Thursday, August 31, 2006
For I believe the first time since we three took the office together, one of my officemates noticed me snoring during my post-prandial nap.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Geschiedenis van het lachen in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, zestiende en zeventiende eeuw (”The history of laughter in the Southern Lowlands [that is, I think, what's now the south of the Netherlands and Belgium], sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”). A prodigious work of scholarship, 245 pages plus references. I foresee it will be a frequently-consulted reference work. [...]
I’ve just been hacking around with one of my pages, trying to tweak what Google Image Search thinks it represents. The page contains a number of short paragraphs, each with a header and a single picture. The problem is that Google cleverly mines the text surrounding each image for keywords, above and below, meaning that [...]
Thursday, August 24, 2006
The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst’s typographers bible. (Nijhof & Lee, which I’ve never allowed myself to go into before because they have a whole typography section, but when you’ve got Kiwi visitors and they want to check it out…)
Peter McIntyre’s New Zealand. Another visitor-inspired find, this was on the Spui Boekenmarkt for just [...]
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Today’s weather, as of yesterday’s forecast: “Unknown.”
(Funnily enough, they did know that tomorrow would have a “Chance of rain.” But then, I could have told them that this time last year. Bloody August in bloody Amsterdam.)
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Harry Mulisch, De ontdekking van de hemel (The discovery of heaven) (Boekenmarkt Spui,
Grimbergen Boeken). The seller told me “Ik vraag me af of het goed is” (”I don’t know if it’s any
good”) which tickled me pink. Mulisch is part of my campaign to Appreciate Dutch Literature.
Dutch “ten slotte” has a funny double usage that has always given me trouble, but this morning I cracked it. It’s first use is for enumerating options: “ten eerste… ten tweede… ten slotte” (firstly, secondly, and finally). But there’s this other use, for example in the following exchange from De ontdekking van de hemel:
[...]
A friend of mine just came out with the following line: “Ik ben er nu naar aan het luisteren.” Babelfish tries heroically: “I am there now to for listening” which even manages to recognise that “het luisteren” is not, in this context, “the listening”.
What does it actually mean? “I’m listening to it now.” And even [...]
I just bought a wireless card, installed Kubuntu Dapper Drake, and imagine my delight when it just worked, out of the box, no problems at all! Glory be. So I ran a complete update, crowed publically, and went to bed. The next time I started up, the wireless card had apparently evaporated.
The solution is actually [...]
Thursday, August 10, 2006
I’m writing this from home.
That’s all.