One of my favorite on-line toys has had an update. Multibabel now includes Japanese, Korean, and Chinese in the mix when mis-translating things. With this added functionalaity, the common phrase, “Do you have any fruit to declare?” changes from this:
You make the examinación that is explains to her fruit?
to this…
Takes frutte, that one that eats the communication?
An obvious improvement…
Tagged Personal Blather
Monday turned into a wine work day. I got the blueberry and cranberry wine racked into new carboys and added finings to the blueberry. The blueberry will be ready for bottling in two weeks or so. I had a little taste of each of them as I was doing the siphon, and they’re both really tasty. I also ordered some supplies, like a bottle tree and a couple more sets of two-part finings. I checked on E. C. Kraus and Homebrew Heaven for what I was after and found that despite their lousy website design, Homebrew Heaven had better prices and more selection, including the really handy auto-shutoff bottle filler.
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Tagged Wine
So, the big bathroom project weekend has been and gone and didn’t go exactly as planned. Shockingly little actual bathroom work was done, mostly due to the near-continual rain, but a lot of other projects got finished. Normally, rain isn’t that much of a deterrent to an indoor remodeling project, but I’ve got the drywall and everything stored out in the garage. It was so absolutely disgusting on Friday that the drywall would have turned into extremely soggy wall in the few seconds it took to make the trip from the garage to the house.
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Tagged Personal Blather
A friend of mine is thinking semi-seriously about moving to New Zealand. In some ways this would be very cool. My folks visited New Zealand a while ago and had a great time, and it sounds like a place that I’d enjoy a lot. But if he moves there, it could put a crimp in one of my Nefarious Schemes.
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Tagged Personal Blather
There’s a nifty web article at “newscientist.com” about how human brain evolution may be due to a mutation that weakened our jaw muscles and let our skulls grow. Of course, my friend David sent it to a mailing list I’m on with this as the subject line:
The answer, my friends, is growing from your chin…
Tagged Personal Blather
Did a bit of site cleanup on the image front, adding a little “Image by Quirk” bug to the upper left corner of a bunch of pictures. I’d considered just adding the logo to images that people had been linking to, but it was easier to just do a batch process to everything. I’ve kept a copy of the files without the modification, just in case it’s too obtrusive. It was starting to bother me to see my stuff on other people’s sites without them crediting me. I don’t mind them using it – that’s why I’ve got the “Creative Commons License” after all – but I would like some credit.
Tagged Technical Notes
I’m low on tea. This is Twinings “Gunpowder Green” looseleaf tea, and I’m down to the dregs and stems. I drink tea when the breakroom coffee is particularly foul.
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Tagged Art
Short entry today… I just need to warn you about The Scotch.
By which I mean the beverage, not the people.
This particular brand of scotch is bad enough to deserve capitalization as “The Scotch.” It’s something I’d never have bought on my own. Curiosity will only carry me so far when it comes to impulse buys, but my wife was interested in trying it and the description that the guy in the store had was interesting.. So..
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Tagged Reviews
Remember what I said, long ago, about there being no such thing as a free lunch? The same goes for folks who use my stuff on their web sites without crediting me. I mean, seriously, if someone wants to use one of my images, I don’t mind, but is it so hard to put it inside of a link back to here?
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Tagged Personal Blather
After playing around for most of the last two days, I’ve got a new appreciation for just how horribly broken Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is. I’ve been trying to get a page to work the way I expect it to using cascading style sheets, and I’ve got it down to a good, consistent layout. It’s nothing too complex: just a title banner across the top of the page, a block of text beneath that, and a navitaion bar down the right side of the screen.
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Tagged Technical Notes