PSA: useful site feature

Stealing text shamelessly from livredor, in whose journal I found this PSA:

This comment aggregator looks like it's going to be nearly as useful as a friends page. I'm not quite sure what the status of it is, if it's an official feature or if it's still under development or what; it's not documented at all. Anyway, very useful tool assuming it stays around.

Particularly since right now comment emails are not being sent consistently. The unofficial word is that this problem may be fundamentally unfixable, though people are trying.

Things to note:

• It's kind of limited for free users (only ten most recent comments).
• It lists only comments you've made and comments in your own journal. There's a view held among the senior geeks that being able to get a list of anyone else's comments is a privacy violation, even if the individual comments are public anyway. So it's almost certainly not going to be extended into a really useful feature of aggregating comments from any user you're interested in.
• There may one day be a feature that would allow you to get a notification whenever anything updates that you're interested in, but that's very much in the pipeline and at a 'don't hold your breath' level of development.

I think this could possibly be the first step to making LJ more like the good aspects of Usenet.

Looks like a spiffy thing. And I, too, have wished more than once that I had an NNTP interface to LiveJournal, with journals I could subscribe to, read/unread flags, thread and subthread watching/killing, etc. etc. A bidirectional interface—whereby I could post through my Usenet client and have a comment appear on a journal—would be even more spiffy.

Random entry

Random memory: receiving my first letter from a French boy who would become my pen-friend. Part of his letter (in German) was "Meine Geschicklichkeit ist: [street + number, postal code, town]"; that is, in English, "My dexterity is: [street + number, postal code, town]".

While I knew what he meant, I wondered how he had come up with that word, but I had a suspicion. I looked up "Geschicklichkeit" in my German–French dictionary, and sure enough, it had "adresse" as one of the translations. I suppose he looked up the word in a F–G dictionary but didn't want to pick the cognate, so he went for the Germanic word—which, unfortunately, doesn't mean what he wanted :) "Adresse" is the only word I can think of in German that's used for "address" (place where something is).

Later on, I would write him letters in French and he would reply in German; we would then correct each other's letters and send them back with our next letter, as a way to practise.

Random fact: "Creo" in Spanish means both "I believe" and "I create". Fun when two verbs "interfere" in some of their forms. (It occasionally leads to confusion, as when many people use "lay" for "lie", or "laid" for "lay", in English, which still bugs me a little, and has made me unsure after hearing the form I consider wrong for so many years; "I lay on the bed all day yesterday" now seems strange to me, for example.)

PHP

One of these days, it might be fun to learn some PHP, to see what it's like.

Gmail poll

[Poll #321938] [Poll #321939]

Ticketses

The tickets have arrived. I have real paper in my hands now that say I'm going to Saarbrücken in November.

Excuse me while I panically check that I didn't accidentally book the wrong weekend…

…nope, the date's right. And my bank says they've charged my credit card, so I didn't enter the wrong number for that by mistake, either.