Philip Newton's journal

Now that I’ve had my computer for a week, I’ve noticed that the fans are not as silent as I had thought. But they’re still fairly quiet, and I only hear them rarely (and most commonly in the evenings when it’s quiet)—mostly, I tune out their sound. So that’s all right.

And 4 GB really seems to be enough; I’ve noticed after playing The Sims 3 that the memory curve never even gets close to 100%, so I’ve taken to no longer closing down other programs (even Firefox, which can turn into a bit of a memory hog if it’s been running for a while).

And a lot of things seem quite a bit faster—including, oddly enough, Internet file transfers, though the DSL connection hasn’t changed.

And the fact that it has four real cores means that Mozy configuration, even if it chews CPU on startup sometimes, can’t hang my computer the way it used to, but at most one of the cores, while the others remain responsive.

I heart my PC.

Woke up this morning, switched on the computer - no network connection. (Well, only my VirtualBox Host-Only Network, but that doesn't get me onto the Internet.) As in, it didn't even recognise that there was a network hanging off my network adapter, not even a LAN.

Took the network cable out (not easy in the confined space in that part of the case!) and put it back in - no dice. Looked up Driver Manager - no yellow exclamation mark. Disabled the network chip and re-enabled it - and things worked again.

Still, I hope it's not going to make a habit of that.

Language Hat has an entry on the origin of the word “commute” (as in “travel back and forth regularly between two places, especially home and work”):

Do you know why someone who regularly spends a certain amount of time traveling back and forth between home and work is called a "commuter"? It's because the first people so called were using commutation tickets, what we now call season tickets, that commuted ('changed,' from Latin commutare) a bunch of daily fares into a single payment. (If you check the foreign equivalents linked at the left of the Wikipedia article, you find that a number of languages use a word or phrase meaning 'pendulum migration.')

Never thought about that, but that makes sense.

Language is fun!

Starting to get a bit worried about my computer. It went into production on Monday, so I would have expected it to ship by Tuesday at the latest.

Today’s Wednesday, and there’s still no sign of it. I called them up at about half-past five (shortly before they closed for the day at six) to inquire, and the chap on the phone said he’d need to look up something, could he call me back? I left my mobile phone number with him and he said he’d get back to me soon.

Well, close of business has come and gone, and I still have no news.

Stella says she’s starting to worry they’re in the nocturnal aviation business and will simply take our money and not deliver the goods (and I wondered, briefly, whether I should have sent the money via my VISA card so that I could have, perhaps, disputed the charge with them). But that’s not the impression I got from reading their forum and a couple of other places on the Internet (let alone the test in c’t magazine); there were some disgruntled customers who had to wait too long for a machine because parts (especially higher-end graphics cards) were not available in a timely manner, or who had an encounter with an unfriendly employee on the phone, or whose computer needed to be repaired several times—but nobody who even intimated that they never got what they paid for.

I was reading through a grammar of Romansh when I came across this delightful example sentence (exemplifying gruppas conjuncziunalas):

Sco mintga di è il tren era oz puspè stà punctual.

Or roughly,

Wie jeden Tag ist der Zug auch heute wieder pünktlich gewesen.
Like every day, the train was on time again today.

Only in Switzerland would they use something like that casually as an example sentence! :D

So, I got an email today at 12:15 telling me that my computer had gone into production. Whee!

Looking into my account, it appears that the status change was already at 10:30.

It’s evening, now, and I still haven’t got a message telling me it’s been dispatched, though. Meh :( On the other hand, when I had phoned to inquire how long it would typically take to get here, the chap on the phone said that if work started on it today, it could be finished “today or tomorrow”, so things are still on track, I suppose. (Shipping usually took “one to two days”, he said.) So we shall see when it arrives.

I had an idea today to call the computer “Alma”. Everyone gets to pick whether they want the Nephite meaning, the German/Latin one, the Spanish one, the Crimean Tatar one, or the Hebrew one.

From this Language Hat post:

Colon "part of the large intestine" and colon "punctuation mark" are both from Greek, but from different original words. Similarly, coma "cloud of gas and dust around a comet" and coma "state of unconsciousness" are also both from Greek, again from different original words. (Read the post for details.)

Fun stuff, that.

(False friends are also fun, such as the "much (en), mucho (es)" pair mentioned in the comments to that post, or "haben (de), habere (la)".)

I really need to update my “barcode” icon for Dreamwidth at some point… it includes my LiveJournal numeric userid and the ascii codes for “LJ” in it; those should get changes to my Dreamwidth userid and the code for “DW”.

Or is there someone with too much time on their hands who'd make the change for me? :D The full number is “767407257160", which would have to become “688700207914” (68 = ‘D’, 87 = ‘W’, 20791 = my DW userid, 4 = check digit). I'm afraid I don't know for sure which barcode encoding/symbology was used, though it looks very likely to me that it's UPC(-A). (Could also be the EAN representation of “0767407257160”, in which case the DW version would be “0688700207914”.)

Also, the original barcode I got years ago from whichever creator it was (maybe from mart?) placed the first plaintext digit to the left of the start bars and the last (check) digit to the right of the start bars; I had to lop both of them off when converting to an icon since they were outside the 100 pixel width. But they could be written underneath the first and last barcode digits, respectively, I suppose.

Edit: Done! I used Unifont for the characters, which is perhaps not quite as pretty as the original, but it's what I had easily.

For comparison, here are the old and new icons:

Now I just need to add a Semacode/Datamatrix icon for http://pne.dreamwidth.org/ to replace (or complement) the one I have to http://pne.livejournal.com/.

Done!

German “heißen” is translated in Romansh as “avair num”, literally, “to have name”.

The basic meaning of “heißen” is “to be called”, so the Romansh equivalent makes sense: “Co avais Vus num? Jau hai num Chatrina.” (How have You name? I have name Chatrina = What are you called? I’m called Catherine.)

However, I’ve also seen “avair num” used in at least two ways corresponding to figurative senses of “heißen”:

First, in situations such as “ussa hai num lavurar”, literally “now has-it name work”, which seems to mean “now it’s time to work; now is the time to work; what needs to be done now is work”, parallel to German “jetzt heißt es arbeiten”.

And second, in situations such as “en ses cudesh hai num che…”, literally “in his book has-it name that…”, for “in his book it says that…”, parallel to German “in seinem Buch heißt es, dass”.

When I first saw such constructions, I thought they were maybe something an L2 learner had produced under the influence of their L1, but having seen that a few times, I wonder whether L1 speakers actually say that these days. Interesting, if so, where the meaning is broadened under the influence of the range of meaning of the translation in another language.

(Another, vaguely similar thing I saw today: “‘Bla bla bla,’ uschia X Y” for “‘Bla bla bla,’ according to X Y/said X Y”, parallel to the German construction “‘Bla bla bla,’ so X Y”. Which seems perfectly normal to me in German, but the Romansh construction looked odd at first glance. Funny how I kind of expect different languages to “feel” different.)