31-X-2011.
In the blogue, addressing Amers, obviously:
While putting things in order on my recently crashed OS (caused by a dying SATA controller on a motherboard - the shortest lived one so far, only 16 months), I found this note that I wrote on [2007-09-19 00:09:03]. Yes, that's the date format I keep internally, that's the ANSI date. American Standard Date, believe it or not. Actually, only the Japaneses and the Hungarians use it, because that's how they pronounce dates.
Back to the matter. Here goes, without any editing or attempts to make it look nice, the translation of that note, as literal as I can make it.
Typical of the western common-law way of thinking is also that that (in fox, and it seems elsewhere in Windowses too) horizontal menus have "pads" (hygienic?), while vertical have "bars" (pretzels or chocolate?). Although logically it's perfectly the same, no, these are separate cases and merit syntax of their own etc etc.
It is possible that in the essence of that legal system lies the root of the western unused-to-ness to abstract and/or axiomatic thinking. Nothing follows from the general, nothing can be deduced by itself, everything has to be introduced inductively, based on a sufficient number of similar cases. What with prescribing lists of what is similar and what is not.
For example, there is none of that a law would hold for legal persons and we're done, or for physical persons, or for minors and we can sit in peace. Practically every time the set of those who are subject to a law and who are not is defined, and lists of exceptions are, ahem, no exception.
Meanwhile, oldwave goes on about two things: first, increasingly frequent cases when windowses sevens go dark and come back few seconds later, with a message saying „the video driver got stupid and then recovered“. Final note: „taking off the dark is what matters“ (taking off the dark - old euphemism for losing virginity). The other thread was about completing scanned issues of Alan Ford, which is finally due, and which I'm missing too, the almost complete house collection (maybe sixty issues) being in Virginia now.. In time these did show up, I have it somewhere (the dates on the folders are late march of 2016, the jpeg files inside spread over 2009 and 2010).
Jan complained to Nick that there's still ongoing shitstorm over SFBC's testing server, why so many things are still not installed or done and why do we have to use special names and passwords for it, our heads are full of those. It's becoming complicated and time consuming. And goes on to tell him that this edition of Feds is not brand new, there are few clinics on it already, you wouldn't be a guinea pig. Even pointed him to the specs (we had them written, surprise!) on our wiki at George's. And „why don't we put it straight on production server?“. To which Nick replies „I agree completely, our local IT bureaucracy has reached a point where this problem becomes impossible to solve, so we really better go straight to production“. I chimed in, reporting of my last test, where the escuelle client first crashed, had to kill it, then on second try took much longer and produced an error message. Is it possible that the virus scanner is still inspecting every temp file SQL server writes, and why was that not turned off yet?
On third, passed to Marinko the indexer gadget in fox, said I saved his butt, the indexing in their app was such a mess, it was horrible.
In the evening we two sat to shell the walnuts. Our tree is fucked up, the sheld is hard and internal partitions are also hard, it was never easy to shell. I thought of a good trick, took the pocket gadget left behind by Ender in saxo's trunk, it's sheath is black and the carpet there is also black, I didn't notice it before they were already flying. It's card-sized, fierce steel, about 2mm thick, cut by laser to make all kinds of tools - one corner is a screwdriver, one side is a saw, has in the middle wrenches 4 to 8mm, a beer opener and on the opposite corner a can opener. That's what I need, I poke the sharp point into the hole where the stem of the walnut was, wiggle it a little and it cracks just enough that then it's easy to finish it with a nutcracker.
Which worked swimmingly for three quarters of an hour, then I ran behind with attention payments, and the blade slipped. Over my left index finger. Fine cut, surgical, precise. Bleeding copiously. She said „pour some hot pepper powder over it, I've read that it's the best“. Well, costs nothing to try.
Marvelous, first of all it hurt none at all. The cells which react to spicy are in the mucous membranes, capsaicine simply cheats them into detecting a burn. No such cells elsewhere, so it's painless. Second, the blood stopped in two minutes. And third, the next day you couldn't really notice where the cut was, unless under a magnifier - the fingerprint was misaligned along that line, slightly shifted to the side. So I had a falsified fingerprind for a few months, until it grew back to normal. Ever since this we always have hot pepper powder at hand.
Mentions: Alan Ford, blogue, Ender Aquila (Ender), Feds, fox, George Whiteley, Jan Brenkelen, Marinko Protić, Nick Scage, oldwave, saxo, SFBC, in serbian
28-III-2026 - 8-IV-2026