Philip Newton's journal

In Klingon, there’s an animal toqvIr lung translated as “Tokvirian skink”.

I thought that was a made-up word, but apparently, there really are animals called “skinks”. Huh!

(And they’re lizards, which makes sense, given that lung “loong” is described as a lizard-like animal. I presume the name was influenced by the Chinese word 龍 lóng for a dragon.)

Turns out that Edmonton and Hamburg are at nearly exactly the same latitude (around 53° 32' N), as I found out just now when I received a Postcrossing postcard from there. (Postcrossing plots the start and end on a map and draws a line between them, and I wanted to see whether the line just looked horizontal or whether it was actually completely horizontal.)

So the postcard travelled effectively due east all the way! (Well, if it had followed a rhumb line, at least….)

Always fun to see such coincidences.

From spam today: Upscale dating is what you deserve, and its free!.

I don’t know about others, but for me, “upscale” includes “educated” which, in turn, includes a reasonable command of standard English spelling and punctuation. Especially in advertisement copy where you’re trying to show your best side.

The other day, while practising my Esperanto flashcards on Anki, I got a new word: bankalsono.

I didn’t recognise it, so I tried to parse it: bank'al'sono? Something about making a call to a bank? bankal'sono? A “Bankal sound”, whatever that might be?

Then I asked it to show me the answer: “Badehose” (swimming trunks).

Oh! It’s ban'kalsono!

Perhaps one should start using the apostrophes more often to separate the morphemes :)

Famous mis-segregations in German include Wach'stube vs. Wachs'tube; Blumento'pferde vs. Blumen'topf'erde; and be'in'halt'en vs. bein'halt'en. (Though in most cases, the alternate parse is merely humorous, or the entire pair might be a bit constructed.)

Amy made me two Easter cards (link goes to the Flickr photo set)… and signed her name in Gregg shorthand! (See the two “back” images.)

I told her a while ago how to write it (since I’m trying to teach myself Gregg shorthand, so it’s been on my mind quite a bit recently), but I’m still a bit surprised she remembered.

The proportions are rather off (it looks more like “Anner” than “Amy”), but still! She even remembered the “capital” dashes on one of the two cards.

To see what it should have looked like “by the book”, see this image (it’s also linked to from the set, but you can’t see anything in the thumbnail; it’s the white space just after the last image).

In Gregg shorthand (simplified), “thorough” is written th-e-r-o.

I would have used different vowels there, so I tried to see where those came from.

The first was easiest; I was expecting a STRUT vowel there, since I have STRUT in case such as “hurry”, but I have heard NURSE in such words from Americans. Essentially, I have “hu-ry” while they have “hur-y”. (I do have NURSE in words where I segment things with the r in the same syllable as the u; for example, in “furry”.)

OK, so this presumably represents a pronunciation with NURSE; that sound is regularly spelled e-r, so that made sense.

But I have commA at the end of the word; the vowel in both syllables is nearly the same for me. So seeing an o there seemed odd. (So I would have spelled the word th-oo-r-a, since oo is used for STRUT.)

I checked dictionary.com and while that gave both STRUT and NURSE for the first syllable, it gave only GOAT for the final vowel.

Then I had a look at Forvo; that had seven pronunciations recorded. Clicking through them one by one, it seems that there is a Commonwealth/US split for this word, with commA for the former (the UK samples and the Australian one) and a fairly clear, unreduced GOAT for the latter.

Huh! Learn something new every day.

(And now, thorough sounds extremely odd to me. Typical result of listening to a word over and over!)

At the moment, there are election posters in Hamburg with the slogan, “Reicht das Erzählte, oder zählt das Erreichte?”

I thought that a rather clever turn of words. (And I’m sure it wasn’t the candidate pictured who came up with it, though I had never heard it before.)

For those who don’t speak German, the meaning is, “Is what has been told enough, or does what has been achieved count?”, or perhaps a bit more fluently, “Are you going to be satisfied with what other people have told you they wanted to do, or are you going to measure people by what they have actually achieved?”.

The punchy bit is in the parallelism of the nouns and verbs: reichen “to be enough, be sufficient” vs. erreichen “to achieve” on the one hand and zählen “to count” vs. erzählen “to tell [e.g. a story]” on the other hand.

I just got some spam from Sweden with a sender of “test testsson”.

Made me chuckle :)

Some people use Twitter a lot, some use it rarely… I’m not sure whether it’s my generation or what, but using it multiple times in a hour, perhaps even for nearly-real-time conversations, seems strange to me; it’s not something I’m used to.

What’s your Twitter usage?

Also, if you want to follow me, I’m “mizinamo” on Twitter. I very rarely post, though, and don’t read very often. But I do tend to add people I like, as a kind of marker of friendship; just be aware that it’s not a very efficient way of communicating with me :)

So, if you want, let me know what your Twitter account is, if I’m not following you already! Comments are screened. (Let me know if you want a comment unscreened.)

So at some point during my trip to Saarbrücken for the qepHom last November, I managed to disabled the WiFi on my laptop. It has a hardware switch with an LED, and it somehow got into a state where it was permanently off, and clicking the switch didn't switch it back on.

I couldn't enable WiFi from Network Manager because it said it was disabled by hardware switch ... but I had no idea how to get it working again. I was even considering reinstalling on the off-chance that that might fix it.

But this evening I googled for "compaq nc6220 hardware wifi switch" and found this entry which linked to this one, which had the magic incantation!

tl;dr: after installing "rfkill" and running rfkill unblock wifi, the LED started flashing, I got asked for my keychain password, and I was connected to my home WiFi network! Yay!