On Charsets

Found an interesting quote on the subject of charsets and how modern software handles them transparentlystill makes things difficult even though it's supposedly the 21st century now:

When it comes to charsets, software is still following the "ascii a stupid question, get a stupid ansi" rule...

Bonus points if you find that quote funny, too.

Random memory

I remember when I was in Greece as a missionary and a French or Italian missionary would ask me what a certain English word meant and I'd reply with a synonym—for example, I remember explaining "cliff" with "precipice".

The Americans wondered why I was explaning a simple word with a complicated one, and I was amused at that :).

The reason is, of course, simple: the "complicated" words have a Romance origin, so they're likely to have a cognate in French or Italian.

(For a similar reason, one of them told me that he had a much easier time remembering "injection" than "shot"; he also liked to use words such as "facilitate" which aren't that common in spoken English IMO.)

This would probably be the case even more for German, which has fewer Romance-derived words than English; Romance loans, therefore, tend to be even more "educated" than in English, where a Romance word is often the common expression. For example, someone talking in German about a "Possibilität" would sound high-brow or pretentious, whereas "possibility" is a "normal" word in English. (The usual German equivalent is "Möglichkeit", which might be translated into English as comething like "canliness".)

On the other hand, compounds from Germanic morphemes sometimes sound funny to me as well—for example, the Dutch "hoeveelheid" for "quantity" amuses me, since I'd understand it as "wieviel-heit", which makes sense but just sounds… quaint somehow because of its simplicity and transparent derivation. Perhaps like a word a child would create. (German wouldn't usually use "Quantität", though, but has a separate word: "Menge".)

Which counties have I visited?

NB Some of the counties I've been to only as a little child (for example, I vaguely recall having been to Bournemouth, for example, or to Stonehenge, but that was ages ago). A couple of others I'm not sure: possibly Surrey and Sussex.

But as you can see, my trips to England have taken more mostly to the south.

( Map! )

Prams on eBay

I just bid €55 on a pram and am having second thoughts whether this was a good idea.

The auction is going to expire in a quarter of an hour and bids are only €15 on it… I would have expected to be outbid immediately.

Now I'm unsure whether to wait up and see what happens. I'm also not sure whether the seller ships; he makes contradictory statements of "Pick up in person since shipping is expensive and inconvenient for me" and "Shipping can be arranged; contact me for pricing afterwards".

Part of me is hoping that I'll be outbid in the next fifteen minutes and that we'll maybe get this other pram which only offers "Buy it now" for €298… but which is a bit better and where the seller explicitly offers shipping (worldwide, even).

On the other hand, €298 is a lot of money.

On the third hand, there's no telling whether we'd get a decent pram cheaply off eBay if we didn't buy this one which obviously looks good—but then again, perhaps it just looks good?

Meh. Impulse purchases. Gah.

Edit 22:17: €40.50 now.

Edit, one minute to go: We've been outbid.

Edit 22:42: The second pram auction finished as well. Stella decided not to bid on it.

Will have to think about things more when we're more awake—tomorrow or later.