all things me

This is really really really spooky. I’ve been quoted in the Language Log… I commented on a list of John Doe names (at Carob (a blog)) in different languages where the Finnish version “Matti Meikäläinen” was spelled wrong. Now when I was reading LL my name was there! (And a LINK to me!) *faint* From a post by Mark Liberman:

Minna from all-things-me added a more complete and believable correction of the Finnish name:

just letting you know that the Finnish version is a bit “off”. It’s actually Matti Meikäläinen

Minna should know, being actually Finnish, but the fact is that I should have see (sic) the vowel harmony problem too.

This is like… I don’t know… Robbie or DD said (not past tense, just an “if”) my name… *happy shivers* If I had foreseen this I would’ve made my comment more linguistic and elegant.

Last night, around 1:50 I finally got to the Final Boss Fight in Beyond Good & Evil. I fought the darn thing for about half an hour and finally after a whole lotta K-Bups and going through the “choreography” over and over (I ended up playing with my eyes closed — hey, I was tired! ) I beat it! The end movie begins, good. And then, no voices, screen fades to white. The background music seems stuck. Nothing happens. I hit del, esc, any key. Nada. Ctrl + Alt + Del opens the program list, luckily. It was 2:20 then and I couldn’t stay awake anymore so I had to leave it at that.

This afternoon I decided to try it again. There had been a saving point just before the final battle but that was alright. <irony>I knew it by heart anyway…</irony> This time it took me 10 minutes to beat, not flawlessly though. And this time the end movie worked. *phew*

So, now I can say I beat Beyond Good & Evil.

I joined BG&E fanlisting, by the way.

I went to see Spiderman 2 today (hence the title). Tobey Maguire looks a bit silly when he wrinkles his face in strain, but what can I say, all that Spiderman acrobatics appeals to me I found this —> picture, but it’s a bit dark and the spiderman suit is all torn but it’s the closest I could find (crouched and one leg straight on the side — like Trinity in Matrix Reloaded when she jumps off the motorcycle and lands very coolly ). If anyone finds a better one, I’d be mooooore than happy to drool over it. Anyway, I go swoon now.

I “installed” a category image plugin for WordPress. You see those tiny images below a post’s title? That’s them. If you mouse-over the images you get an explanation on what they mean, but I’ll list them here:
Miscellany — very “clever” picture of two unknown variables
Books — a stack of books
Computer — string of zeros and ones, the binary
Dreams — a thought bubble, by dreams I mean the nightly kind, by the way
Games — a Pacman
University — a Greek-style column
Site — a home as in homepage, I know stupid, what else would describe a homepage though?
Fanlistings — a heart, I couldn’t think of anything else to depict fandom
Tweaks — tools are for tweaking
Updates — an idea light bulb
Language — a person speaking, although language means written too
Quote of the Day — quotemarks, hopefully not too close to the Finnish (or capital city area) library logo, no copyright infringement intended!
Word of the Day — ok, this might not be so clear, but there’s a page of a calendar and a W on it
(Odd) people — a bunch of people and a questionmark
I Don’t Understand — questionmarks
[edit: New categories]
— OT but not in the meaning of Off topic as usual. Posts that, as the name says, stay on one topic.
— WordPress
— Amadeus, our dog
[/edit]

Wheeee!!! I know it’s only 0:10 and I have to wake up for work in about 7 hours, but still! Last day at work!! I get to start my summer holidays!!

@ 9:53
Ok, have to remember to return the key [check] and the grammar book [check] I still have borrowed from the library, take my coffee mug and my slippers/sandals and clear the desk… I wonder if I have to carry this computer back to where it was. I don’t have a key to the room (anymore) and I don’t know if the door will be open when I finish at 16.

Just my luck. I bought 7 jelly doughnuts (and there’s one extra just in case) for the people here at work and there’s only one person here besides me! Oh well, Dad and sister are no doubt glad about my misfortune.
[edit @ 15:20] OK, good. The bag is down to 3 donuts. Just perfect. Now, NOBODY COME TO WORK ANYMORE! Shoo! [/edit]

Gosh, last night I had trouble sleeping cause I started getting ideas what to do to the blog I didn’t have my notepad on the bedside table (yes, I have a notepad on my bedside table — the best programming ideas, all the best ideas for that matter, appear on the notepad on my bedside table) so I had to scribble on some tiny piece of paper. Have to try out my ideas ASAP. There was one that I was too close to sleep to wake up and write down… what was it? Or maybe I did write it down.

Sheesh… I just realised I forgot to take/buy lunch. *bang bang bang* (that’s my head and this desk, hitting on each other )

When I went to return the key to the janitor he said “Well, this was a short story [referring to my period of employment]. You’ll probably be back some day.” Yeah, I probably will. Did he mean that all us innocent short-time employees are sucked into the evil vortex that is the University?

Wondering: Who plays Bolero here?! I’ve heard it almost every day at work. (And all kinds of other music, but I recognise Ravel’s Bolero…)

Yesterday when Dad left for his annual volleyball tournament (company vs. company) I stole Beyond Good & Evil which he’d been playing. It’s an interesting game — a nice change after FPSs (well, I just played NOLF II which isn’t all FPS either). And very very funny! The installation music, which later is playing at Akuda Bar, was a hoot!

On Ubi Forums I read how to get the song, so now I’m listening to it over and over and over… “Propaganda!”

The game is set on a planet called Hillys and you play Jade, a reporter/photographer who joins a rebellious group, the IRIS Network, which is trying to reveal the truth and free the Hillyans from their oppressors, the Alpha Section. Along the way you get to fight alongside with uncle Pey’j and Double H.

In addition to making money by exposing a conspiracy, Jade photographs the fauna of Hillys for a Natural Museum catalogue.

There are a few (I’ve found 4 so far) pirate caves on the planet. Once you enter the pirates (or looters) steal 100 Units from you and you have to chase them. At least I didn’t pass the “race” on the 1st try, so after a couple of dozens (in total, not per cave) “Look out, Miss Jade! Looters! Don’t let them get away, Miss Jade!” a la Double H, I felt like banging my head against the table (I took an easy way out, I turned the volume down…). But once I do catch the darn looters and get their treasure, plus a big pearl with which I’m able to buy all kinds of goodies to my (sorry, Jade’s) hovercraft — ah, what a feeling.

Game’s website

The game site is very very odd. Or not the main site, but the “side sites” of
Hillyan News and IRIS Network. On Hillyan News it says “Others News” and on IRIS Network “Lastest News”. Bah! And none of the sites can decide if it’s “Hillyan” or “Hyllian”, “Hillys” or “Hyllis”.

(sorry, I’m not very good at [spelling] English interjections, hopefully you get the point)
It’s amazing how one person can produce so much suffocating stench. I don’t remember one single morning recently that there hasn’t been a smelly hobo/drunk on the tram stop or in the tram. *Outside*, at the stop, one can smell them from 5 meters away (!!) and when they get on the tram the smell soon spreads to every corner.

After yesterday’s hacking-hacking I decided to make a new category for posts called Tweaks. I’ll try to document what I’ve had to do to make the blog the way I want it to be — as a reference to myself mostly so that I can re-do them if something happens (or when I update WP etc. and all my hard work will be copied over (or whichever operation the update requires)).

Crazy language + statistics note:
I seem to favour 3 same-letter variations of different interjections. For example: awww, ewww, and phoooweee as in the title of this post. Language Log had a wonderful post (called Aw+ ) on the subject. Apparently, I’m following the hordes. Unintentionally!

Why I think I use three letters? It’s the shortest ungrammatical cluster of same letter. So, it stands out (well, at least somewhat, compared to cluster of one or two) and is economical.

Oooh… I almost slipped an eggcorn (I’ve read WAY too much LL). I first wrote “hoards” instead of “hordes” but luckily checked it.

Regular expressions are nifty. I just wrote in an *informal* report on “what on earth I’ve been doing all summer” and when I would’ve had to write “subdirectories and subdirectories’ subdirectories” (or “subsubdirectories”) I simply put (sub)+directories which my professor will surely understand (the + is a Kleene plus meaning >1, a Kleene star * would be >0)

The cleaning lady had brought me a waste-paper basket. Very kind. Too bad I’m finishing work on Monday…

Oooh. I’m so proud of myself. You see those picture texts in the menu? Well, not all of them were easy to get showing. For the link list (all things me, other sections) and calendar I had to “hack” a bit. I’ll show you:
in links.php (found in wp-includes folder) around line 563 you get

echo ' <li id="'.sanitize_title($cat['cat_name']).'">' . stripslashes($cat['cat_name']) . "\n\t<ul>\n";

which echoes (i.e. outputs) the link title in a neat unordered list. I wanted to assign an image to each link category title so I modified it to say:

echo ' <li id="'.sanitize_title($cat['cat_name']).'"><img src="'.stripslashes($cat['cat_name']).'.gif">'."\n\t<ul>\n";

instead. I changed the category names to one-word names so they won’t cause any problems as image names. Also, the image source path has to be absolute (http://…) which I don’t understand why, because you never leave the index page you just choose different content. Oh well.

The same thing — slightly simpler — has to be done to the calendar. In template-functions-general.php, line 366 (about) you find <caption> tags (following an echo) which is the caption, or title, of the table… obviously:
[edit Sep 15, 2004] I made it XHTML compliant by adding the end tag to the img tags [/edit]

<caption>' . $month[zeroise($thismonth, 2)] . ' ' . date('Y', $unixmonth) . '</caption>

I changed to

<caption><img src="'.$month[zeroise($thismonth, 2)].'.gif" /><img src="'.date('Y', $unixmonth).'.gif" /></caption>

Naturally, I have to remember to make an image for each month (I already made one for August cause it’s so soon) and year as needed.

Now, I can go to bed.

Ooooh, I found my very first Bookcrossing book here at the department. I didn’t take it though. At least not yet. It’s in Swedish, and one I’ve read (not in Swedish though). But the greatest (?) thing is, it’s Stephen King!!! Svarta Tornet: Följeslagarna — what a coincidence.

I am afraid that some over-zealous cleaning lady or our janitor (or anyone who hasn’t stumbled across this Bookcrossing “phenomenon”) will take it and throw it in the garbage bin…

I removed the slow random FL image script from the (right) menu and replaced it with a random text link (two in fact). Maybe it wasn’t too slow, but on my 56 k modem at home (56 k in theory — 42-46 k in practice) it was annoying. I think if I would’ve got an answer from Scripthost concerning the ability to set image sizes (which they “advertised” but didn’t give instructions to), it wouldn’t have disturbed the page load so much.

Updates:
1) I made a pretty cool underlining for TGWLSK. You can see it for example at the Love (works) page and Notebook.
2) testing out blog times image
[edit] Bah, it won’t change the background colour. Oh well, have to look into that some other time, now it’s ugly bright white but I ain’t changing the site’s bg colour. [edit] I’m such a noob. I had a space after the comma in the colour value… Now it works [/edit] And until I can figure out how to either put it only on main page or remove it from archive (I know the variable for category and single, but not archives), you’re going to have to goggle at it in surprising places [/edit]
3) finished reading Black House (100th book in my booklog); gave it **** and because it’s better than Carrie which in turn is better than Bag of Bones I had to put a minus after Carrie’s four stars… This is getting complicated.

Other “100 things” today: This is the 100th entry. And also, I’m writing a “100 things about me” list. I think I’m at 81 or something (I’m counting *down* from 100)

I took a Goddess test just for fun and the result is: Hera. Hmm… I’m The First Lady (Hera is Zeus’s wife (and also his sister…), and Zeus is the supreme god in Greek mythology. He wasn’t really a committed type, though.) The whole of results is on the entry page.

I’m really annoyed by a restaurant’s name in the center of Helsinki: Casa Largo. Which language is that? Plutoan? In Spanish at least, which I think the name is trying to resemble, the adjective (here largo — large) has to agree with the noun it determines (here: la casa — house, home), thus the name should be Casa Larga. WHY ISN’T IT?!

@ 15:06
Mmm… Christmas Coffee. (I taste cardamom.)
I just realized a funny thing. We put kardemumma (cardamom) in our *ginger*bread (ginger being inkivääri in Finnish). And gingerbread is piparkakku in Finnish and the “prefix” pipar- can also be found in “piparjuuri” (horse-radish) or “piparminttu” (peppermint).

@ 12:04 on July 23
Mum pointed out that gingerbread in Swedish is pepparkaka in which peppar means ‘pepper’. I knew there was a pepper hidden there somewhere!! The Finnish piparkakku comes almost certainly (I’m not an etymologist) from Swedish and it has been phonetically adapted to Finnish (a common form of loan word formation).

Continues »