all things me

I don’t understand Part III:
– why some people think they’re bicycles
lots of people walk smack in the middle of a cycle path on the street
– yesterday a woman with a pram didn’t get on the bus because there was one step! I was all ready to help her to lift the pram in but she took one look at the bus and left. It didn’t cross her mind to ask for help?

Word of the Day: guffaw; I sort of learned that today, I’ve always thought it was “guwaff” I must’ve misread it when I was little (I’ve never *heard* it). Oh yeah, it means hearty, boisterous burst of laughter — or a corresponding verb

In a way I finished the homepage I was making for my aunt. Now we’re anxiously (well, I’m anxious at least) waiting for the details to arrive so I can start uploading and setting up things. Very exiting!

Eh… I was flabbergasted cause a Java code’s output was being cut off in various places (I thought it was my doing cause I had modified it). Finally I realized that I was running it on the local computer so maybe it just didn’t have the strength to run the program all the way to the end. I logged in our dept’s server and voila. Even the last character is output to the file like it should.
This is almost in the same category as “why isn’t the bloody Ant code working?!?” and all you need to do is add fork="yes" in the places where you run Java.

I just read a wonderful article by David Campbell (hopefully that’s a permanent link, and an accessible one) on careless spelling and the mistakes the spell-checker programs may allow. (Found it through a comment on Language Log, what else)

I’ve mentioned my allergy of “their vs. they’re vs. there” and that article contained some of my other horrors: seperate, definate, relevent… I also grimace when I see “than” instead of “then” or vice versa.
I have to admit that I didn’t see anything wrong with “accomodation” but that’s because I don’t think I’ve ever used that word myself. (In case you don’t see it either, it should have 2 m’s.)

[Finnish alert] There’s a “personal” experience in this area too. Or actually it was my sister’s. The spell-checker didn’t recognise the word viisisakarainen (with five points (I don’t know what the things on a star are called)) even though it should understand compound words; one of its alternatives was viisipakarainen (with five buttocks). Clever.

What was I supposed to write about… Oh yeah, there was a gross documentary on parasites (focus on worms, it’s a 3-part series) on tv last night. I watched it (of course!) and I had goosebumps and suddenly started itching all over. It was BBC‘s “Body Snatchers”. I can’t remember (and the commentator was dubbed) the English terms of the species so I can’t talk about it much, but one man grew a tapeworm type of creature inside him — for research purposes. It grew to almost 2 meters. And one woman had been stung by a mosquito that carried the eggs of a fly and a big (about an inch) maggot started growing under her scalp. It looked like a big bump on her head and there was a biggish hole in her skin through which the maggot breathed. Ewww… I’m shivering again.
Oh and one man had caught a leech from drinking from a brook and it had attached itself in his nostril.

Brrr… is it cold in here?

As much as I like Greymatter and as much as I hate MySQL, I think I’m going to change to Movable Type or Textpattern or some other blogging tool. The main reason is that my hostess’s webspace provider doesn’t *recommend* it, and as I started looking into that, I realized that it really isn’t the best thing out there. I’ve been reading about different options and it’s really difficult to decide!!! But I’ll try Movable Type next if I can get it working. Or Textpattern… At least it should be easy to convert my GM entries to MT (as opposed to my html entries to GM). People with crazy amounts of entries (and sites with lots of authors) use MT so it must be good. I just hope my site won’t become one of those filled with MySQL errors. Those are a pest. Or maybe the webmasters/mistresses are the ones to blame for the errors, not the system. If that’s the case, I’m happy.

I wonder if I’ll be kicked out of the Greymatter Fanlisting for this…

I can see I crave coffee cause everytime I write “correcting”, I write coffecting… Oh, well, r and f are close on the keyboard but anyway… I never mix them up.

Ah… only about an hour to go.

I don’t like holding babies in my lap because they usually start crying and I feel like it’s my fault. They should have a disclaimer plaque hanging around their neck saying “Don’t take this personally, but you’re just not my Mommy or Daddy.” *waaaaah*

Or maybe it is my fault but the parents say “oh, it’s only a phase” …

Yesterday we had Grandpa’s 80th birthday dinner. We all were there: us and all Dad’s sisters with their families. One of my aunts asked if I could do a homepage for her, and if course I could! The website is done now (apart from her critique and my adjustments accordingly). It’s pretty exciting I’m going to be the webmistress because she doesn’t have a Internet connection at home (and I understand about that stuff, she has “heard about a resolution and something called jpg” ).

Anyway, I don’t have anything to say really, I just wanted to post the following quote I read yesterday in the car (on the way to the dinner) and bookmarked it with a Jesus brochure I found in my pocket

Quote of the day:

“Space-lag,” he [Ford Prefect] said, “is very bad for sub-clauses.”
— Douglas Adams: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish

[Warning: Finnish ahead]
Talking about inflecting… I’ve always wondered why — in Finnish — one way to wish things (“have a nice weekend”, “good night”) can be done with plural + partitive case: viikonloppuja, öitä respectively. You don’t need any preceding “good” or “nice” words either (e.g. “good night” is hyvää yötä in the “normal” way — hyvää is, obviously, “good”)

The corner of my mouth still twitches when I think my professor just said that if there’s an emergency (something doesn’t work, I don’t understand something…) it might be more practical for me to text him than send an email. Text! Apparently he is comfortable with the additional features cell phones offer nowadays (additional to just using it as a phone). I am not planning to disturb his vacation, however.

Another thing, I was just told (not 100% sure) that the structure <possessive pronoun> + <uninflected noun> is nowadays *allowed* in Finnish. Damn those allowances (hey, I thought that was a “word play” but it does mean “act of allowing” too… super). Soon we’ll be talking merely in uninflected words cause everyone’s too damn lazy to inflect.

Inflect, people!

I always stop for a fraction of a second when someone has written ‘iff’ (or Finnish equivalent ‘joss’) in a text (scientific or at least somewhat). That, of course, means “if and only if” (‘jos ja vain jos’).

[Useless-ish to read if you don’t understand Finnish] I just sent positive feedback to a radio station because last night I heard one of the announcers (radio jockeys) say “minun nimeni on…” which is the proper, inflected way to say it. Usually he (the jockey) says “minun nimi on…” which to my ear feels like a hot needle. (If you need to use the erroneous (in that context) uninflected ‘nimi’ then please at least use the colloquial ‘mun’ — not half and half.)

A woman asked people for coins near the railway station this morning (she looked like a traveller though, not a professional begger). She asked me, too. That reminded me of this (extremely annoying) woman that has been standing around the exact same place (not railway station) since I was in high school (at least), so that’s 5-6 years by now. She has the same winter clothes and boots all year round and asks the passers-by “do you have any money to give” with her hand stretched out. 6 years! I wonder if anyone gives her money. If not, why does she keep doing that? Wouldn’t she be better off even in a crappy job or looking for a crappy job? That would probably be more productive than her current line of “work”.