Accio

One thing that surprised me in the HP7 film was that they pronounced “Accio” as “Ackio”; I had expected “Axio”.

That is, I had expected acc- to have the pronunciation as in “accelerate”, since it’s followed by a high vowel; the pronunciation as in “accordion” would have made sense to me if acc- had been followed by a low vowel.

“Winning on penalties”

I found it interesting that the Wikipedia article “Penalty shoot-out (association football)” includes a section “Criticisms” which states that opinions on the results of a penalty shoot-out are divided:

As a way to decide a football match, shoot-outs have been seen variously as a thrilling climax or as an unsatisfactory cop-out.

It includes quotes for both sides.

As for me, I’m on the “unsatisfactory cop-out” side. I can see that games that go on for (essentially) forever, with extra time after extra time until one team is ahead, are not particularly satisfactory, but being declared winner after a shoot-out seems to me as if the game they won is not the team game “football” but rather a much more restricted, rather different game.

Eh. It’s in the rules and it’s official, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. (On the other hand, don’t I often claim I’m not interested in football in the first place? Perhaps I shouldn’t have such strong feelings on this point, then.)

Martin as my brand

I wonder whether it’s possible to find out since when I’ve been using Martin as my default userpic on LiveJournal.

I think it’s the first userpic I uploaded, so it became my default then (and has stayed my default most of the time since then, with some interruptions). I’m less certain when this was, though; I know that at the beginning, I had no userpic at all. (And that I used to think 6 userpic slots would be more than enough for me; I now have around 100 or so, though I only regularly use a handful of them.) So I wonder when, exactly, it was that I uploaded him.

Because since then, I think he’s become a bit of my “Internet brand”: he’s my default LiveJournal userpic, my default Dreamwidth userpic, my Yahoo! login security seal picture, and my Gravatar. That’s also pretty much the reason I use him as my Google+ profile picture: because I think that people who know my through the Internet are very likely to recognise that profile as “the Philip Newton I know” (or possibly “the pne I know”) if they see that picture.

So if someone complained, I wonder whether saying that this picture is related to me (and only to me!) about as strongly as a photograph of my face, whether that would be true—I think so. (And I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone else use a picture of a green-yellow duck/platypus stuffed animal.)

Speed matters: how Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps... and beyond

Speed matters: how Ethernet went from 3Mbps to 100Gbps... and beyond

An interesting article about the evolution of Ethernet technology, and how 30-year-old tech managed to survive even if nearly everything about it except for the packet format has changed.

This painting is not available in your country

I’m not sure whether to be amused or depressed.