dennis J (Ford's pal, played serbian music in a brass band, they even performed on the Sabor in Guča once, gave me a CD the one time we met, september 1999, which I promptly mislaid), Zyanna (!), J. Hancey (who wrote the demographic add-on for vfe)...
Of course, I didn't attend, because the speaker was some dot net evangelist (!). m$ really thinks this is religion, or that one is required to embrace dot net.
We considered moving to Richmond, even asked about a few places. Found something on Doyle Road and even asked the seller about the details. Nothing came of it, but we were seriously considering it for a while.
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* because it says so on the shop itself. The PC version is, of course, American American.
** actually not, this was the DC user group, unrelated to the pennsylvanian.
Mentions: Allan Robin (Ford), Božidar Sokolović (Boća), Cecilia Roxbury (Berix), fox, Gorana Sredljević (Go), Gradivoj Škrbić (Škrba), Majkrosoft (m$), mirko, moba, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), pedalj, Rick Netter, UbiquAgora (UA), VFE, Vilmoš Baranji (Vanji), Walter Banks, whilfest, Zyanna, in serbian
17-XII-2009 - 11-V-2026