sauce for the gander

A couple days ago, Senator Orrin Hatch said that he favors developing software that would remotely destroy computers on which pirated music was downloaded. This attitude is frightening from any senator, but especially from the chair of the Judiciary Committee. I assume everyone knows that part by now.

I wonder if the senator would consider it appropriate to broaden this a bit to, say, destroy computers running unlicensed software. Like, say, his own web site.

linguistic oddity

I was surprised to see the following logo today:



I had assumed that, in general, when translating a business name with semantic content from one language to another, you would actually translate into the target language, rather than transliterating the phonemes in the source rendering.

I mean, it's one thing if your name is, say, "McDonald's"; that's just a person's name without an obvious corresponding word, so you'd just transliterate it. But "Burger King" has semantics that are lost in (this) translation, which makes me wonder why they did that when they didn't have to.

short takes

Last night's D&D game was very good. We had good role-playing, we learned something more about the world that's important, and the encounters were well-balanced. The cliff-hanger we ended on, though, prompted the "ack! how can we deal with that?!" reaction, which probably means the GM has done a good job. We'll find out next time. :-)

Tomorrow is an SCA event, the Academy (a day of classes). There are some interesting classes on the schedule. We have crashers coming tonight, people we haven't seen in a while. Should be fun.

CompUSA hasn't called about my computer yet, so today I called them. They're working on it. Can they say anything more specific? No, but they'll have the tech call this afternoon. That was at 10am; I think "afternoon" has safely come and gone by now, and still no call. I hope it's ready for pickup on Sunday.

It must be rough to be a thirsty cat (or dog, probably). In watching Eric drink water earlier, I realized that cats don't have "slurp", only "lap". And the tongue just isn't that big, y'know? As someone who drinks around a gallon of water a day, often more, I cringe in sympathy.

rain, rain everywhere (but outside would be better than inside)

Not long ago, there was a very heavy, sustained rain outside. (Now there's just regular rain.)

There is a lake where the patio is supposed to be. It's draining, very slowly.

There is water oozing into the basement from many directions. There is a sustained gurgle as that water makes its way, slowly, to points of egress, leaving flowing tendrils all about. We've seen water in the basement before; we always assumed it was pipes backing up, not a water invasion. The various folks we've called to bring in snakes and stuff when that happens have never done anything to dissuade us of this idea.

Lovely. Just lovely.

On the positive side, this is probably the sort of thing that's covered by homeowners' insurance. (I am often amazed at what's covered by homeowners' insurance.)

On the negative side, it's going to be a pain to get this diagnosed and fixed, I don't know if they can fix patio drainage (if that's a source of problems) without ripping up huge amounts of our yard, and the guest room is in the basement (see previous entry about imminent guests). Obviously we'll come up with some other solution for the guests, but still...

And Shabbat starts in less than half an hour, so certainly we're not going to call anyone in for a quick fix tonight.