Task: Identify a batteries included Mac scripting option that allows popping up a GUI dialog box.
Solution: Are you serious?
Much like most of the markup engines out there, you kind of have to wonder at some point when it’s better to just program rather than abtract yourself to death.
If Obama can win the Peace Prize for “aspirations,” we owe a very big apology to every ridiculed Miss America contestant who wishes for world peace.
Also: I just considered creating a tag for “politics,” but I realized “nonsense” covers it just fine.
I really enjoy writing Turkish. It has a very formalized tone and grammar. The most fun part is stitching together really long words by using suffixes. Speaking for me is kind of a tongue-twister, and I have a lot more trouble with the word order and organization.
Longest Frankenword created to date:
konuşmayabilirdi
“she was unable to converse”
I was proud of that one.
Most of the time, when you ask someone how to say something non-trivial and give them the English, they pause for a moment and say, “Well, we don’t say it like that. You should use…” This seems to be the joy of going outside your native language family.
I definitely agree that any native speaker would think their language is far more expressive than would someone coming in from the outside. I will say that I have a very trustworthy native speaking Turk who prefers English to Turkish for precision of expression. But that’s an isolated case. I’m sure Orhan Pamuk would have something different to say.
I will defy taxonomy for this post.
I went to a coffee shop called Cafe Nero today. Everything there was in English (and Italian for style points). The waitstaff were wearing shirts that said “The best espresso this side of Milan.” I got a kick out of that, because we’re on the other side of Milan.
There seem to be two ways to enjoy Tool’s music. If you listen to the music, the lyrics are too complicated to follow. If you listen to the lyrics, you’re so blown away by whatever is trying to be communicated that you don’t really feel the music. I still don’t understand what “Lateralus” is about, but it’s something special either way you listen to it. Something about spirals. In fact, that whole Lateralus album kind of has a math/geometry thing (“Parabola” is another song title).
IE 6 has so many little pernicious [yeah, I had to look it up to make sure I knew what it means] bugs. Efendi sizes its main writing <textarea> percentage-wise to ensure good adaptation to netbook screens, etc. But if you hit a line wrap just right (one fraction of one character along the column that I split by not specifying by number of columns exactly), the whole business erupts in horizontal scrollbars. Now I can’t make sure I wrote “Now” rather than “No” without scrolling.
I’m marking that bug WONTFIX, because no other browser on earth is dumb enough to mess up line wrapping like that.
I wanted to lay down a tribute to the hundreds of Turks that every day put their lives on the line to avoid having to stand out an extra light cycle when crossing the street. We all owe them dearly for creating so much gridlock in the afternoon.
You can kind of measure freedom of the press when looking at the flagship publication versus a fairly less prominent competitor.
Hürriyet does have a picture or two of the IMF protests buried behind some Flash, but it’s a bit strange to lead off with guys in suits and “President Erodoğan asked Minister Ali Babacan, ‘What will happen tomorrow?’” rather than showing the festivities down in Taksim.
It’s funny to see CNN rail along about riot police, since the pictures I’m seeing are pretty consistent with the standard police presence for a normal demonstration in Taksim/Beyoğlu. The tear gas is certainly not normal (the only other time we’ve seen reports of that was May Day), but just as abnormal as people doing anything besides walking around with signs.
We can actually see this part of town from our window (we can see a lot of town from our window, but we get some detail looks at Taksim), and it really seems like this is pretty isolated. Nobody was even talking about it at work today.
They make it seem like a war zone. We’re talking about a street or two.
Much like the Turkish police who drive around with their flashing lights and sometimes sirens on all the time (the cars are equipped with a loudspeaker that they talk through when it’s actually an emergency), Fidelity’s MySmart cash management features include an ingenious little “alerts” system.
They treat this like they just invented select-a-size sliced bread, but of course it’s the exact same thing all the other banks are doing. Except that there is no way to clear the alerts. So, every time you log in you get a big exclamation mark, par exemple:
Something like that says to me “you’re overdrawn” or “identity theft.” In fact, that just tells me that I’ve had deposits into the account on September 22 and 30.
If you make a steady income, this means you will never not have alerts. Meaning if there were to be a real cash emergency, I wouldn’t even pay attention because the actual alerts are listed at the bottom of the page just above the copyright and disclaimers.
Your ATM transactions are also marked CASH ADVANCE, which caused me to excrete a very large chunk of masonry (we miss you, Kurt Vonnegut) as I looked to see if I had just turned a debit card into a very costly credit card. Nope, that’s just how it’s written (according to a SlickDeals.net bulletin board posting, at least).
Of course, I can turn them off, so then I don’t get an e-mail when I get my paycheck. Which is such a serendipitous event at this point I kind of prefer the heartwarming reminder that something works.
I can actually say that my Turkish banking experience is rock solid compared to this mess between Europe and the US. The three factor authentication is a little nutty:
You type in your username and password. But wait, you aren’t allowed to type your password because of the risk of keystroke logging. So you on-screen-keyboard in your password on a scrambled-order keyboard (even the number pad is out of order so people can’t look over your shoulder and see the pattern).
There is an even more secure option that types the keys into the password blank when you hover over a letter long enough, as this would prevent mouse-logging to some extent, I think. You can also name the keyboard and attach a picture to it, which is basically a SiteKey a la Bank of America.
Once you’ve gotten past the easy part, you’re taken to a page with another password entry. You get out your celly and open up the special application that was loaded when you registered for the bank. It then requests a PIN on your phone, which is different from your on-screen-keyboard password. You key that into the cell and are issued a one-time PIN code that you then hand-transfer to the blank on the screen.
If you get past that bad boy, you’re actually in your account. I’m not making this up. I get a bit of an exciting secret agent vibe when I log in.
Surprisingly given all this, your user ID must be your bank user number. This is a long enough number that I have to get out my ATM card and copy from the card when I type my user name. This means I’m exposing my 16 digit Visa card code and accompanying name and expiration to anyone around, which would probably be more useful than a lot of this information I’m obscuring.
There is nothing that will happen today that must impact my mood or outlook.
The best the past can do is to benefit me. > From whatever does not benefit me I should seek to learn. >> But no matter how the past may affect me, the only place it should be is behind me.
The most important purpose of any assignment is to be done well. > No assignment is without purpose insomuch as it is still valued by someone.
On the whole, unfairness has a natural means of righting itself. > Whatever unfairness remains is only relevant to the extent that it shows how I must seek to change the present circumstances.
The least I can and should do in any situation is to improve the outlook of others.
The most I can and should do in any situation is my best.
Inspiration: Psalm 17, Colossians 3
Grasshopper tells me the third wire to the second bank has officially failed.
I’m telling you, if the market dips, hooks, and makes a smiley face before that cash comes in I’m going to be pretty seriously burned up. I mean, look what has happened since I became an expat!
This Twilight thing (vamp alert on the link) is just completely out of control.
Seems like this thing has more fan content bolt-ons than Star Trek all of a sudden.
Is this ingenious stealth marketing, or have people really drunk the Kool-Aid on this one?
Bloomberg, not exactly the “This Week in WCW” type of news source, toward the bottom of this story really helps us out by explaining a very obvious Alice in Wonderland reference.
Poor David Rosenberg actually used Alice in Wonderland in his quote, and they explained about the rabbit hole. It might be remotely possible that a lowbrow news source might need to explain a reference to a rabbit hole as invoking Alice in Wonderland, but the other way around, guys? I mean, there’s a Disney movie and it’s in Kingdom Hearts, for goodness sakes.
Funny, because on my way home from work today I heard Immortal Technique’s deft one-liner:
My metaphors are dirty like herpes but harder to catch.
Which makes me think of my actual favorite rap one-liner, by our now disgraced friend Kanye:
Mayonnaise colored Benz, I push miracle whips.
Explanation at that level is kind of like putting a Scotsman on American television with subtitles. I mean, if you couldn’t get it, maybe at some point you aren’t meant to get it.
But, seriously, Kanye dissing Taylor Swift was pretty harsh.
The above paragraph was getting ready to vent my frustration with Norah Jones and Amy Winehouse (yeah, I deleted it because it was a bit of a non-sequitur as it was), but then I was checking Wikipedia to make sure Norah was spelled with an “H” at the end, only to find out that (1) her real first name is Geethali, and (2) she is the love child of Ravi Shankar.
As in the guy who played with the Beatles. No wonder she won so many Grammys without being popular or particularly talented. Ah, I got my dig in anyway! I don’t care how sophisticated listening to her might make me, that music is just depressing!
It seems like football coaches get the same “child of a legend” help. You have a lot of serious football geniuses who sit in the glass booth their whole career, and then all of a sudden Legend Junior is out there with a clipboard and a headset. Must be frustrating.