MindlessCode.net

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is: High-Level Nerd. You are definitely MIT material, apply now!!!.

*Sigh*, I must be bored.
In case you want to see how nerdy you are.

I don’t usually post stuff like this, but I thought it was too good to not post.

We’ll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes,
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.

If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn’t the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn’t the plural of booth be called beeth?

Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.

Let’s face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren’t invented in England.
We take English for granted.
But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that
quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don’t fing,
grocers don’t groce and hammers don’t ham?
Doesn’t it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and
get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn’t preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.

In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
while a wiseman and a wise guy are opposites?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
in which your house can burn up as it burns down,
in which you fill in a form by filling it out,
and in which an alarm goes off by going on.

So if Dad is Pop, how come Mom isn’t Mop?
Author Unknown

Thanks Kara.

From geek-foo:

Oh dear…not exactly what I planned.

My, I must be bored…

Ugg, I fell all sick and terrible, I probably shouldn’t be up right now writing this :(–whatever.

I donno what my problem is, I just haven’t been feeling that great over the past few days; maybe it’s this report I have to write about Theories of the Evolution of the Eukaryotic Cell…I should have stuck with Binary Compatibility on Linux Systems and explaining what executables, shared libraries, and gcc are.

Or maybe it’s that I live out in the middle of nowhere, 30 minutes outside of Corvallis (or, civilization) and we’re driving in something like 5 days a week for various random things.

Or maybe it’s that I’m missing what’s going to be an awesome theatre production of Jane Eyre tonight.

Or maybe it’s that I haven’t been able to hang out with my friends for a long time (friends I’ve met in real life, you know, the kind I could mark with “met” in XFN–yes I have some of those).

Or maybe I should shut up and go to bed.

James, Annie, Kara, Christy: I emailed you, write my back, dammit–I mean, please! (I feel safe saying this because none of you read this. If you do actually read this (gasp), please write me back, I’ve had nothing but mailing list emails for a long time–it’s quite depressing that no one ever emails me ;))

I am listening to an awsome song though, Crooked Still rocks!

Now, pardon me, I need to get back to a sucky math problem…

Random Item #1:

Are you going to have a wood stove when you go to college?

– Mary, responding to my comment about how slow it is to cook on a gas or electric stove.

Random Item #2: OpenOffice.org doesn’t rock! “What!?!” I hear you cry, “How can you say that?”
Yes, it’s true–I’ve been teaching my dad to use Impress to create a presentation, and I can say that OpenOffice.org is not that great (heh, to say the least). For example, the UI layout really doesn’t make too much sense:

That is, the “Add Slide” button (which looks like a green plus sign plus the words “Slide”), the “Slide Design” button, and the “Slide Show” button. What do these 3 buttons have to do with each other? Nothing, as far as I can tell–except that they all have to do with slides–like the whole program does :S… There are a bunch of other examples, but I’ll spare you more UI ranting from someone who knows nothing about UI (that is a screenshot of QuickI, the invoicing program I wrote for Wild Garden Seed–it completely sucks, but if anyone who wants a POS system that sells products by weight and supports price breaks, let me know and I’ll send you the code).

Random Item #3: We’re about to roll beta3 of Autopackage 1.2. Please, please, please, we need testers! Get ahold of us however you want to, #autopackage (on freenode), the autopackage-dev mailing list, or the forums, and we’ll get you setup. Thanks!

Random Item #4: Lost in the great bit-bucket (/dev/null) because Firefox crashed again! (For the third time while writing this post.) It had to do with the instability of Firefox–no suprise there. It seems like it has something to do with uploading a file and using the new GTK File Choosers… /sigh

Random Item #5: Does anyone have a Linux box with g++-3.2 and g++-3.4 installed on the same box? If so, would it be possible to let me have SSH into there? I need to find a system with those two versions of g++ (3.3 doesn’t work) so I can double-compile the Scribus autopackage for testing. Contact me, or leave a comment (with your email address–it won’t be displayed), and we’ll try to arrange something. Thanks!

As I promised a long time ago, I’ve finally got around to added my blog posts from the beginning to August 2004. They aren’t in categories because it appears that my DB dump from then didn’t have category_ids (!). Also, links to other blog posts in the old posts are probably broken, because of URL changes (to pretty mod_rewrite URLs). Comments, however, should be intact and attached to the correct posts.

Oh, and to access the stuff, use the links on the right under “Archives.” Enjoy my old posts from a long time ago (heh–if you could enjoy them).

This is what we’re living with now:

This seed is drying by the stove–and makes a great obstacle to trip over.

More seed drying up above.

It must be November, the seed drying time of year.

Also, I got SupremeServer to increase my quota without having to screw around. They’re a great company if you keep on trying. At first, they wern’t going to increase my quota saying I need to screw around with pulling my data off the server, canceling my account, then recreating my account and putting the data back on–I would be on the same server. Then, this morning they contacted me saying “Oops…you’re on the right server, we’ve updated your account.”

Nice!

…and other marketing photos:

UPS Tracking Page. Portland is 2 hours north of Albany, *not* 1 minute.

And Amazon being smart, as usual.

Fall has finally come here. The trees are bare, it’s COLD, it’s raining all the time, and it’s freezing every night! Ahh…fall–that means that winter comes next!

http://ned.ucam.org/~sdh31/maths/pointnine.html: Proof that 1.0 = 0.999…

How to Collect LED Pocket Calculators. It sounds kind of strange, but it’s a pretty neat page. Check out the pictures, it’s pretty cool to see how the calculator has changed into what it is now (see The Bowmar).