Until seven times seventy

The Church recently announced the formation of a Seventh and Eighth Quorum of the Seventy, due to the large number of brethren in the Fourth Quorum and the large geographical area served by the Third Quorum.

This initially puzzled me since I thought I had remembered a scripture which provided for only seven quorums… after reading through D&C 107:93–96 again, I suppose that the until seven times seventy may apply to the other seventy besides the first seventy to whom [the seven presidents of the Seventy] belong, thus providing for a total of eight quorums. That is, the "seven times seventy" applies to the additional quorums chosen by the presidents, rather than to the number of quorums after the additional ones have been added to the first. Still, I found the news a little disconcerting.

Firefox hates SourceForge?

For some reasons, Firefox has started hanging today when looking at SourceForge's site documentation.

At first, it would only load the title and show a white page; after getting there through clicking on links rather than pasting in a URL, I saw the first screenful and the scrollbar looked appropriate, but the browser still wouldn't respond after that.

I wonder whether this is connected to my updating Java from 1.5 RC to 1.5_03 yesterday. Still, rather annoying.

Maybe I should upgrade Firefox and see whether that helps; I saw that it's still stuck at 0.8.

Chinese names for chemical elements

I found the Wikipedia article "Periodic table (Chinese)" interesting, since it collects all the Chinese names for chemical elements (in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, where names occasionally differ, especially in man-made elements after uranium).

I find it interesting that Chinese has coined single-morpheme, single-character names for each new element.

It makes me wonder, though, whether this causes even more problematic homophony and/or how people learn the pronunciation of such extra characters—are they pronounced exactly the same as the phonetic component, for example?

PSA: Deleted usernames being purged

As mentioned in the FAQ on deletion, you have at least 30 days to undelete your journal—after that time, the account can be purged from LiveJournal's servers.

Historically, purges have been relatively infrequent, so some people may have started to rely on being able to keep an account deleted (perhaps to hide it) for longer than 30 days. However, bradfitz announced recently that there'll be a purging run tomorrow.

LJHook

I had read that a Firefox extension called "LJHook" was implicated in weird behaviour (random userpics when the user wasn't expecting that, for example).

A quick Google didn't turn up anything likely-looking on the first page, but what I found amusing was the message, "Did you mean: ljhooker?"

The travails of a new mouse

I was fed up of my previous mouse, which would occasionally behave erratically (for example, the cursor would start wandering off to one side of the screen, or it wouldn't move when you moved the mouse).

Inserting new batteries typically fixed that, but only for a while. So I decided to go out and buy a good old wireful mouse. A Microsoft one, since I had heard good things about their hardware.

I finally found one—not the IntelliMouse Explorer I had been looking for (which they only had in Wireless and, I believe, Bluetooth versions, and I didn't want to trust their promises of a six-month battery life) but an IntelliMouse Optical. I kind of wanted to have an optical mouse for a time now anyway :)

I installed the software and shut down the computer. Stella plugged the mouse in; she asked whether there's only one way that the USB plug will fit into the socket and I said yes.

I restarted the computer and—no mouse. (I had taken the batteries out of the other one so that the computer wouldn't be picking up signals from it.)

I navigated to the Mouse control panel using the keyboard and tried a few troubleshooting steps, to no avail.

Next, I crawled behind the computer and saw that Stella had put the USB plug into the Ethernet socket! No wonder the mouse couldn't work. Unfortunately, there aren't any free USB sockets at the back: the four that there are are taken up by the keyboard/mouse wireless receiver, my PocketPC cradle, the scanner, and the printer.

So I plug in the mouse at the front, where there are two more USB sockets behind a cover, just to see whether it works in principle. Hm, still no mouse after rebooting. However, after logging in, Windows recognises the mouse and installs it; a bit later, I can move the cursor by moving the mouse. After a reboot, I can also use the mouse in the login screen.

I deactivated the other mouse in the Mouse control panel. However, I still can't see how to set up the various buttons of the mouse; perhaps that only works if only Microsoft mouses are connected to the computer? But I don't particularly fancy getting a new keyboard.

I think I will be getting a USB hub, though, so that I can plug my mouse in at the back.