tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-323589332012-01-24T17:36:58.094+01:00Started as an ethnographic myth buster - both about Yugos among the Amers, and about US among the Yugos - this blog rapidly degenerated into an ego rant trip.<br> And then I moved back to Serbia, so anything I wrote after summer 2010 is from a new angle.D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.comBlogger1531100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-51247375452874678342012-01-24T17:34:00.000+01:002012-01-24T17:36:58.103+01:00

Even though I speak English for decades now, a dictionary is something I frequently need. My formal study stopped long ago, and I'm extending my vocabulary by chance - hearing a word the second time in a different context, and then guessing what it may mean is the most frequent method. Seldom I look it up in a dictionary. Now that I'm spending about half of my average day at the keyboard,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-46563350620901407432012-01-12T15:33:00.000+01:002012-01-12T15:33:56.856+01:00

There's a scene in Cimino's "Heaven's gate", when Christofer Walken tries to impress Isabelle Huppert. He's basically an ignorant gunslinger, living in a wooden hut in a wild neck of the woods, and she's an expensive prostitute who has seen the world. So to show his worldly manners, he finds out that all the rage at the time is to have wallpapers. He brings her to her hut, and the "so... how do

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-81370528279675355722012-01-10T01:11:00.000+01:002012-01-10T01:13:08.182+01:00

I've noticed we never say "it's the same shit on both sides". Because it is politically incorrect, this time literally. Politically, because it's said when talking about politics. Incorrect, because "both" assumes there are only two. Well, this is not some rich country where nobody has the money to start a third party. Even when they make a new movement, you find out it's not a new car, it's a

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-71811367925066322332012-01-08T11:03:00.000+01:002012-01-08T11:03:09.528+01:00

Whenever my browser restarts, I lose the cookie to this blog's dashboard, so I have to log in again, which happens every few weeks. I already blogged this. Now it's getting more invasive. There's an open threat, "enter your cell phone number - it only takes 30 seconds - and avoid a much longer security hassle that's coming". Allegedly, that's to avoid my blog being hacked in the future. And the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-67639540099626344052011-12-30T16:49:00.000+01:002011-12-30T18:18:08.544+01:00

Back to my pet project. I noticed that the web form doesn't refresh after saving. Why should it refresh if it submitted successfully? Simply because for some controls I have combos and textboxes overlapping, and I show the textbox in viewing, and the combo in editing. Once submitted, the combo is hidden and the textbox comes forth. But the combo doesn't get the value from the combo - it has to

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-90447392735749520352011-12-28T09:47:00.000+01:002011-12-30T18:18:47.679+01:00

Just thinking how the december hype was one of the major reasons we dropped TV altogether. During all those years in the US, whatever we were watching with any regularity was inevitably going off air for the duration of it, and replaced with some appropriate content for the occasion. Which I don't mind if the occasion is a day. But it extended to four, five weeks. And as there isn't any special

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-4062428502260105032011-12-23T11:45:00.000+01:002011-12-23T11:45:43.339+01:00

After the successful tour of all songs containing "siddeh" (where tour is a one way trip into the unrecyclables), the next thing that annoys me has been spotted. That is all the songs where they pronounce words ending with -ability as -abilaty. Responsabilaty, persanalaty, stabilaty... any of them. Even electrissaty (in all versions of 3-5-0-0 of "Hair"). I don't mind singing in a local

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-71303604949531604442011-12-20T20:59:00.000+01:002011-12-20T20:59:25.680+01:00

First off, I don't consider sugar water to be a juice. Whenever one refers to soda as juice, I ask from which fruit was it made. But it gets worse - last time I was offered a juice, it turned out to be iced tea. Sugared (or worse, aspartamed). Yugoslavia used to be a proud producer of excellent fruit juices. Serbia was among the top regions in that. But... Looking at the shelf in the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-20200160926248393712011-11-30T14:50:00.001+01:002011-11-30T14:50:58.164+01:00

Just wondering, if Hercule Poirot is Belgian, how come he never spoke a word of Dutch?

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-22616998076844910812011-11-29T22:53:00.001+01:002011-11-29T22:53:47.324+01:00

Of course. Where else.

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-63489578691085506572011-11-28T23:16:00.001+01:002011-12-30T18:19:19.401+01:00

Serbian alphabet has 30 characters, each representing one sound. It is, thus, as phonetic as it gets. There is no spelling whatsoever, question "how do you pronounce/spell your last name" doesn't exist. That's for cyrillic alphabet and for those who write according to the orthography of the language. But, the language can be written using latin alphabet, which still maps 1:1 to the cyrillic,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-44765943461366724452011-11-24T10:42:00.001+01:002011-11-24T11:04:22.402+01:00

Yet another time the msi installer has taken me an hour. Something somewhere overwrote a dll, or replaced a path to it with an encrypted one, as described here. Solution? Simple: reinstall the app which stopped working. Ah, if only it would be so simple. The installer goes for good two minutes to build a script... which then can't execute because it can't find the installer at the original

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-64512122641926540242011-11-21T10:22:00.001+01:002011-11-21T10:36:27.743+01:00

Just a thought... about them Nielsen ratings etc. What was exactly the best thing on TV? The definition, please. Ah, whatever is seen by most people. Whatever has the highest number of viewings. Something like web page counter. I wonder whether they count the first run viewership when they rerun something. If they did, I think the results would turn the world of TV upside down. Whatever is

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-70046287399000296772011-11-08T14:49:00.000+01:002011-11-08T14:49:55.942+01:00

So far, my choice for hardware was Newegg. The only exception, IIRC, were my cameras, which I bought at Amazon - that was the area where Newegg had weak offering. But even then, I had to google these cameras for technical specifics, because on Amazon there are none. This time, it's a scanner for negatives. We always had a camera in the house, since the late fifties. And kept the negatives. Some

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-30323311802555676812011-11-06T20:57:00.000+01:002011-11-06T20:57:39.563+01:00

And they said "market will provide, as long as there is demand". The invisible hand of Adam Smith or some such guy. Bullshit. Market is... the green market, where the peasants freely sell their product, i.e. produce. We had that in socialism, believe it or not. Free market. The green market nowadays, same here as in the US, is not a market. It's an outlet, controlled. The trick was simple:

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-75750765946685756052011-11-03T11:32:00.001+01:002011-11-03T11:33:20.907+01:00

Just listen to Joe Cocker singing "Summer in the city", and you may just spot one of my pet peeves in current state of English language: the t near the end of the word becomes a d. And, of course, as kitty becomes kitteh, actually kiddeh, so does city become ciddeh. Of course, if English were anywhere near phonetic, the confusion created by sounds would creep into the written (ridden) language,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-52449990407249095442011-10-31T23:21:00.000+01:002011-10-31T23:21:23.781+01:00

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 Japanese and the Hungarians use it, because that's

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-48215235228608735862011-10-14T11:56:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:34:29.014+01:00

I already wrote about Skype being dumbed down. Meanwhile, I had a serious problem with them, having paid an annual subscription for something (no, Microsoft, I'm not keen on memorizing your stupid "product" names) that should give me group video for a year... which was sort of fixed after a week or so. It didn't give me what I paid, but instead kept offering to buy it again. I'm now getting

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-27772763880897197282011-10-09T18:14:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:42:49.296+01:00

I used to write SF. Was crazy enough, and had some ideas, and I just wrote. Only the first one was on paper, though - the very next one went into a computer, on what machine I had then - I used REM lines in ZX Spectrum (am: timex) in lieu of a real editor, then bought (unheard of, in those days) a real editor, then carried the stuff over to my Atari, then used WordStar (never WordPerfect), then

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-42741829079081952332011-10-04T23:23:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:43:36.512+01:00

Why would a gift shop exist at all? Is there an allowable class of items which can be given as gifts, and those can't be found in regular shops? Shouldn't the gift be something meaningful, rather than glamorous? And, I bet gift shops don't carry proper gifts at all: rare books, vintage wine, and homemade stuff (as in "and I made this for you"). To buy any of them, you'd have to go elsewhere and

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-11051617096003411202011-10-03T09:49:00.003+02:002011-10-04T12:20:03.176+02:00

Suppose you're building a space shuttle, but can't publish it under that name, because NASA holds the rights to the name. What do you do? Appleye the same old trik (trique?) everybody else youzes: tchange the spellingue: kall it spays shubtle. When trying to decide between spelling and lawsuit, the choice is easy.

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-90013020990669920512011-10-03T01:58:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:44:45.696+01:00

The distinction between binary and not binary probably came from the same mindset which thinks that percentages are integers, and that percentages and fractions have nothing in common. Let's face it - how is a value decided to be binary? The most common test is "it displays little squares when I open it in Notepad". Why not call it printables vs nonprintables? Because, deep down under, it's

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-61172167742211776592011-09-26T15:46:00.000+02:002011-11-30T14:52:07.136+01:00

It began with the simple need to look up a phone number of a friend. I have bookmarked the search page ages ago, this one, which was named "whitepages.onpalm" - the "onpalm" part meaning probably nothing in English, but the phrase is a good fit for what it offered. If something is "kao na dlanu" (as if on [your] palm), than it's easy to see, in plain sight. Of course, it doesn't work. The

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-52491687600509384692011-09-17T00:16:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:49:10.918+01:00

First I wrote about life without one. Meanwhile, bought a piece of land nearby, to grow tomatoes - 11 years in the US makes you a man of love, sorrow and remembrance - you learn to love tomatoes, are sad you can't get any decent ones, and fondly remember how they used to be back home. I should be able to buy them, but that's capitalism: there is no market for real ones; sufficient number of

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-81888557245032118092011-09-12T20:01:00.000+02:002011-11-03T11:48:43.849+01:00

Google is slowly becoming the new Big Brother (not of the TV kind, which I never watched and wouldn't know - I mean the 1984 kind). Maybe I exaggerated. Not slowly at all. I just wanted to check whether I got any comments to vet, and voila, Google tells me that I should enter my cell phone number. In proper Serbian (not the mockery that tries to pass for one on Panoramio or in various other

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-78975603637821738632011-09-09T15:11:00.000+02:002011-09-09T15:11:09.683+02:00

Twelve years ago we landed at JFK. Started from Budapest, because that's where we had to go for the visa and the airplane. The embassy in Belgrade was closed, and no international flights operated from Belgrade. I had to borrow the office car, buy a couple of coke bottles of gasoline from a friendly dealer on the corner, and went about all those last minute chores. Twelve years later, the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-15168867210170873252011-09-06T12:14:00.001+02:002011-11-03T11:46:53.304+01:00

Today I tried to send a Libre Office document as a pdf attachment to an email, which I regularly did before. This time, due to reinstall of everything (which is a periodic toothache which I contract every couple of years, this time because my system disk crashed), something in this edition of Windows didn't quite catch what is my email client... so it went to the regular route of "no email

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-10586765075715251292011-09-04T08:25:00.000+02:002011-09-04T08:25:25.062+02:00

Vacuum cleaner ranks high among my favorite misnomers. First, its name suggests it's a device to clean the vacuum. Vacuum is a total absence of anything, it's literally emptiness. So there's no dirt in it, by definition. This being English, you never know how does a pair of words function. Horse cart is drawn by horses, but milk cart is not drawn by milk - it's used to transport milk. I wonder

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-40342657180221793772011-08-23T12:21:00.001+02:002011-10-14T11:56:58.432+02:00

As usual, Skype just installed a new version on me. Somewhere along the way, probably during one of the reinstalls of everything that Windowses treat me to, the loading of new versions was set on autopilot, and it doesn't even ask anymore, just tells me that it loaded the new version. And, as usual, the GUI has changed a bit. The news: missing buttons in the video call window. The button with a

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-41867427843306332972011-08-15T14:34:00.000+02:002011-08-15T14:34:49.573+02:00

Though, this one seems to go as far back as Sybase. I tried to make a field binary, i.e. change its type from char(10) to binary(10). The contents should stay the same - I am only changing the behavior of the field in some cases, like when coming over the wire to an ODBC client near your Windowses with a non-Western codepage. IOW, the field may, in the future, contain nonprintables. So I try to

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-39570170974405388652011-07-11T21:48:00.000+02:002011-07-11T21:48:08.507+02:00

A whole year after returning from the US would be a good time to sum up the experience. Except I don't feel like anything important has happened. It's just a place where I prefer to live. Food tastes better, beer is real beer, and I know more people. The rest is more or less the same - government equally insane (and while being far less dangerous internationally, is still ranks of cronies and

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-6220743090366276482011-04-24T12:47:00.000+02:002011-04-24T12:47:13.042+02:00

How is "politically correct" calculated? How do we know whether an expression returns a correct or incorrect result? In mathematics, that is not a problem (or is, until a solution is found). In our regular discourse, however, any expression can return a wrong result, independent of its contents. Take "Negro" candy from Subotica. It's been called that since the inception, which is probably buried

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-9539348420561176362011-04-21T14:31:00.000+02:002011-04-21T14:31:53.571+02:00

So I began writing this blog on Blogger... and in the end it seems to belong to Google. I'm posting my street photos on Panoramio, and then Google buys Panoramio. Them being wed in this manner, I'm wedding them on this blog too. Looking at my Panoramio stats, I noticed one of the less prominent pics having a inexplicably high number of views. It's not in a specially known place, not a landmark

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-11618735245488581462011-04-10T18:23:00.000+02:002011-04-10T18:23:38.107+02:00

This one was long in the making. I just never got around to write it down. It hit me as early as first week back in Serbia: where do you go when you you want to buy something. It's actually a skill which takes a long time to learn, no matter where you live. And the depth of your pocket doesn't really change the speed of learning - whether you're shopping for price or quality, it takes time to

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-76893488693182112712011-04-06T18:59:00.003+02:002011-04-10T17:13:19.022+02:00

I should probably start this with a link to the probable cause of the phenomenon, the failblog, but I won't - I'm not visiting them anymore, simply because about 40% of the items shown there are ads for their other sites (which worked - I'm visiting a few of those weekly). Anyway, I proclaim my mild disgust at people who use the word "epic" to augment whatever they want to say (just like they'd

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-30255132522515674282011-04-04T15:26:00.004+02:002011-04-04T15:47:09.862+02:00

I just lit a cigarette with a match. Next to them, on my desk, there's a good steel lighter. A meter away, three or four disposable lighters.When I was a kid, matchboxes were made of light veneer and put together with thin blue packing paper (the inside box). Such a box could last forever - I think my collection of 1 dinar coins from 1959 is still in one of those. The sandpaper side wouldn't

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-24282690026818408442011-04-03T11:16:00.003+02:002011-04-03T12:20:18.023+02:00

Well, not just Leo's article in the title link, but this and this too.Of course, it's near impossible to find the old articles now, the explanations offered by M$ back in 1995, when the registry was introduced. And even so, the reasons Leo states could have been solved by storing all the registry information in the filesystem. Here goes:Separation of "machine" settings from "user" settings. This

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-74060464567849725012011-02-11T20:57:00.003+01:002011-02-11T21:06:59.707+01:00

A word waiting for a sentence where it could be used to great effect: encyclopediatric.Just like diagnoseology, defective mulch, rexcursion, blogorrhea, and other things that doublecross my mind, like a road, time and time again (to prove that there's always time after time, therefore its structure must be cyclical).There must be some use for all of that. If not there, then right behind.

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-70801473787500266802011-02-02T00:35:00.001+01:002011-02-02T00:36:46.503+01:00

What do you mean "my computer is running slow"? If it's running, then it's fast. If it's slow, it's walking.Try to walk. Try to run. Feel the difference.Next time, say "my computer is walking".

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-58091538832734915212011-02-01T18:47:00.004+01:002011-02-01T21:10:14.580+01:00

For years I used the freebie versions of SQL server. The price of full license being too steep for me, this did the job. And SQL is nice in that it connects to pretty much anything, or should I say anything can connect to it (but then, probably anything but Access can connect to MySQL, Progress et al).There was some trouble with developer tools, because earlier freebies didn't come with Query

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-18741737374865625502011-01-22T22:14:00.003+01:002011-01-22T23:31:24.167+01:00

I guess the FailBlog.org is predominantly populated by Americans, so... here's to them and what they vote in.Be it noted that I just discovered the vote page, where the unfiltered content comes in, so I'm wading my way back through the sights unseen, presently making my way through last November. And now I see what's submitted and what's voted in.So, things which are not fails, but you fail to

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-14618362482202023752011-01-13T14:45:00.003+01:002011-01-13T15:16:34.256+01:00

Sucks, just like it sucks anywhere else. The good side of it is that the same tricks work.First off, there is no donotcallme.org list of any kind. You can't opt out. But then, you don't need to: the new Consumer protection law of 2008, article 41, says "Zabranjeno je neposredno oglašavanje telefonom, faksom ili elektronskom poštom, bez prethodnog pristanka potrošača." - direct advertising by

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-22635278750852418252010-12-27T14:33:00.004+01:002010-12-27T16:07:01.285+01:00

Once upon a time, when Google was young, searching for web lyrics was easy. You just type the song title, or (even better) some of the words, and the lyrics would pop up. Actually, fourteen years ago, when the sanctions were eased up, and we weren't disconnected from the interwebs (for which, as I hear, we owe to unknown Austrian moron who cut us off for no good reason - web was not on the list),

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-89625851333191222032010-12-14T11:15:00.002+01:002010-12-14T11:57:45.679+01:00

Now this is where I definitely see the difference between the US and Serbia. First of all, let's see why did I need the car there? For one, to get the groceries. That's most of the driving. Then, occasionally driving daughter to school (long story, actually, the whole last year I had to drive, because her school was 8 miles away, and due to budget cuts the school bus would take a hour and a half

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-22858203743479724062010-11-06T12:54:00.003+01:002010-11-06T12:58:38.426+01:00

1) they believe in something inhuman - supposedly superhuman, but still not exactly human. They may try to explain this way or other, but in the end their divine person is not a man.2) their allegiance is not to their near and dear, nor to humanity, nor to the planet - they may go against any of that if they believe it will serve their faith. Worse, they think that serving their faith is enough,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-32598230739943266402010-11-02T14:37:00.002+01:002010-11-02T14:53:01.518+01:00

After my old PSP crashed on the floor today, I decided to give Bejeweled 2 another try. Not from PopCap, of course, I'm still pissed of at them asking more than $7 for a game they sold for $2 to iPod users. I am very sensitive to racism, even if it's not by corporeal features.But then there may be other versions - someone may be offering to play again for free, for the odd chance that I may click

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-81055080301776837242010-10-14T14:00:00.002+02:002010-10-14T14:03:39.991+02:00

[this is from the UT forum... TC asked, and I answered]>So what's on tv these days in Serbia? Do you have a tv turned on over there?TV? What TV?Exactly the same crap as in the US - Fox, history channel, national geographic something... didn't even bother to check whether our old TV would work, or how much would a new one cost. Actually, between cable IP and DSL I chose the latter, because cable

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-5846641542028087112010-09-24T11:20:00.004+02:002010-09-24T11:27:33.685+02:00

Among the most annoying habits of English speakers, IMO, is the use of "try and {verb}" instead of "try to {verb}". It actually confused me a lot while I was learning the language. In Jethro Tull's "Cross eyed Mary", there's a lineto try and catch some sunwhich confused me to no end - what did he mean to try? Or was it "try" as in "invest some effort" - but then, into what?As a general rule, two

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-38620772792916846842010-09-19T10:27:00.003+02:002010-09-19T10:47:51.401+02:00

This from a programmer's question on a programmers' forum: What is the content of those fifteen "boxes"?The "boxes" are unprintable characters - the guy was trying to edit a field which contains some null-delimited strings, integers and other binary content.What's it with today's programmers? Have they ever heard what a byte may contain, what's the ASCII value of it, and in how many different

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-87730294260959263572010-05-21T01:07:00.004+02:002010-05-21T01:43:20.853+02:00

Funny though, leafing through houses for sale (pardon! no houses at all - they're all homes already, even empty), I'm amazed at how many of them address the potential buyer as a consumer.Huh? The house you're selling is a consumable? Selling to termites perhaps? How long will it last? Suppose I buy it, and then what, I'm supposed to consume it and buy another when I run out of this? Like, say,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-21306197961839155222010-04-12T14:41:00.003+02:002010-04-12T15:14:44.846+02:00

After all the entries here, where I badmouthed many a business here for their malpractice (or at least doing things wrong towards their customers, IMO), for once I have a few words of genuine praise.Cox Communications may have bad cable offer (but then they can't change the system, I guess - they bundle, they charge you for access to digital channels for which you have to pay again separately),

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-20882054298373107522010-04-11T21:22:00.004+02:002010-04-12T00:14:42.937+02:00

For once, I wanted to have a boat tour of the area. Living all these years on the coast, I never got around to doing it, but seeing as it's such a lovely day, I got an itch for a boat ride. Just an hour or two of a ride through the inlets, make a few dozen photographs and just be on the water.For that, I need to know three things: where, when and how much. Google gives me the first choice of

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-12843952949425826722010-03-28T19:44:00.004+02:002010-04-01T00:15:51.751+02:00

Here's a list of software junk that I can't throw out without scouring the registry:- a bunch of java applets I picked up while looking at some physics simulations at University of Colorado. Each of them installs as a separate app, and wants to call home when uninstalled, namely the java runtime wants to report somewhere. When my firewall prevents that, it says "unable to completely uninstall

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-44718281835161787912010-02-27T05:07:00.003+01:002010-02-27T05:24:27.939+01:00

How does this work?Very simple. Walmart is cheap, because they have minimal staff cost. They have no workers, only associates...OK, now seriously, they are seriously understaffed, as a matter of policy. Friday evening, pay day, there's a crowd. The big one where we go sometimes has 40 cash registers. About eight or ten were manned, so whichever you pick, there are four or six loaded carts ahead

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-34345891846533765842010-02-25T14:21:00.004+01:002010-02-25T15:14:13.067+01:00

Just saw a truck from a company "{somethings} 'Я' US". Probably mimicking the toys outfit, just like a dozen other places do. Well, fine, as far as local idiosyncrasies go, but for me, and generally anyone who had more than two hours of Russian alphabet will never read Я as "ar". It's "ya", period. For the natives here, it may look like a reverse "ar", because it's the only way it makes sense

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-64389731311002838252010-02-11T22:41:00.003+01:002010-02-11T22:54:53.619+01:00

One problem that plagues atheists is that they have no symbols to brag with. No book to quote, no smart sentences to shorten into a vanity plate... not even much of a bumper sticker. I could assume that everyone with a blank bumper is one, but I'd probably be wrong. I'd put an empty sticker, but that would probably be misunderstood.On the other end of the spectrum, the believers have a well paid

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-61021483697794022352010-02-06T22:47:00.004+01:002010-02-06T23:37:13.228+01:00

[This is based on what I wrote on a forum; my thanks to TC who provoked this. Forum text is in italics.]>>The proof that I'm still Serbian is that any attempt to describe my status would begin with "it's a long story". Though, I may have gone native in many ways - the event an hour ago may be a symptom (finally caught the neighbor's girl with her dog crapping on our lawn, shouted a few hot

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-79637193624501808262010-01-10T16:24:00.004+01:002010-01-10T17:33:45.775+01:00

Our daughter canceled her credit card by the end of last year. It was about some $62. She logged in several times on 25th, 26th and later, to check the monthly payment, which was an automatic payment in full of any CC debt. On 25th she saw that it was paid, some $1500. The next day she moved the rest of the money left on checking to her savings account. On 28th some amount was moved back to

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-13877035215496598402009-12-23T16:20:00.003+01:002009-12-23T16:39:31.561+01:00

I sort of expected this would happen when I saw how it works. Yeah it works most of the time, but even if/when it works it's mostly in the way. We asked our daughter (a blonde, BTW) to turn that off, the effect was nauseating. And, btw, it's not moving the camera, it's that the camera has more pixels than really needed, so the software only looks for the best crop with the face smack in the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-41260536401274130332009-11-14T17:20:00.004+01:002009-11-14T17:46:08.121+01:00

I have to confess to a bit of vanity - six months ago, I added counters here and on my regular website, which I won't link to from here - that thing over there is my alter ego, which I'd like to keep separate.StatCounter provides a nice service - I get decent statistics, albeit short-term, just last 500 visits, but that's OK. I'm not aiming to become a slashdot or a porn site. The few people that

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-82523211182676580642009-11-01T05:14:00.004+01:002009-11-01T06:02:35.528+01:00

This Friday I got this friendly letter from Wachovia (they still seem to stick to the name, although far go they did meanwhile):Wow. And I was trusting my money to you for some seven years. And you are now closing my line-of-credit account? In case you didn't know, guys, I closed my account three years ago. If you left my line of credit attached to a nonexistent account for three years... you

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-69737485548960273782009-10-24T22:14:00.002+02:002009-10-24T23:07:53.311+02:00

Transcript from Diane Rehm's broadcast, as I heard it (because I just don't feel like spending $30 for two minutes of what I already heard):D: Good morning, Tom, you're on the airListener: Good morning. Ahm... these discussions I hear in general about the unemployment rate, they tend to go on about the recovery of the stock market, or issues about bonus payments for bankers, but I don't hear

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-19660604776637613472009-10-09T05:44:00.003+02:002009-10-09T06:25:00.238+02:00

So I'm trying to buy a car, again. Last time it was almost simple, autotrader.com was still publishing those magazines you could pick at the grocery, and at least I had a way to find the whereabouts of the price for the car I want. I got one from a dealer, though, but that was in the classifieds in the local papers, while they still had their own ads - nowadays they only host pages from some

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-20639019601812461032009-10-04T01:09:00.004+02:002009-10-04T03:14:27.208+02:00

I ordered both movies to arrive together from Netflix - Tarkovsky's, then Soderbergh's. They came in that order, but the first one was on a DVD which seems to have passed through too many hands, and had irreparable scratches. I returned it and replacement came two days later. Doesn't matter that I saw them in wrong order - I saw Solyaris at least three times, roughly ten years apart.The topic has

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-20704782833570168642009-09-22T04:47:00.000+02:002009-09-22T04:48:31.274+02:00

For the umpteenth time I find in the crossword "ruler of Russia" and it resolves into tsar, sometimes czar. As if it was solely a Russian word, or if it was a rank that only Russia had.Well, sorry to disappoint you (even though I haven't appointed you at all), but it's simply not so. Czar - car - цар - царь - cár and related variants like cisař, ćesar, Keiser etc all originate in the Roman title

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-15294088110445709832009-09-20T22:33:00.006+02:002009-11-03T17:03:57.394+01:00

After all the entertainment I had in the previous installments of installation of nothing new but the motherboard (and processor, cooler and memory), everything seemed to work just the same, only a bit faster. That is, because I wasn't using Office, except via automation. I do write a lot, but I do that on forums, or in tools I wrote, like the one I use to maintain my website. Documents, not as

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-19799735887518713682009-09-19T20:28:00.005+02:002009-09-19T21:30:19.949+02:00

The other two parts are just below.Daughter came to rescue - she has a full-fledged SQL server on her Vista laptop (a HP, on which the wireless network card fried the motherboard, beyond warranty, HP largely ignored the issue even though it was a mass event, class action may be pending), courtesy of her employer. The laptop is on the cable, so speed should closely emulate what my users are

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-61430867597844190012009-09-18T23:06:00.008+02:002009-09-19T00:38:21.578+02:00

If you didn't read the first part, here.So, next day it was about getting the SQL Server Express 2005 (SSE in the rest of text) to work. I figured it got somehow branded, or lost some setting somewhere, so I'd just have to reinstall it, which I tried.But first, to the event log. When I first managed to boot (before the bloody switch stuck), the error saidFaulting application sqlservr.exe, version

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-89260897567841475082009-09-15T06:23:00.006+02:002009-09-15T07:57:04.230+02:00

I watched the first Galactica on b/w TV. It really didn't look good at all, what with the gleam of centurions' bodies being dull gray. But the sound came through alright. The flat voices of Cylons were such a bad idea then, and the whole idea that they would speak among themselves, in ersatz human at that, was stupid then, and time hasn`t helped it any. Why would a robot army also be so slow in

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-18384379375852689662009-09-12T01:52:00.005+02:002009-09-12T02:29:17.190+02:00

Last weekend I rebuilt my workhorse. The old Athlon 64 was getting a bit slow for what I was doing, specially with SQL stuff. My usual trouble with rebuilding is that I don't have the time and the patience to learn all the buzzwords and TLAs that have changed meanwhile. But, once in three years, it's something that has to be done - it's not that I'm just playing Solitaire (I do, but that's PySol

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-71005185382174376492009-08-16T00:41:00.004+02:002009-08-16T01:53:40.221+02:00

Just visited the nearby Barnes & Noble, hoping to find some good SF to read over the weekend and... bought a John le Caré off the junk heap.Not that I wasn't trying. First, went for new books. Out of some twenty or so on the shelf, about fifteen had various dragons, swords, vampires and whatnots on their covers, or had titles like "The A of B". The rest belonged to various franchises - the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-45055822689691424852009-07-28T20:22:00.008+02:002009-07-28T21:15:01.167+02:00

I was looking for updates for my digital camera software, and came upon these guys. Nice piece of software, their driver detective (oops, should that be uppercased, as if it was a person?). It quite correctly detected my motherboard, bunch of devices that I have, and it knew which ones had old drivers - cute, saved me a ton of time. Then whichever of its cute slick icons I clicked, it would tell

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-78146605837193035522009-07-25T17:34:00.005+02:002009-07-25T18:32:43.769+02:00

For definition of what's original, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original; for common usage, there's a linguistic blind alley, because it is mostly taken to mean previous, or at the source... for which meaning the proper Latin would be primitive. Just like the function from which get another as a derivative is the primitive function to that derivative, at least in mathematical analysis.

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-88770188445915350012009-07-22T15:12:00.003+02:002009-07-22T16:04:39.251+02:00

Here goes another......making Los Angeles look like international locations, such as India and Ukraine...What was the exact meaning of "international", again?in·ter·na·tion·al /ˌɪntəˈnæʃnəl/adj. Abbr. int. or intl.1. Of, relating to, or involving two or more nations: an international commission; international affairs.2. Extending across or transcending national boundaries: international

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-1403558076467119492009-07-17T21:00:00.004+02:002009-07-17T21:27:02.688+02:00

This is about stupid names of things, another pointless ode to equally pointless heaping of words on merchandise, in the hope it would sell better.What does SUV mean? At least, to differ from the recent stupid name, this one has a firm noun in the end, so we know it's a vehicle. It's just that we don't know what kind of one is it. Back home, in Serbia, it was called a džip/џип, which is how we

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-32143545187970104072009-07-15T16:14:00.003+02:002009-07-15T16:26:25.039+02:00

Just yesterday I somewhere read, as an explanation for the bailouts, "but if a bank falls, many otherwise healthy enterprises, whose money is in those banks, will have to shut down, and if you're a government, to save those enterprises, you have to"... bail out the bank, not those enterprises.Huh? Who exactly is the idiot here?The enterprises were, more or less, cheated by the bank. For which the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-17739163294886510372009-07-14T17:31:00.002+02:002009-07-14T17:38:57.975+02:00

Just looking at its name, anything that begins with Microsoft and ends with Express is, by empirical definition, a feature stripped freebie bait for the real thing. And the real thing is usually bloatware.On second glance at the name... it's a what? It's a Microsoft something - just like there's a Microsoft Internet (for which there's an explorer), or Microsoft Anything Else... so it wouldn't be

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-65842775177858930112009-07-06T00:03:00.003+02:002009-07-06T01:58:12.093+02:00

I'd rather not talk about that right now.OK - when would be a good date, then? Tomorrow? Or are you about to engage in a year long quest of finding out who knows what and whether I may have forgot about this, whence to estimate whether you still need to tell me "not right now" or "OK, now", or "no, never". Because you obviously don't know enough to give me a straight answer. Not even a straight

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-28244273747128055892009-06-23T21:54:00.003+02:002009-06-23T22:08:27.376+02:00

This time it's Braun. I found these images on a forum:There are two more, with the same text.First we have someone pimping his book by positing that religion=civilization (and not as a subset of civilization, but as the bedrock thereof). Now these guys say "shaved=human".Know what, I never went for those beard mowers. I prefer to just trim mine periodically (using a Remington machine) and shave

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-69887695020659585762009-06-20T06:23:00.002+02:002009-06-20T06:37:38.065+02:00

I bought the book. Started reading it. I already know a lot of what it says, and I have good reasons to believe that most of what it says is true. I expected to have the subject matter laid out in a reasonable manner, with firm facts, sources, etc.Instead, it begins with several biblical quotes. OK, many an author prefaces a book with some verse, and I can't possibly accuse mr Flynn of being a

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-77530124648893418142009-06-17T20:36:00.004+02:002009-06-17T21:51:07.339+02:00

I'm not using either of them Explorers. Not the Windows Ex, not the Microsoft Internet one, not the vehicle of such name. While there are reasons for each, today it's the first one.Among other file managers, I played with Geos (or was it Beos?) and a couple of other wrappers around the explorer object, and settled on Ghisler's Total Commander for the last nine years, and still haven't looked back

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-83527378669780181552009-06-03T16:13:00.004+02:002009-06-03T17:04:23.152+02:00

In this role or that, I was buying from HP for almost 20 years. The first, IIRC, was a HPLJ IV, which probably still works. Then, a VI or VII (I'm becoming bad with names) for my next company. And a scanner for another company along the way. Then I bought, after coming here, one printer, then another, then a scanner, a laptop... and that's where it began to go sour.In 1995, HP had a perfect suite

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-2669363184622821982009-05-25T19:20:00.005+02:002009-06-12T05:43:41.007+02:00

OK, I'm not really an addict. I just have this tooth itch. If you leave me alone with an open can of roasted peanuts, within an hour or two one of us will be gone, depending on when you come to check. Most of the time, it will be me who is gone - to wash my hands. Too much salt and oil.What's the point in oiling something that contains its own fat? Just grind it and you can spread it on bread (

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-28060774870445349052009-05-20T16:48:00.005+02:002009-05-23T03:56:04.999+02:00

Amazon has gone to lengths (a few microns, I guess) to offer me this (plus three other books) under "New Releases in Science Books": "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality".A sidenote first: the other three books don't sound like science either - one is about consumer behavior (so, predator psychology in service of commerce), a "natural history" of NYC (so, history, more

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-1336257521974418902009-05-15T18:03:00.005+02:002009-05-15T18:23:26.872+02:00

I don't know, and I know of a guy who also doesn't know.I do know that about:blank is a special URL which lives pretty much within your browser. This guy doesn't know that. He thinks it's a real website. The guy is Excel.Here's the scenario. I have an app which, among other things, generates a report in HTML format, and displays it in a IExplorer Activex hosted on a form. To avoid littering the

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-47116588181611265942009-05-12T22:09:00.006+02:002009-05-15T18:57:55.480+02:00

For spectators with cheaper tickets, the relevant quote:Writer-director Achero Manas's poignant film won more than 30 international awards, including four Spanish Goyas.So... we have a movie from the famous "Foreign" genre. And we have four specifically and extremely Spanish Goyas - to be distinguished from all of those Chinese, Somali, Paraguayan and Estonian Goyas.Actually, this movie is a

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-35633316092994211872009-05-04T17:35:00.004+02:002009-05-12T22:33:25.537+02:00

Just noticed that I inserted a typically Serbian "eh" in an English sentence... and that it didn't make much sense. So, for the first time in human history, here's theSigh language dictionary(Serbian-English)First, in the Serbian sigh, the aitch is heard. The "ah" maybe should be spelled as an "akh" - the k being there, as usual, to tell the aitch to sound out: kheard.ah - corresponds pretty

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-11663785945952655642009-04-23T20:12:00.003+02:002009-04-23T20:44:29.816+02:00

I had to do something to a xls sheet I received, and wanted to see if it contains any macros first (so I may not have to write as much myself, perhaps). Hovering over the toolbar in Excel 2003, I found a familiar button:The tooltip said "Microsoft Script Editor" - ah, title case, so it's probably a heading to a chapter that I can read, or it's a he, maybe the editor of the "Microsoft Script"

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-56420008406828824022009-04-09T16:43:00.003+02:002009-04-09T17:22:12.764+02:00

I keep running into phrase "powerful symbols" every now and then. As if a graphical piece had some intrinsic power, or if it was an outlet for some underlying hidden power, waiting to burst in the face of any unsuspecting passerby.But... IMO, 99% of the story is just bullshit. It's a cultural thing. For example, it can be argued that the cross is a sign of death - it's on all of those cemeteries,

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-20356346846458574352009-03-28T20:22:00.004+01:002009-03-31T01:10:24.573+02:00

That said, I believe it does well in what it sets out to do--describe a world of chaos, one in there are no ethical standards, in other words, no God.[update: I blogged a similar one already]Ajde. You'll tell me. So, without your god (or maybe you'd allow for others?) there's no ethics.This lack of ethical consideration about what this blurb says about its author's hubris is too much, even for a

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-76903825926279834942009-03-20T23:27:00.005+01:002009-03-31T01:09:57.655+02:00

[about Golden Compass]This would have been a nice and new endeavor, a brave fairytale doing away with the authority and Authority... except that it's actually full of the same old, of cliches, of profiling and whatnot.Let's start. First off, just like any other story with parallel worlds, it has to be connecting to other worlds somewhere in the US or the UK. If there's a difference, it's mostly

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-63419667808745476142009-03-19T19:53:00.006+01:002009-08-15T16:57:12.706+02:00

WTF is this? We have to delimit hex numbers with quotation marks because they are not real numbers? Or because they are?Imagine this dialogue- how much is that car- it's "fiftyfive" hundred.Huh?Also, is reading of memory real reading or we only call it that but we know it isn't? So anywhere where we apply reading, but which does not involve a human being looking at glyphs and conjuring meaning

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-76239874425639101992009-03-19T05:35:00.003+01:002009-04-10T17:48:51.425+02:00

I have just deleted the game from my bookmarks. I won't bother to find it again.Played it for three months, on and off. My (paper) record stands at 318911, and my lowest ever was at 612. Despite being an old geek, I'm still capable of keeping record on paper.Oh, I think I owe some explanation, why did I forget the game. Well, they weren't satisfied that I'm not watching the ads. So every once in

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-34011636706734293252009-03-19T05:10:00.006+01:002009-07-22T16:07:26.491+02:00

The US and UK, and perhaps a couple more of anlophone countries are producing all kinds of movies. Action, documentary, drama, comedy, musical, whatever they can imagine.The rest of the world produces only one kind of movie, poor buggers. They may, in their hubris, imagine that they have learned the difference between drama and comedy, between documentary and musical and sf and... but that's just

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-21634081819540929112009-03-15T17:59:00.003+01:002009-03-15T18:56:22.730+01:00

...was killed ... when militants ambushed him in Pakistan...so a member of one country's military something isn't militant, and a rebel from the other side is. What has newspeak come to.As we can see in the title link (which is a wiktionary link this time, for a change), it's an adjective, jebote, and that's three registered meanings, all with long established tradition in political speech.All of

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-53537694606348882142009-03-04T21:54:00.004+01:002009-03-04T23:40:18.330+01:00

There's one good reason why I never click the "default" button: it may work.The trouble is that I never know what it would do. There's a similar button, which says "set as default" - that one I know and use. But what does a "default" button do?There are three possible meanings:1. stop repaying your debts2. set current values as default values from now, further on and in the future3. discard

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-16678476905968082472009-02-25T21:56:00.005+01:002009-02-25T22:33:01.062+01:00

Here's what the email brought:Rev Up Your WinZip Get the "Best"Compression andLeave Others inthe Dust(and later, elsewhere in the text:) Switch to WinZip's "Best" Compression When Size is ImportantI don't know who these gentlemen, the Others (namely, brothers Leave and Compression) would be doing in a backwater place named Dust. It's entirely possible that they are neither gentle nor men, but

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-47552751583515170922009-02-25T16:44:00.004+01:002009-02-25T17:00:12.157+01:00

Watching Matrix Revolutions... again, and it still doesn't sound any better.The amount of "you will have to believe me" or "I'm doing this because I believe you" or... anyway, any kind of shit, as long as there's something to believe in, then it goes. Anything goes. Any sort of crap goes, simply if it's something to be believed in.Which then brings us to our dear, um, president, or, well not

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-59646138613158322142009-02-10T21:56:00.006+01:002009-02-10T22:06:20.570+01:00

This was my answer to an exchange today on a little forum somewhere in the galaxy far far behind the corner. It's a summation of sorts, my view on advertising.Missing shows? Not really - I've just discovered that they actually look much better on DVD (finally went Netflix, delayed it for a year because of their aggressive advertising). Did you know that by watching TV you actually waste an hour

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-32358933.post-21563232785224245022009-02-08T19:49:00.007+01:002009-02-08T23:32:28.580+01:00

This is so good, that I'll retype it:The third prong of the three-pronged attack on IT is the effort to maximally bureaucratize the process of software development via something called enterprise software. The programmer is now buried under layers of non-programmers: product managers, project managers, solutions architects, various other managers and directors, and let's not forget marketing and

D.R. Fairdayhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02262851718662673437noreply@blogger.com0