Today my girlfriend was making lunch for us and it looked lovely. I asked her what she was making and she replied tarte au thon. She speaks quietly and my French is not perfect, so when I mispronounced this as tarte au con, she was a bit surprised.

It's natural when one is not fluent to inadvertently say the wrong thing, but referring to "tuna pie" as "cunt pie" was particularly unfortunate.

• Crocodile
• Zebra
• Kangaroo (yummy!)
• Crickets
• Creme de menthe from a bottle with a python curled up in the bottom

... and a baby bee.

* Not an exhaustive list

I am not responsible for this. I merely found out about this from another developer, whom I'll call 'Alice', who told me about the task she was given.

Customer: we need you to write a script which synchronizes two directories.
Alice: why don't you just use rsync?
Customer: because the target box runs Windows and the admin says it doesn't work.

Alice wrote the script and it works just fine. All it does is call rsync.

About once a year, I have a really bad hay fever attack. I mean, really, really bad. Sniffling, sneezing, tears running down my face. In fact, I had one exactly three years and two days ago, my first day on my first job in the UK. It was pretty embarrassing.

Now, I'm having one today. I'm typing this at work, but I think I need to go home soon. This is awful.

Last night I went back to my old house in Ealing Broadway and picked a a few remaining things, got my deposit back from the landlord and hurt my back -- again -- by being stuck standing and stooped over on an overcrowded bus for half an hour. By the time Greg and I got home, I was in a poor mood, so I bought a bottle of Bruichladdich (whiskey) and Greg and I just sat, smoked, drank and chatted the remainder of the evening away. And that's when, without warning, I said:

I once knew a girl so stupid she had her eustachian tubes tied and now she can't hear her baby crying.

It was intended as a joke and I've no idea where it came from (I think I made it up on the spot and it's not particularly funny), but that's the strange way my mind has been working lately. In fact, plenty of strange things (words) are rummaging around in my brain. The other night, while washing the dishes and doing laundry, I walked over to my computer, opened it up, and wrote a seven page short story. It all just poured out of me. It's rather bizarre and I've no idea what's going on but I expect that stress from having so many things to juggle is part of it. I won't complain about it getting me writing again. I'll just go with the strange flow for now.

Tonight we will enjoy a Tube strike lasting 48 hours. This is annoying because bright and early tomorrow morning, I need to be at the US Embassy to renew my passport. Fortunately, because I'm a BBC employee, I can walk from the embassy to the Broadcasting House (BH) and catch a shuttle to the BBC Media Village (near the Television Centre, or TVC) in which I work.

Walking from the US embassy to the Broadcasting House is a 17 minute walk and having a back injury, I'm not keen on this. If I want to save a bit of time, I could instead walk to our Marylebone High Street (MHS) offices (good luck pronouncing that correctly if you don't live here) and catch the shuttle bus there. After reading the instructions we've been sent, I've opted not to. I reprint the relevant section here, verbatim.

Customers catching the MHS shuttle going from BH to TVC are recommended to catch the earlier shuttle going from TVC to BH and then waiting on the shuttle at BH to guarantee getting a seat.

Got that? Seems Auntie Beeb has Alzheimer's.

A couple of months ago, I was buying a new pair of blue jeans and the size I tried was a bit too large for me, but other than that, they fit just fine. Being in a hurry, I just grabbed the next size down off the rack and bought them without trying them on.

Later I found out they were mislabeled and I could squeeze into them, but I couldn't fasten them around my waist. Today, I'm thinking about just donating those jeans to a charity shop. I have to pull them up constantly because they're too big for me. I've lost over a stone and a half and am over halfway to my goal of losing three stone (42 pounds). I was at 15 stone (210 pounds) when I finally decided it was time to do something about it. And I'm not writing "stone" just to be an annoying twat. I genuinely think of my weight in stone, now. It's very, very strange.

The weight loss has all just been a matter of healthy eating. Breakfast is usually a bowl of Dorset Muesli with non-fat milk. Lunch is a salad or soup and dinner is usually a healthy meal of stir-fry, a chicken breast with veggies or something else suitably low-fat. Snacks are often just peaches or apricots. I frequently "splurge", as I did last night with a dinner of baguette and a variety of lovely cheeses (and I've not given up alcohol), but my diet is good enough that it's still working quite well. It's gotten to the point where I've had to ask my girlfriend to serve me smaller portions because my appetite is so much less than it was.

Now I just have to go out and buy new clothes.

In reading this news story on illegal behavior by members of the House of Lords, I reached the final paragraph and had to double-check that I wasn't reading The Onion:

'Two other Labour peers implicated in the affair, Lord Moonie and Lord Snape, were cleared of any wrongdoing but ordered to apologise to the Lords for "inappropriate" conduct.'

If you're not a Harry Potter fan, that won't make much sense. We, on the other hand, are amused.

Embarrassment: when a French person asks for your help with pronunciation, don't correct them by teaching them how things are said in Texas.

I haven't been back to Texas in almost two and a half decades, so the idea that I still pronounce some things that way is a bit of a shocker.

And if you must know, the word was "genuine". The "i" is pronounced with the "i" in "pig", not "swine". She was pronouncing it like the "ea" in "wean".

The good news is that I've torn my left erector spinae, also known as the left lower back muscle. This is good news because the other reasons for my back pain tend to involve surgery.

The bad news is that my brother and his best friend are nurses and they've enjoyed explaining the downsides of my pain medication, Dicoflex. Dicoflex is the brand name for Diclofenac sodium, which apparently is Latin for "say goodbye to your stomach lining". And I'm told that the increased risk of myocardial infarction and stroke is very small. My favorite warning about diclofenac is from the wikipedia entry: "studies in Pakistan showed that diclofenac caused acute kidney failure in vultures when they ate the carcasses of animals that had recently been treated with it". There goes my dinner plans. Still, I'm grateful because Dicoflex and heating pads have kept the pain down enough that I can actually walk.

My back has been sore for two and a half weeks now. However, last Saturday, after spending an afternoon walking along the south bank of the Thames and looking for places to live, I got home and the pain started getting intense. I had trouble walking. I couldn't even take a warm bath because I discovered that getting out of a bath tub when you can't sit up is a bit humiliating.

I've now missed two days of work, but fortunately they're letting me work from home. I'm probably going to be missing a few more days of work, but hopefully I'll be back in next week and, with luck, the BBC will have a staff physiotherapist available for me. As it turns out, waiting for an NHS physio will take a couple of weeks. So far, this has been my first disappointing experience with NHS, but the doctor was able to see me the same day as I called. That, at least, was a good thing.

For LJ readers:

Note that because the use.perl journal appears to have a bug in it where it does not allow me to post a journal entry where comments are disallowed, I'm posting this here and linking to it from there. Most of you can feel free to ignore this.

( The use.perl post )

This is day four of my back being out. It's slowly getting better, but it still hurts to stand up. This is ridiculous.

On an amusing note, have you seen Science Against Evolution? It's a hilarious Web site. It's not just the "my nephew made this" look and feel; it's how the people who created this have managed to put together a laughable set of "theses" to support their idiocy. Of the two officers of this non-profitr organization with a listed background, their science background consists of electrical and civil engineering. There's no anthropology, astronomy, genetics or anything else which might actually relate to the subject matter at hand (astronomy counts, but it would be a long digression).

Here are the "theses" numbered 15 through 17:

15. "Abiogenesis" is the belief that life can originate from non-living substances through purely natural processes.
16. The theory of evolution depends upon abiogenesis as the starting point.
17. If the theory of abiogenesis is false, then the theory of evolution is false.

Number 15 is almost correct. Strike the work "belief" and replace it with "hypothesis". When they have such a subtle twist on a straightforward definition, you know something's amiss. I wonder if this was deliberate? Their general lack of sophistication suggests to me that it's not.

Number 16 is also subtly twisted. The theory of evolution depends on life being created as a starting point. Many religious people believe a supernatural entity created life and let evolution take over (just as the Catholic church). Catholics don't require abiogenesis as a starting point for evolution. I wonder why these people aren't telling you this?

Of course, their subtle psychological attack in number 15, combined with their distortion of point 16 leads to the outright lie in point number 17. Are they cognizant of this lie? I doubt it, so maybe it's not a lie per se, but this inability to reason about something is the sad state our education system has left so many people in.

Of course, many who support the theory evolution are often no better.

I will, however, give the people behind the "Science Against Evolution" Web site credit for at least understanding that there's a difference between the origin of life and the evolution of life. Most creationists I've talked to don't even understand that.

A few weeks ago, a call for speakers at London.pm and I offered to do a short talk. I never heard back and I'm pretty sure that Yahoo's curious spam filters have something to do with this. Yesterday I found out that I'm speaking tonight. Oops.

I threw this together last night. If you don't understand OO programming, it will make no sense. Heck, it will still probably make no sense, but them's the breaks. This is not a tutorial. It's primarily an exploration of why inheritance is such an awful idea and how roles solve the problems found.



Roles are also known as "traits" in SmallTalk, but these are not the same thing as traits in C++. They are also not abstract classes, Java interfaces or Ruby mixins. I really wish people would stop saying they're the same. It's like saying a Lamborghini and a tricycle are both modes of transportation.

While I doubt this is a general sign that politicians are finally understanding the issues involved, French MPs have rejected a law which could easily penalize innocent people. Basically, the law would have allowed the recording industry to tell ISPs to disconnect people the recording industry thinks is illegally downloading content.

What I don't understand is that we've known for years that you can't identify users by their IP address. You can't do it. It's not possible. You can sort of guess who they are by IP address, but if you're doing something serious (like cutting off their internet connection for a year and forcing them to continue paying for it), then you're a fool to rely on IP addresses.

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was behind this bill and I'm quite happy to see him get smacked down on this idiocy.

Frankly, I'm quite horrified by the UK Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorism Campaign.



Click on the image to go to my original.

You know, I love cats, but I think they've lost sense of that whole "predator/prey" thing.

Either that, or they're one heck of a lot smarter than we've given them credit for. I don't think I can decided which.

We're in trouble. Serious trouble. The Bank of England is going to try to print money to ease the economic crisis. Anyone with even a marginal background in economics knows why this is a disaster. What astonishes me is that I don't see the press howling over this one.

The problem is simple. When the government starts printing money and injecting that into the economy, people have more money. Unfortunately, that means they spend more money. Suppliers raise their prices. Why? They have higher demand and can do that. Even if you think they're being greedy, their suppliers will raise their prices. Lots of people are going to raise their prices and inflation sets in. The more money the UK government prints, the worse the inflation will be.

• So can't the government freeze prices?
  
  So what happens when the price of your goods is frozen and the supplies for those goods cost more? You go out of business.
• So can't the government turn around and freeze those prices?
  
  Not if you have an international economy where many goods and services are supplied outside of your country.
• Ah, but the price of those goods and services aren't affected by our printing money, so they'll stay cheap.
  
  No, you've just trashed your currency and undercut its value internationally. You can't afford those goods and services at the exchange rate for your money. (See Zimbabwe for a delightful example)
• But the Euro means no exchange rate with other EEA nations who've adopted the Euro!
  
  Ah, but we haven't adopted the Euro, have we? And if we did, we'd be taking other EEA countries down with us. This national disaster would turn into an international crisis.

What's worse is that I suspect the Brown government won't stop this ludicrous idea.

The UK has officially gone nuts. No economist would seriously suggest this. As an act of desperation, it ranks up their with going to a loan shark to help paying off your bills. Everyone's going to be screwed. Prices are going to go up much faster than wages and people will struggle even harder to make ends meet.

I am trying to hang on here. I have almost two and a half years before I can apply for citizenship but I'm scared that this government is going to make the intervening time a living hell for me. I just can't believe this idiocy.

You know how to deal with this economic crisis? I'll give you a hint. Somewhere there's a farmer in Tibet saying "there's a global economic crisis"? He raises his own food and keeps to himself. I am not arguing that countries should be isolationist, but they should be more self-sufficient (there's a big difference, but I'll be Rush Limbaugh types won't be able to figure it out). By focusing more on local economies, we can have some level of protection when another economy collapses.

But why won't this happen? Because there's no incentive to. Global financial systems ofter huge rewards and the people who play them have little risk. If they lose a few billion dollars, it's not their money they're losing. And why do politicians allow this? Because there's no downside for them, either. If they play along and let these institutions assume too much risk with other people's money, they leave office for a nice, fat, private sector jobs. And if the economy gets hurt by this? They leave office for nice, fat, private sector jobs. The revolving door of government ensures that they'll do what the business tell them to do.

So the UK government needs to focus on local, sustainable economies and let the economic crisis run its course. There's no way that the UK government is going to come out of this as a island of wealth and stability in a search of financial turbulence. The best we can do is mitigate the damage, work with other countries to repair the damage and admit that they can't print money to get out of this mess.

Is the UK economy going to collapse completely before I can get citizenship? If the BBC were to lay me off (not likely, but you never know), it's not going to be easy to get another job right now. I'm really, really worried about this. On the bright side, I can apply for permanent residency in June 2010, so if things hold together that long, I should be OK.

Hmm ... time to look for a wife (with EEA citizenship, of course :)

So far I am very, very impressed with Livemocha. People are really taking this seriously and I'm getting email and chat requests from complete strangers wanting to practice their language skills and mine. One lady from Cameroon just emailed me and told me, in English, about her day today and asked me to tell her, in French, about mine. I replied, in part:

Aujourd'hui, j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux. C'est très difficile pour moi, mais, j'adore la langue et je voudrais parler couramment. Je suis allé au magasin pour acheter des livres et maintenant je veux lire un peux plus français.

I struggled with some of the words and I know it's ridiculously simple, but it's lots of fun connecting with people all over the world and practicing. Because you can record some lessons with your computer's microphone, people can hear you speak. One native French speaker even said that I sounded Parisian (my last girlfriend -- she is French -- would have laughed at that thought and she would be right -- my accent isn't that good). I'm now pretty handy at typing all of those funny characters on my Mac. As an added bonus, because I got tired of Firefox telling me I was misspelling all of those French words, I've installed a French language pack and switched to French. Now Firefox is telling me I'm misspelling all of my English words.

LiveMocha is really making language fun for me. The only annoying bit is how lazy people seem to be in their writing. Often when I'm trying to give feedback on people's English, I see stuff like this:

the man is at the store he is not at home he is going to school she does not want the cabbage

So, that's probably four grammatically correct sentences, but it's very hard to read. I usually mark stuff like that as high on spelling and grammar, but low on quality and I add a note about spelling and punctuation. I suspect that our Internet culture is harming people's communication skills.

Update: the lady from Cameroon has gotten back to me. Apparently it's not "j'ai essayé d'apprendre le français mieux", but "j'ai essayé de mieux apprendre le français." I've been corrected on this before. I should remember it.

My brother Greg (yossarian69) moved in Yesterday. We'll probably stay here for a couple of months prior to moving closer to central London. Meanwhile, my temporary housemate, Armgard, who speaks English, German and Afrikaans (she's Nigerian, if you're curious), is studying Spanish. She told Greg and myself about a wonderful Web site named LiveMocha, another social networking site. Why would I join yet another site like this? Because they are centered around offering free language lessons. So far, they seem to be pretty good. Greg and I have signed up to learn French. I thought about jumping ahead to French 102, but decided to play it safe and stick with 101. Good thing I did. The lessons are much more comprehensive than I thought.

The site requires Javascript and Flash, but that's OK because the quality of the courses is fairly rich. You'll need speakers to listen to people, but you'll also need a microphone to record your voice and let other people listen to what you say and give feedback on how well you say it. The "social networking" aspect is that you can add friends and you can ask complete strangers to review your work. This is pretty common and I've reviewed the English of people from Japan, the Russian Federation, Brazil, and quite a few other places. Enjoy!

Update: even though livemocha is a social networking site, I do find it a bit odd that you can set your "Relationship Status". If I'm looking for a relationship, I certainly wouldn't be doing that on a language learning site.

Please boycott Ryanair and tell them why you're not flying them. It's great if you could send them a receipt showing the tickets you've purchased from someone else.

A guy named "Jason Roe" blogged about a minor technical issue with Ryanair's Web site. An anonymous respondent, claiming to be a Ryanair employee, responded by calling the blogger and idiot, a liar, and pathetic (amongst many other things). Tracking down the IP address revealed that this probably was a Ryanair employee.

According to this Telegraph article, Ryanair took swift, decisive action and released a statement (or at least made this comment to the Times):

Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won't be happening again.

Ryanair further went on to say "Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel".

Needless to say, if you're thinking about flying Ryanair, please don't. And let them know why you won't. Oh, can't figure out how to contact them? Ryanair is well-known for its apparent lack of concern for the public and goes to great lengths to hide contact information, but fortunately www.ryanaircampaign.org collects the email addresses they can find and publishes them. Here's the email I sent:

---

Date: Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:02:52 -0800 (PST)
From: publiustemp-ryanair@yahoo.com
Subject: telegraph.co.uk Article
To: penstonm@ryanair.com, walshg@ryanair.com, greenc@ryanair.com, 
    oneills@ryanair.com, WiniarkskaA@ryanair.com, KellyG@ryanair.com

I apologize for sending this email to so many of you at once, but since Ryanair apparently makes it a policy to not let customers contact it, I felt this was the best way of possibly making contact.

In a recent article in the Telegraph, there was discussion about a blog entry about a minor technical issue with your Web site. One of your staffers was extremely unprofessional in responding. Horrifyingly, after Ryanair was alerted to this fact, rather than apologize for your employee's behaviour, Ryanair apparently released a statement referring to the "idiot blogger":

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/4801505/Ryanair-calls-blogger-lunatic.html

I routinely fly all over Europe and like to save money, but I won't be using Ryanair. I'll also be urging my family, friends and blog (yes, "blog") readers to also not fly Ryanair. Not only is this behavior unprofessional, it's immature and the individual responsible for that "idiot blogger" statement should be ashamed of themselves for acting in such a juvenile manner.

Sincerely,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe
--
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