“When you attack someone’s character for liking Harry Potter too much that’s called Ad Hermione.”
— David W. Peters"The next few updates may be a bit irregular"
Outsider resumes with a bit of understatement. :-)
Fun with machine translation
Dear Google Translate, the adjective いけ好かない can be translated as disagreeable, disgusting, nasty, or creepy. I think you’ll find that there are very few contexts where it would be correct to translate it as “dicksplash”.
Books that need reprinting
Space Cat and its sequels.
Also, all six Mushroom Planet books. The first one is available, and I still have an old Scholastic copy of the second, but I don’t think I ever saw the last few.
It will be a few years before my niece and nephew need them, so the universe still has time to make things right.
Odd layout limitation in Word: columns
Microsoft Word has very good standards-based HTML import. It’s much more capable than OpenOffice, and advanced layout can be set with custom CSS. It’s robust enough that the majority of Word features will survive a round-trip through the HTML exporter. Your brain may explode if you try to edit the exported HTML, which IMHO is only useful for figuring out how to use their custom CSS; for sanity and source-control, write in HTML, layout with Word, print to PDF.
[and only use LaTeX if you need to do tricky things like post-process DVI and AUX files to generate cross-referenced vocabulary lists and delete content without repaginating…]
[Update: an odd limit to the importer is handling indentation of nested lists. At a certain point, it reverts to left-indented]
I'd almost forgotten about this one...
Gaining new relevance due to his death.
(replaced with youtube embed to get rid of the long ads)
Reasons to envy Japan, #71b
They had a DVD release of Megaforce.
A perfect pinup
The photographer and stylists responsible for this picture of Shizuka Nakamura (中村静香) deserve as much recognition as the model, but unfortunately, I don’t know which shoot it comes from. The artistic and technical quality remind me of Playboy at its (long-vanished) best.
Not nude, but still under the fold, just in case there are workplaces where pretty girls in bikinis are a bad thing.
"Linguistic faux pas"?
Nice cover work there:
Obama on Tuesday labeled the Nazi facility used to process Jews for extermination as a "Polish death camp." The White House later said the president "misspoke" and expressed "regret".
The linguistic faux pas overshadowed Obama's posthumous award of the highest US civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, to Jan Karski, a former Polish underground officer who provided early eyewitness accounts of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews.
Seriously, when can we just admit that his speechwriters are a pack of ignorant fools and Obama just reads whatever the teleprompter says, regardless of its content? He’s capable of delivering a well-rehearsed speech, but since the election he doesn’t take the time to rehearse, even for significant events.
