random bits

[cellio]

Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from filkerdave)

As dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

You can make the "The"s easier by adding sort tags. Select all like artists, right click, select Get Info, then select the Sorting Tab, and enter the artist name without "The" under Sort Artist or Sort Album Artist. Only problem is you will have already done some of those letters...

[kayre]

According to both NPR and CNN, the oaths are a formality, confirming the change; in fact Biden and Obama took office at noon, regardless of the fact that Biden took oath before noon and Obama several minutes after.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I know that French says it's all Hebrew to them.

[cahwyguy.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing (actually, I wondered if we briefly had a Bush/Biden administration, and what would happen if Bush died. But then it was clarified Obama became president at noon, independent of the oath. I guess it is like a Bar Mitzvah.

[blackpaladin.livejournal.com]

The 20th Amendment explicitly states that the terms of the President and Vice-President expire at noon on the 20th day of January, at which point their successors' terms begin. The oath is a complete formality, and CBS News was misinformed.

To answer siderea's question: as I understand it, if the President-Elect drops dead on January 19th, then the Vice-President-Elect becomes President at noon on January 20th and is sworn in as such.

At no point did we have a President Bush and a Vice-President Biden. At 11:59:59AM we had President Bush and Vice-President Cheney; one second later, we had President Obama and Vice-President Biden.

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

Email - it's a stupid software design, and nothing more.

I say that because: we know how people behave, and then if one builds a system that absolutely frags itself when people do what people do, the system is ill-designed.

Not that Microsoft hasn't made a lot of money attempting to retrain the human race.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

So Esperanto basically says "That's Volapuk to me". That struck my funny bone, but it makes sense considering the history.

BTW: I notice the site mentions "Gringo". I've heard a number of theories regarding the etymology of this word, but I note that there is a heraldic cross that ends in little snakes: it's called a "cross gringolee". Considering that the name "Sioux" comes from the Cherokee (? IIRC) word for "little snakes" (the Sioux call themselves "Lakotah") I wonder if "Gringo" comes from some Spanish-based insult meaning "little snake, worm".

[jducoeur]

As [info]dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah.

To be fair, this is probably less about chutzpah than it is a fine example of the dangers of bureaucracy and overly-strict rules. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the charge came from the computer's automatic algorithms, and the representative they talked to didn't have the authority to override those.

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh.

It's actually a pretty good example of why CommYou is focusing on small communities first. Scaling systems up to large communities is pretty tricky.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Correction: Art of Conversation actually doesn't have anything much to do with CommYou yet (aside from the topic) -- it's a bog-standard Wordpress blog, and not even an especially fancy one.

I hope to move it over to CommYou eventually, but like I said, CommYou is initially mainly focused on small-community discussion, rather than open public discussion. The use case of blogging demands strong anti-abuse capabilities, so I don't want to put CommYou forth as a blog alternative until I feel that it's ready for that use case, and that's going to be some while yet. It's probably going to require at least half-a-dozen new features before I feel that it's good enough for that.

The hell of understanding this subject really well is that I'm my own harshest critic. I've got a very strong sense of which features are needed for which use cases...