The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for October 2008
You know those myriad science fiction stories with rocket ships flying around…
It won’t be science fiction forever.
This is so exciting!
http://space.xprize.org/lunar-lander-challenge
Even better to watch the videos in high quality here and here.
Zimbabwe has 231,000,000% inflation.
The wikipedia article on the Zimbabwean dollar reads like a Keystone Cops comedy.
A Reuters article reads “The country’s largest bank note, a 100 billion Zimbabwe dollar bill introduced on Monday, cannot buy a loaf of bread…”
On July 24th 2008, a “Second” 100 billion ZWD note could buy 3 eggs.
Of course since then the currency was devalued by 8 decimal places. And continuing inflation has moved things along another 6 decimal places. Their currency has been devalued a couple times.
A little quick math (that’s probably wrong, I’m no wiz at such things) tells me that 1 US Dollar could buy 32,145,960,000,000,000,000,000 (yes, 3.2 x 10^24) “First” Zimbabwean dollars from back in 1983.
(that number calculated from here. Here’s the ratios: First ZWD:Second ZWD = 500,000:650. Second ZWD:Third ZWD = 758,000,000,000:1,780. Third ZWD:current US dollar = 98,300,000,000:1)
Thanks for the pointer Trav and thanks for providing my RDA of absurdism Mr. Mugabe.
update 11-2-08: Hey would you look at that. Someone on Wikipedia made a chart for the most part agreeing with my 3.2×10^24 estimate. :-)
update 11-13-08:
Take a look at this screenshot I took of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe I took today.
Today’s sage advice:
First, ask yourself how you would pronounce the word “Wiktionary”. Ok, now proceed.
In April I commented in the Wiktionary wiki about…. well, I’ll let you read:
(archive)
There is quite a consensus that the pronunciation for “Wiktionary” in the logo of this site is not definitive. Why then is this contentious pronunciation displayed on every page of the site? A look through the archives of the discussion rooms, FAQ and entry discussion shows that the issue appears time after time without any resolution. This has caused me to lose faith in the process Wiktionary’s Administration uses to agree on subjects. Since I cannot trust Wiktionary, I will not be using Wiktionary. For the betterment of all, I hope this issue is resolved. I will check back in 6 months. —Gadlen 22:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)
The responses were… well, less than compelling.
Apparently everyone is perfectly happy that the logo of this wordie website is an incorrect pronunciation of the name of the site.
Feh.
Sure, encyclopedias are more exciting than dictionaries but it’s interesting to compare the popularity of the two sites…
wikipedia Active users 157,889
wiktionary Active users 995
For posterity, here is the rest of the discussion from above:
Today’s joy:
A high resolution Bravia Bouncy Ball Video. Download and play this 78mb video. It will endevour to make you a little happier. Sorry, I don’t have a streaming version of this. I tried but the fine details of the video don’t show well as a Flash video.
If you’re into Bittorrent, here’s a Torrent file of it.
I installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin. It is specifically compatible with the WP Super Cache plugin which has worked very well.
With this plugin, if you have posted a comment on my blog, it’ll remember you and you won’t have to see the banner ads that I put at the bottom of every post.
I just downloaded and installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin (1 file). Then put this in my comments.php:
<?php if (function_exists('is_regular_user')) { ?>
<?php if( is_regular_user() == false ) { ?>
<center>
My Google ad here
</center>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>
W
ell, that was straightforward. I installed Gravatars in the blog comments.
So now if you want to put your mug shot next to any of your comments on any blog in the world that supports Gravatars, just sign up with Gravatar.com and give them your image.
Here’s how I installed Gravatars.
I added 1 line to my comments.php following this already existing line:
<cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite> Says:
<?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 50 ); ?>
And I added this to my style.css
.avatar {
float: right;
}
Done.
I’ve been using PlainPaste by Skrommel for more than a year. When you’re running PlainPaste and you hit Ctrl-v, it strips out all the formatting info of whatever is in the clipboard and pastes just the text. It’s really useful when grabbing web page text and pasting it to other places.
Unfortunately, PlainPaste doesn’t always play nice with other programs. For instance, when you paste into Excel, Excel crashes :-(
So now I’m trying PureText 2.0 by Steve Miller. He also wrote the venerable Dependency Walker which bodes well :-). Puretext claims to work similar to PlainPaste. Hopefully it won’t do bad things. We’ll see! It has the added benefit of playing a fun clave sound when you paste using Window-Hot-Key-v. Of course you can turn off the sound but it made me chipper.
Here is the -original- “Ma na ma na” song… the Swedish soft-porn version, with Star Wars visuals.
As mentioned on Wikipedia
“Mah NÃ Mah NÃ ” is a well-known pop music song, written by an Italian musician Piero Umiliani. It originally appeared in the Luigi Scattini‘s Italian film Sweden: Heaven and Hell, but in the U.K. its most famous version was on the first episode of The Muppet Show.
I like this :-)
Found on Youtube… somewhere. There’s a bunch of similar versions. I couldn’t tell you which is the original.
PS, I still think the 3 newer Star Wars movies are crap. I watched Star Wars “Return of the Jedi” a while back and even that was pretty crappy. Han smiled too much among a milltion other things.
PPS. Han shot first.
