February 2012
31 posts
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TV5 Monde et leur sous-titres
TV5 did something annoying over Christmas. For a couple of weeks their digital subtitles stopped working entirely. And then, upon returning in January, they were no longer en français, but in English. This defeated the whole purpose for me. I was watching TV5 to learn French, not to indulge in low-budget police procedurals. TV5 Monde is fixated on police procedurals, la gastronomie and questions...
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Just used my crazy mad CSS skills to put a background on this thing. CSS has got a bit complicated hasn’t it? I remember when it was just a polite way of setting font display options. Now it’s like studying a DNA molecule. “I’ll just tweak this to adjust the text size… Oops, there goes the immune system.”
And where have all the dear old tables gone?...
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It really gets on my nerves
That I can’t logout of Google without also logging out of Youtube. I logout of Google because I don’t want some shadowy server farm in California recording my every search. I don’t want to logout of Youtube because I like being able to comment on videos and receive subscriber content. We log into Youtube for our own benefit; not so with Google search. Search is clearly feeding on...
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There’s this movie on BBC HD starring Scarlett Johansson - or Yonnason, as our house christened her - and they have tried to make her look awkward and dorky by giving her these laughable silver-rimmed glasses. I have hated movies doing this since I saw She’s All That. If you want an ugly person, either hire an ugly actress or put a little bit more effort into makeup. Don’t just...
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My little bro gives such good advice. A paragon of equanimity. He is supposed to be 2 and a half years younger than me but I am convinced it is the other way around.
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Long Way Home
Driving back to Birmingham tonight. Steeling myself for the A42, the most boring road in Britain. You roar down it at 90 hoping it won’t seem so long, but it always does.
Wasted week really. I got my apps finished, but apart from that an organized person could have probably done in a weekend what I have done in 6 days. GOTTA STEP UP AND MAKE PLAYS.
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siestaforever:
thefoxontherocks replied to your post: If I could feel bad with my parents for something…
In case you haven’t noticed you’re doing rather well with the English right now! I’d love to have your level of skill in an FL. :D
Thanks, Matt! :) Do you speak any other languages besides English? xx
I speak basic French. I’m supposed to be teaching it to primary school children in...
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These Windows 7 libraries do my head in. I don’t want to save my work to the Picture Library, I want to save it to an actual folder. This is archetypal Microsoft: trying to help you but instead clogging up the interface with superfluous shit you don’t care about or use.
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“The advent of the GCSE examinations in 1986 resulted in many cases in a...”
– Hunt, M., Progression and assessment in foreign languages (2009)
The plural of 'ethos'
is ethe or ethea. Who knew?!
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For some reason Firefox or Ubuntu, but I suspect Firefox, just deleted my entire browsing history since March last year. That’s really annoying because I often used it to find old stuff I wanted to visit again but didn’t consider worth bookmarking.
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“I don’t return fruit. Fruit’s a gamble; I know that going in.”
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It always annoys me how badly Simon cocks up with Carli on The Inbetweeners. I am always rooting for Simon, even though he is a twat.
With primary teaching degrees
siestaforever:
mentallyincompetent:
…how do you fail?
I’m not saying it’s not hard
But I know someone who does it and they have lessons like in school.
So if you’re learning how to teach something you got taught years ago… how do people fail that?!
This is a genuine question, I want to know if I’m missing something here haha
I agree and it’s the same in Spain. They even have modules that...
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“The UK is arguably a hostile climate for language learning… While negative...”
– Coleman et al., ‘Motivation of UK school pupils towards foreign languages’
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“When we fall in love,
We’re just falling in love with ourselves”
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“The title of the album comes from the book “The Hundredth Window:...”
– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100th_Window
Just Facebook messaged my older brother and realized it’s the first time I’ve spoke to him since New Year’s. Never before have I gone a month without speaking to one of my brothers. Funny how you can drift apart from people without even trying.
January 2012
14 posts
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Things I care about least in the world:
horseface3000:
Football
Celebrities who are famous for being reality ‘stars’
The renaming of tiger bread.
I got roped into watching the opening night of ‘Celebrity’ Big Brother a few weeks ago, and there were these utterly absurd moments where several of the z-listers had to explain who they were to the other z-listers. So just the same as regular Big Brother, then.
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1. Spend two days trying to configure Deluge on Windows 7
2. Realize there is a Windows build of Transmission
3. 1.3 MiB/s for the glorious win
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Chase the White Dragon
Ok so I’m channel-hopping and there is this dragonslayer thing on “syfy” that I quickly realize is actually a sword-and-sorcery take on Moby Dick, with Danny Glover as Captain Ahab. And Starbuck is there, and Mr. Stub. And according to the Sky Guide Vinny Jones is in it as well, but I have an inkling he may already have been killed off. Chop Chop.
But then for some dumb reason...
You know your French software is old when it asks you to change money into Francs.
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My brother and his girlfriend are an alarmingly quiet couple. Once in a while it’d be nice to hear them having a good shag just to confirm everything is going ok.
But they’ve been together about 4 years so maybe that’s the key to longevity. Kinda depressing though, to contemplate a sexless long-term relationship. Sort of like living in Las Vegas and never visiting a casino.
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Word’s grammar check: still wrong 90% of the time. Fragment (consider revising)
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Shift Happens
So my parents’ internet has broken, and I am trying to talk them through the troubleshooting procedures over the phone in order to isolate the problem. It is maddening. Stuff that would take me 10 seconds to do intuitively if I were there, takes me 5 minutes to explain to them, and even then I cannot be sure they have done as I instructed. And certain fixes - flashing the firmware or...
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Wayback Machine
Just talking to my brother on Facebook chat and it occurred to me that I couldn’t send him a file using it. Then it occurred to me that even MSN Messenger could send files in 2002.
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1660
Loving my little mono laser printer. I should have bought one of these years ago.
p.s. I also love that PC World gave me free 3-year instant replacement cover on it.
p.p.s. I also love how I’ve printed at least 40 pages since it instructed me to replace the toner.
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5 year itch
Rapidly going off 11pt Calibri. At first it was a revelation, Word reinvented for the Windows 7 age. Then came a period of professional indifference and now a sort of jaded sickness, where it looks like one undifferentiated blur on the page. We are like a foundering couple. I’m thinking of taking notes in 10pt Arial instead.
December 2011
12 posts
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“And you won’t
Put out this flame
It burns so bright
Through any wind...”
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“Blood Bowl at least offers something in the way of a tagline – “The Game of...”
"Fit for purpose"
This phrase needs to be banned immediately, along with “in a very real sense.”
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