Fragments of Life

Adobe Reader 9 installation finishes and suggests me to defrag my hard drive

How nice it is of Adobe to suggest me to defrag my hard drive.

I wonder how many people bothered to read it instead of immediately clicking “Finish”.

Footnotes

Aharoni Manual of Style, paragraph 392: A footnote must fit on one page, no matter what.

Reality – Herzl

A small ad for the Herzl Museum from the Jerusalem Post website:

The New Herzl Museum - Yes We Can

This, of course, refers to Herzl’s most famous quote: “If you will it, it is no legend”.

Google Wave Impression

So, Google Wave is live for beta testing and i received an invitation. I still have a couple of them left, feel free to ask. First come, first served.

I and all of my friends who tried it have a “what now” feeling as soon as we log in. And then loneliness. It is like improved email, but we already have email.

The scrollbars are weird. Terribly weird. Not the way to go. They already made this mistake with Picasa. Please not again. I love the stupid old-school scrollbars.

Waves don’t become read after i click them. Silly bug, they’ll probably fix it.

People Speaking – Do

— “No! It can’t be true! What a disgrace. Did you hear who received the Nobel Peace Prize?”

— “No. Who? Abu-Mazen?”

— “No, but the letters are almost the same.”

— “Eh… I don’t know.”

— “Obama.”

— “But what did he do?”

— “Exactly.”

B

When i became vegetarian, everyone told me that i am going to lose all the B12 i have and die in terrible pain. Well, i have been vegetarian for over four years and my B12 is steadily going up.

How do you look up words in a Hebrew dictionary?

How do you look up words in a Hebrew dictionary?

For this post i would like to get as many comments as possible. If you are more comfortable reading or writing in Russian or in Hebrew, please see:

• The same post in Russian: Как вы ищете слова в словарях иврита?
• The same post in Hebrew: איך אתם מחפשים מילים במילון עברי?

What is difficult for you?

Is it difficult to find the root of the word? (This is relevant mostly for verbs, but in some dictionaries also for nouns.) How do you prefer to search for verbs – by the root, by the infinitive, by the past (perfect) tense, by the present (participle) tense?

Is it hard for you to separate the prefixes (conjunctions, prepositions) and the suffixes (tense, possession)?

Do you have any trouble reading Hebrew with or without vowel points (niqqud)? Do you need transcription in easy-to-read Latin characters or in IPA?

Do you understand abbreviations such as vt, n.pr.m., adv., impv., זו”נ‎, פעו”י‎, מ”ג‎, נ”ר? Do you notice them at all? Do they bother you in any way?

Do you remember any words that were particularly hard to find? Words or expressions, in order to find which you had to open several dictionaries? Words that you couldn’t find at all, anywhere?

Do you have any particular problems with the usage of the letters א‎, ו‎, י for vowels? If you can’t find the word תוכנה, do you know that you should try searching for תכנה? Is there a dictionary that you prefer, because it has a system for the usage of these letters that you like?

Do you have a preferred dictionary in general or a dictionary that you don’t like? Why? I am talking about mono- and bi-lingual ones, and about printed and electronic: Even-Shoshan, Ben-Yehuda, Gur, Ariel, BDB, Rav-Millim, Alkalai, Sapir, Ha-hove, Morfix etc.

These questions may seem a bit generic, but i am curious mostly about the aspect of using the dictionary and not general language difficulties.

Please write whatever comes to your mind, even if you think that it is embarrassing or too simple. Feel free to answer anonymously or to email me at amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il.

Many, many thanks in advance.

Thesaurus

The second best way to enhance your English vocabulary is to read a thesaurus.

The best way is to read music reviews. Here’s what Robert Christgau has to say about Yo La Tengo’s Electr-O-Pura:

Brimful of punk, fuzz, feedback, noise, and the lovingly amped squelches of fingers sliding off strings, their seventh album is a subcultural tour de force, luxuriating so sybaritically in guitar sound that I’m reluctant to mention that the tunes are pretty good. That’s why it’s the best record they’ve ever made, though.

I thought that “sybaritically” is a typo.

Edge

It’s rather weird that i’ll complain about Windows Update, since i’m kinda anti-Windows in the first place, but why do Microsoft put a fugly JPG at the top of the Windows Update page? Haven’t they heard of PNG?

Welcome to Microsoft Update - notice the fugly pixels around the letters

Unsubscribing From EFF

EFF is an organization for freedom and privacy on the internet. I am on EFF’s mailing list. I am too busy to follow the emails, however, and they seem too USA-centric for me anyway, so i wanted to cancel them.

But what do you know, the unsubscribe link in the bottom of the email is invalid.

On the website i only found a place to subscribe to the mailing list, not to unsubscribe. And they ask for a ZIP code! It’s a privacy organization, i remind you.

Oh, and the Privacy Policy link on the website is 404.

I don’t like filters that delete unwanted emails. I like clean unsubscribing. And of all the organizations, the EFF proves to be the hardest to unsubscribe from.

Beer, Vegetarianism, Holocaust

Apparently dead fish are used in the production of Murphy’s and Guiness. This really really sucks.

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Some vegetarians say that vegetarianism is right, natural or healthy.

It is supposedly right and natural, because our teeth and stomachs are different from those of predators and similar to those of herbivores. Maybe, but technically we are able to eat and digest meat.

It is supposedly healthy, because it lowers the chance of certain illnesses, such as cancer. Since i am not a physician, i cannot assert that it’s true.

I am vegetarian, because i am not able to kill an animal that doesn’t hurt me in any way in order to eat it and because it is possible to live without eating meat. How do i know that it is possible? There are many millions of people around the world who survive without meat, and i don’t think that all of them are lying. This is a very simplistic and non-scientific check, but it makes sense to me. As far as i am concerned, this is more true than the claims of vegetarians, who claim that it is healthy, even though they don’t know anything about medicine.

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Hamas accuses UN of plan to teach Gaza kids Holocaust, because it is “a lie invented by the Zionists”.

I don’t know whether Holocaust happened. I don’t know how many people were killed there and how they were killed. I wasn’t born then. There are some scholars that present proofs that it happened, and there are some others that present proofs that it didn’t. I am too busy to study all of it.

What i do know is that during my life in Israel i have met quite a lot of people with numbers tattooed on their arms and i don’t think that they did it in order to participate in any kind of lie.

Mtmihim

Google’s PR people Mtmihim me.

Every few days, Google tells the world about the wonderful free translation tools it offers, but the problem is that they completely Mafnim, because they can not translate one sentence correctly between each pair of languages.

Why do they think the public will buy the lie that stupid?

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The above was automatically translated from Hebrew. What i actually meant to write was this:

I’m puzzled by Google’s public relations people.

Every couple of days Google tells the world about the wonderful and free translation tools that it offers, but the problem is that they completely suck, as they aren’t able to translate a single sentence correctly between any pair of languages.

Why do they think that the public will buy this stupid lie?

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And i’ve got to admit that this particular translation is not that terrible, but i already made the original somewhat synthetic. Any real world translation is completely useless.

Aklocpa

I wonder how much time will pass until the word aklocpa will appear in search results.

Oh (edit): after two hours it already appears.

Zero-State

The blogger known as Nobody asks: Are you afraid of a one-state world?

I am afraid of one-state world, especially the United Nations kind of it. I prefer zero-state world.

Hadar went to Northern Italy and told me: “They all speak German there. Why do they belong to Italy and not to Germany?”

And why doesn’t Austria belong to Germany? And why doesn’t Alsace belong to Germany? And why doesn’t Transylvania belong to Hungary? And why doesn’t Karmiel belong to Russia?

There shouldn’t be states – there should be only municipalities. Municipalities that share language or culture should organize themselves into non-exclusive cultural associations. And that’s all that’s really needed.

Debug

“My bike is making a noise I haven’t debugged yet.” (Gaal Yahas)

Made Me Cry – Neda

Whatever it means, Neda made me cry, too.

Conspiracy

The question is not whether Iran is a dictatorship or a democracy.

The question is whether the civil unrest there is a Google conspiracy or a Twitter conspiracy.

Never

I shall never ever buy a book with Digital Restriction Management.

I buy a lot of books and i prefer to be buried in paper, pay more for moving, pay more for bigger apartments with bigger bookcases, than to buy files that i can’t copy any way i want.

No DRM book. Never.

MIDI

For years my geek friends forced me to listen to Dream Theater. I hated it.

Yesterday they played in Tel-Aviv. The reviews are good. Oh well.

I just listened to Pull Me Under on YouTube and now i finally understood what does it sound like: like a demo song of a MIDI keyboard.

Anti Stab

“Less Lethal Ammo“, meet “Anti-Stab Knife“.

Too Much Crowdsourcing

LinkedIn asked me to fill out a survey. And you know that i love filling out surveys!

They asked me whether i work as a translator. “Yes”, and i immediately knew where it was going.

“What kind of incentive would you want for translating LinkedIn – premium account / group leadership / i’ll just do it for fun.” And of course, they didn’t offer me money. I ticked all options except “fun”, ‘cuz LinkedIn is not that kind of a website which i’d translate just for fun.

The next question was even better – “How many hours a week would you spend as a volunteer translating LinkedIn?”

The success of Wikipedia made some people think that random folks really love doing things for free. Some people like some things, not all people like all things.

Violinist

I am living in a four-story house. In front of my window¹ there’s a fifteen-story house and it blocks the view.

It basically sucks, but a violinist lives in that house, and she² practices all day long, which is very pleasant.

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¹ I wrote “Window” first. Why would i do such a thing? :)

² Does this make me sexist?

People Speaking – Woman

— “Is it a man or a woman?” (My ten year old niece Dasha seeing the opening sequence of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.)

Priest

Ray Ozzie, [Bill Gates'] successor as chief software architect, doesn’t have anything close to the confrontational approach that the Microsoft co-founder used to shape the company.

“It’s as though you’ve been running Italy using the Mafia for the last 20 years and you bring in a priest,” said Mark Anderson, publisher of the Strategic News Service technology newsletter.

One year later, Microsoft feels subtle effects of Gates’ transition, Todd Bishop

The meaningless and the weak

“If it is just to prohibit a Jew from living in Samaria, is it also just to prohibit a black from living in Washington DC?” – Moshe Feiglin

I strongly, very strongly disagree with Moshe Feiglin on many points of his political platform. He’s a manipulator: he presents himself as “loyal to the principles of Likud”, but his own platform actually contradicts that of Likud. It doesn’t mean that i, heaven forfend, support Likud; it just means that Feiglin is a bit of a trickster. Not a liar, just a trickster: Many of his platform’s points are very religious and fundamentalist, but he only publishes them on his own website and not in the articles that he writes for Maariv.

But i strongly, very strongly agree with the point above.

“Stopping natural growth” of the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria is, beyond being nonsensical, violent and racist.

But you know what? Barack Obama is himself a trickster. Worse, yet – he’s a puppet and the people behind him are tricksters. Obama is too good at pleasing crowds. He pleased the crowd in Prague saying that he wants to end nuclear weapons. I support that, but i don’t really believe that he means that. Obama tells a crowd of Jews that Jerusalem will stay undivided, but then a campaign adviser had to clarify, that is muddle it.

A campaign adviser.

At least Moshe Feiglin doesn’t seem to have campaign advisers.

People Speaking – Programming Perl

— “Hey, what are you doing?! Do you want to program in Perl?” (Hadar, to our cat, when she saw him jumping on her laptop keyboard.)

Wave

1998: I was working on the final project in the programming course. We were a team of seven people. Thanks to my famous Microsoft Word prowess i was in charge of writing the documents that were part of the project, but the other team members also had to update them and it was quite troublesome. So i told my friend El’ad an idea i had: “How nice would be it be if i could collaborate with my team members – if we could write the same document simultaneously. It would be a nice startup!” El’ad told me that it seemed rather useless to him.

Some time later El’ad told me about his own idea for a startup: “Let’s say that you have some files on your computer, for example music or images, and these files may be interesting to other people on the web that you don’t even know, and you want to share them and help people find them…”

To which i replied: “Who on Earth would want to do such a thing? That’s what websites and FTP are for.”

A few months later all the websites were buzzing about Napster’s fucking up the music business and El’ad told me that they implemented that idea of his.

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2007: I went to Catalonia for a week and didn’t go online for all that time. When i came back, all the websites were buzzing about Radiohead’s fucking up the music business further with “In Rainbows”.

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2009: I haven’t used the web since Thursday morning. Today i went online and every website was buzzing about Google Wave.

Google Wave is a combination of a word processor, an email program and an instant messaging program that is written in HTML. We’ll have to wait and see whether this will fuck up Microsoft’s business model, but the important parts for me are that it has a very cool spell checker, and more importantly – that it allows several people to edit the same document simultaneously.

Take a look at the video: Google Wave Developer Preview at Google I/O 2009. At 00:35 you’ll see exactly the thing i envisioned in 1998. It even has Hebrew there.

So, El’ad, you can say that you had your revenge on me. But i’m still quite proud – i envisioned an idea that took many more years to implement.

Amazing

Kanye West wrote a book. That’s what he has to say about it:

“Sometimes people write novels and they just be so wordy and so self-absorbed. I am not a fan of books. I would never want a book’s autograph. I am a proud non-reader of books. I like to get information from doing stuff like actually talking to people and living real life.”

I am a proud non-listener to hip-hop.

Hip-hop is not a crime. Hip-hop is not bad music. Occasionally i listen to a hip-hop song and enjoy it.

But i don’t get why some people talk about “innovative” hip-hop. Nothing changed in hip-hop in the last twenty years or so.

I heard a lot of talk about Kanye West lately. I haven’t heard any of his songs. So i tried a few on YouTube.

Fuck it. Kanye West is not innovative. M.I.A. is not innovative. Timbaland is not innovative. Eminem is not innovative. Dr. Dre is not innovative. Danger Mouse in not innovative. None of them have ever been innovative. Some of them are good artists, but none of them is innovative, never been.

And no, there hasn’t been a lot of innovation in rock music for many years now. Interpol, Elbow, Decemberists, Shins, Libertines, Arctic Monkeys – none of them are innovative. Some of them are good artists, but none of them is innovative. That’s unfortunate, but at least nobody makes such a big deal out of it as it is with hip-hop.

Inside

Click to enlarge

I’ve been seeing ads for Scientology for a few weeks already on Slashdot, and this is the icing.

WTF, i mean WTF. Eitan said, “wtf/minute rate is high today” – but my wtf/minute rate is very high for many months, especially since the riots in Poland.

Social networking

“Facebook sells a 1.96% stake to a Russian internet firm, a move that values the social networking website at $10bn.”

In Soviet Russia the book faces you.

Hmm, actually it’s a good thing.