Fun with Pig Latin

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Filter Pad’s Ouyay Eelin’fay Eemay? post reminded me of a story from years ago.

Just after I graduated High School, I went on a trip with the Bartlett High School German Club to Germany for two months — one month living with a host family and going to school, and one month backpacking all over the country. While we were there, my friend Stiffy and I, being teenage boys, really wanted to be able to talk about girls, and point out choice bits of eye candy when we could. Unfortunately, at first we weren’t sure how. Our German was passable, but not fluent, and everyone around us spoke German also. English wouldn’t work either, as Europeans tend to start learning English in about third grade.

The solution? Pig Latin.

Even after we explained the concept to our German friends, they never could quite wrap their heads around it. Meanwhile, Stiffy and I kept using it, even for normal conversations so we could keep in practice. Eventually, we got to the point where we could speak Pig Latin not quite as fast as we could speak English, but certainly faster than we could speak German.

One night late in the trip, we were babbling in our room at the youth hostel we were at before we passed out, practicing our Pig Latin. Suddenly, one of the other guys in the room broke in to ask us what we were talking about. Turns out that though he could translate the Pig Latin okay, we still weren’t making any sense — our brains, faced with a mishmash of English, German, and Pig Latin, had started to play games with us. Without even realizing that we’d been doing it, we had been speaking Pig Latin, only using the German word order for our sentences. Even our friends couldn’t keep up with our conversations anymore, because in addition to having to translate from Pig Latin to English, they also had to re-order the words to fit English grammar, and by that time, Stiffy and I had moved on to some other subject.

It constantly amazes me what the human brain can do when you’re not paying much attention to it.

Evennay ownay, it’sway eallyray easyway orfay emay otay eakspay Igpay Atinlay ithoutway avinghay otay inkthay aboutway itway uchmay atway allway. Ypingtay itway isway away ittlelay oremay ifficutlday, utbay eakingspay itway? Easyway asway iepay.

Who turned out the lights?

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Okay — so who forgot to pay the electric bill? Just bizarre, to know that that much of the eastern seaboard lost power today. There doesn’t seem to be any real news to the news, but John Hoke has been keeping up with the news as best he can over at his Asylum.

I remember a time probably around 15 years or so when most of Alaska went dark. If I’m remembering it correctly, a raven had flown into some power lines, completeing the circut and bringing down one powerstation (along with killing itself in the process). When that station went down, the next in the series tried to cover for the loss, and couldn’t do it, so it went down. The next station then tried to cover for two downed stations…and it went down. And so on, and so forth, until Alaska was blacked out from the Kenai Peninsula up to about halfway to Fairbanks, I think. Took a good few days to get that mess straightened out.

Hopefully everything kicks back into service soon for all you New Yorkers, though. Good luck!

The spectre of Spinal Tap

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We opened and closed the show, starting after a film sequence featuring a businessman searching sand dunes for a half-buried laptop, and a gravelly-voiced man saying in a so-baritone-it-must-be-important, film-trailer way, “There was a search for an internet business…”

The rest of the sequence was always lost to me as I was concentrating on standing upright and not wetting myself with laughter: Gravel Man was our signal that the revolving circular stage we were on was about to turn us briskly to face the audience and, we suspected, hurl our much ridiculed, old before his time guitarist into the front row like a ball off a dodgy roulette wheel. The spectre of Spinal Tap never leaves a rock band.

— Jesus Jones frontman Mike Edwards describing playing corporate gigs, in the Guardian Unlimited

(via kottke)

Cattle Call 2004

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Cattle Call '04 plot

Roughly every week or so, Daily Kos presents a Cattle Call ranking of the presidential candidates. A quick summary of his opinion of their current position in the Democratic presidential race, usually with a few notes about whether he sees them as heading up or down the chart, and why.

Having watched this for a while, I started to wonder just how the various candidates have fared over the months. So, with a little browsing through the Daily Kos archives and some tinkering in Excel, I can present a (fairly ugly) little graph of each candidate’s potential to grab the Democratic nomination, as ranked by Kos.

It’s actually fairly interesting to see. To me, the three most interesting lines are those of Richard Gephardt (light blue), Joseph Lieberman (medium blue), and Howard Dean (bright pink). Seeing Gephardt start fairly slow, then bounce around towards the top of the chart; Lieberman start strong, stumble for a couple months, then regain a top spot; and Dean’s fairly steady upward climb is a lot easier this way. I’m fairly sure that Kos will continue with the Cattle Call posts up until the Democratic nomination — I’ll keep updating my spreadsheet to see how all this turns out in the end.

Oh, this'll be fun

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I need to print, read, internalize, and (possibly hardest of all) understand the [Apache mod_rewrite documentation].

Why?

This is why. If I’m understanding what I’ve read so far, everything I want to do can be done purely through mod_rewrite. But, as of this writing, I have no idea how.

This could get interesting.

diveintocrappyteenagepoetry.org

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mother do you think thy child is sick?
why are my walls built so very thick?
i hide myself so i can feel no pain
but you crack my walls again and again
bringing emotions, people who care
when all i can do is sit and stare
while the feelings i try so hard to suppress
escape, exerting so much stress
that the walls explode, and i feel the pain
of love, and i build my walls again

This drivel was written sometime in high school, while I was bored in my typing class, and it was (obviously) heavily inspired by Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”.

Today’s bit of nostalgiac tripe has been brought to you courtesy of this comment of Mark’s on his Apple //e post.

Blaster

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Y’know what?

I never got touched by the Blaster worm that’s taking down machines all over the place (yes, I own a PC as well as a Mac).

Y’know why?

When that little “Windows Update” icon blinks at me on my PC, I pay attention to it, download, and install the updates. It’s a pain in the butt, especially since there seems to be a new “cricital update” every week, but sometimes those critical updates really are critical.

I’m sorry that this is hitting so many people. But at the same time — look, you’re dealing with Microsoft software. Bugs aren’t an unfortunate side effect, they’re a gaurantee. The patch for this particular exploit has been available for over a month on Microsoft’s site. Rant at Microsoft all you want for writing shitty software (it’s often well deserved), but at least in this instance, the fix was discovered, publicized, and patched in plenty of time to protect your computers well before Blaster was released.

Yeah, so I’m a little snarky this evening. I spent all day barely restraining myself from beating the ever-loving crap out of my work PC for various other bugs and oddities, which has left me in no great frame of mind when it comes to PCs or Microsoft in general. But at least in this one instance, they did what they could.

Three hours later…

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You may have noticed that I’ve put a surprising number of posts up for this early in the day. That’s simply because I’ve spent the past three hours watching Windows XP chew through security updates, software patches, and other sundry changes to the OS. Running a web browser was about as intense an activity as I wanted to tax the machine with during that process.

Now, three hours later I can finally get to work doing what they pay me for — but that’s only because I got sick of watching a stalled progress bar, force-quit the Windows Update program, and told it to sod off. My security updates were done anyway, it was just chewing on some less critical patches, so I’m not too worried.

Frustrated, and quite willing to toss the computer out a window, if only I had one.

But not worried.