Sometimes, political blogs remind me of a game of chess, analyzed (live, naturally) by a grandmaster with an ELO rating less than 1000 points. I keep imagining the following screen. Mark the double exclamation:
update: If you didn’t get it, that is exactly the point
update 2: Hey, algebraic notation at Wikipedia to the rescue e2-e4+!!!
A couple of items drew my attention: first of all Niels‘ link to an article that tells “it’s official to call Windows ‘broken'” and details the struggle of Microsoft’s executives with the problems ahead for its Windows operating system:
“It’s not going to work: Longhorn is so complex its writers will never be able to make it run properly.”
Closely tied to that item is an item about how Google has forced Microsoft to change its tactics from being a ‘innovative’ marketleader to follower. I can’t find that article, but I’m pretty sure you’ve seen and read the buzz around the two giants. And there’s more: just this evening a message filtered into the Postgres newsgroup where a reader loud up wondered why commercial databases (MySQL and MS SQL) either are too limited (technically) or have too many limitations (license-wise) and how these databases compared with Postgres itself.
“One of those was the MSDE from Microsoft. I started a conversion of a large customer only to find out that we hit the 2 gig limit before it even got installed (converted their current data). We started to look at prices of the full version of SQL Server and the pricing is going to put it out of reach for some of our customers”
So why is this posting titled Wordperfect?
An article over at the Independent about a forthcoming book (link to Independent) that will (most likely) attract language lovers in the world: ‘The meaning of Tingo’ from Adam Jacot de Boinod.
The article over at the Independent lists the paper’s favourite foreign words and one of them is the Dutch word ‘queesting’, a word Anglo-Saxians know as ‘bundling’. Apparently, the practice was brought to the New Continent by ‘those pesky liberal pinko moonbat’ Dutch sailors in the early 1700s and naturally, the practice didn’t sit quite well with moral preachers on the New Continent.
Talking about words: in one of the links above, I noticed a mention of the Dutch word called ‘plimplampletteren’, which is described as ‘skimming stones’. I’ve heard of the game ‘pim-pam-pet’ before, but the word variant with the extra ‘L’ does not ring a bell here. However ‘plimplampletteren’ reminds of the act of ‘plumpen’, which is a variety of the Dutch game of ‘knikkeren’.
I’ll leave it to my readership to figure out what plumpen exactly is about. If you’ve lived as a kid in the Seventies, you’re probably aware that it’s one of the most innocent games a kid can play.
Update: Closely related ‘Sniglets’ or sniglets (Wikipedia).
Update 2: Oh yes: the weirdest Dutch boardgame ever (after ‘Mens Erger Je Niet’): Pim-pam-pet!
Update 3: Thinking of it, ‘skimming stones’ reminds me of ‘keilen’, a word that describes the actual act of ‘throwing stones over water so that they bounce on the surface’. Keilen, I think, is a made up Dutch word that consists of ‘kei’ (stone/rock) and ‘zeilen’ (sailing).
A couple of tips and ‘hacks’ to make ‘big bucks’ fast in VegaStrike:
A posting over at Sadly, No summarizes a certain paradoxal reasoning of the political right in the US, where bloggers literally prefer to believe the news coming from the Defense department above the ones coming from the ‘disgusting’ mainstream media. BradR (one of Sadly, No’s posters) illustrates it with the following example:
For instance, if you read MSM (ed: mainstream media) reports on Tibet, you’re probably under the impression that China has been brutally oppressing the Tibetan people for the last fifty-plus years. However, if you’d read reports about the situation in the Chinese People’s Daily, you’d know that “on May 23, 1951, the Central Government signed with Tibet’s local government a “17-Article Agreement” for the peaceful liberation of Tibet, which helped the region cast off imperialist fetters and laid a foundation for regional ethnic autonomy in Tibet.”
I couldn’t have said it better.
A picture
featured at CBC grabbed my attention: a Soyuz rocket booster readied for launch at Baikonur Space Complex. Hey, isn’t that a Buran, right there in the lower right corner?
Back in the 80s, after all those succesful Shuttle missions, the former USSR’s space plans were leaked to Western media: it appeared that even the Russians were focussing on building their own Space Shuttle. Pictures like the one above (or the the right) dominated Western media, who were speculating about the Russian intentions of manned space flight ‘the Western way’. As we all known, these 
shuttle efforts eventually folded because of money problems but did leave Russia with the heavy-weight lifting Energia (which was originally meant to carry Buran).
It’s interesting to hear that Europe’s space agency, has renewed their interest to work together with the Russians on their ‘Kliper’ project,
In the mean time…
After 
so many years of buggy versions, version 0.4.3 of Vegastrike finally made it beyond the startup screen on my computer.
I’m not sure about some of the graphics when ‘docked’ (cartoon-like characters), but ‘flying’ out there in space is actually fun. I haven’t found out if the current version actually starts up a scenario or not, but plain trading, flying and combat with no apparent goal or aim is plenty of fun for now.
I had the urge to play an MSX game on one of those MSX emulators that you can find on-line. I use an older version of BlueMSX, which makes it a bit easier to ‘change ROMs’.
So I went from playing Nemesis 3 to SpaceManbow to Salamander. Despite my pessimism not being able to beat levels (I finished and beat this game when I was way younger and I have a witness!), the last game went actually pretty good until I discovered I was counting the ‘extras’. In the shoot-em-up game Salamander (like other Nemesis/Gradius variants) you collect ‘extras’ to enhance your weaponry: they range from extra speed to shields to extra ‘options’ (uh drones). In Salamander, one of the most difficult shoot-em-ups since 1986, you must make sure that you have the right weapons and the right number of options to make it through to the next ‘bossmonster’. You still follow me? Now: In the first level ‘Top Speed to Latis’, at the first stage of the first level, you must end up with ‘one option’ and the ‘wide ripple effect’ laser and the ‘2-way missiles’.
This ‘counting pattern’, you’ll hear in the following sound fragment (mp3/700K). A veteran Salamander player will recognize that I selected the extras in the following order:
Next time, screenshots of Salamander stages. If only, I had someone else with me to count along.
Update: And a digital joystick would help too, thanks!
I
needed a belt so went out to get one. Hey: belts have sizes. I wasn’t aware of that. What size are you? The first thought was to take the belt with a size that matched the number of my jeans/waist size. Suddenly, I was reminded of a trick my dad taught us when we were younger:
Your waist’s circumference approximately equals the length of your arm. That’s approximately 2 times your lower arm (from hand to elbow). The length of the much needed belt is generally 2 times the length of your arm or, 3 times the length of your lower arm.
Punching a hole in a belt goes so much easier with a drill.
An item that took me by surprise: Palm announces to make a Windows CE based Treo. Huh? HUH?
The Treo will use a version of Microsoft’s Windows operating system – despite a long and bitter rivalry between the two firms — and work with a new high-speed wireless service offered by Verizon Communications Inc., said the source, who requested anonymity.
Bets are now in: how long Palm will continue to survive?
From: Arthur…
To: Alfons…
Subject: Re: Nogmaals…
In-Reply-To: <9110d5aa0409200320d9e1d48@…>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
References: <9110d5aa0409200320d9e1d48@….>
I’m on it.
Regards,
Arthur
On Mon, 20 Sep 2004 12:20:31 +0200, Alfons wrote…
[snip]
