You greatly pleased me when you made one of the nicest people I know a professor —of physics, I suppose, that’s her thing— and me her secretary. The only sour note was that her other secretary was the woman who was the proximate cause of my burnout when I worked with her in waking life, but as this time she worked mornings and I afternoons we only met coming and going and didn’t have to interact much. It also meant that opening and registering the mail fell to her, and composing letters and sending packages to me. And helping the professor dress for a function, which revealed that she not only had the perfect middle-aged figure that I aspire to (but may never attain) by swimming, but also lingerie to die for. I want my next bra to be dove-grey lace, too, with matching panties.

I didn’t get to see any actual evidence of physics, unless it was the decorated circle five inches across, kept in a flat tin like a film canister, that looked like solid gold and felt heavy enough for that as well. The other women who came in from time to time to talk to the professor —one of whom said of a man both of them apparently knew, “He keeps throwing lovers at me”— looked very much like middle-aged academics too, but vague as to branch of academia. The room was a dead giveaway, though: the long and extremely narrow room I worked in when I was the secretary of a professor of physics in waking life in the summer of 1980 or 1981.

Later we were at the function, which suddenly turned out to be a parish meal. Because I was the only person standing when everybody else was already seated, someone asked me to fill a water jug. I spent a lot of time filling all the water jugs; I especially liked the four-foot-high one in the shape of a trumpet flower that had a wheel at the bottom of the stem because it was too heavy to carry when full. Eventually I sat down and said “I haven’t had anything to eat yet,” but all that was left was a platter with two pieces of bread. Deeply symbolic, I suppose, but I wouldn’t know of what.

Those were splendid military planes and airships, especially the huge one that came very low in the centre (possibly of Roermond, I sort of recognised the city hall) to disgorge small red one-person aircraft. They were coming from several directions so you had me worried for a while until I realised that they were all just flying in patterns, not trying to fight each other or even get in each other’s way. My cousin the nun was right, though, when she said “it’s a pity those beautiful things are designed for killing people”.

Also, I’ll have you know that this is a Linzer torte, not this; that’s a slice of cheesecake. The coffee shop in the covered mall where my cousin and I fled the rain and the noise didn’t know either. My cousin did like it, fortunately, and I loved the sugared puff-pastry things I had— must make that!

Now I’m at it I must commend your offering of the night before, when you put a bit of lawn edged with flowers in the church so people who aren’t in the choir in waking life —mostly because they don’t sing, and even if they did sing they’d be unlikely to be in the choir: one is an acolyte and two others live too far away to come to choir practice— could start the Liturgy an hour before the normal time, because they were in church an hour early on account of forgetting the end of summer time. Fr T was so angry that he locked the connecting doors, conveniently situated about three meters closer to the altar than they normally are. I was left on the choir platform alone and confused, but somehow found myself outside a moment later. Naturally, I didn’t want to get in past the rogue choir, and I couldn’t get into my own house because I had church keys but no house keys, so I had to wait until Secunda and Tertia came out of the house, dressed to the nines (Secunda in a short green dress and thigh-high boots) and, more importantly, with keys.

I had so much dough left over that I made six more prosphora to bake later. I didn’t want to put them on the hot baking tray, so used the shallow rectangular Yorkshire-pudding tin as an emergency tray. Whether it was the upright sides of the tin, or the extra half-hour of rising outside the oven, or the ambient-temperature convection with the heat from the main batch, or…

Anyway, a rather spectacular fail. Proper prosphora look like this.

The Chamber of Commerce held a meeting for local entrepreneurs —not quite the right word, because it was for people who have a business and work in it, not just put up the money— with “how fit is your business” as its theme. My first thing of that kind. It was in the VIP lounge of the football stadium, that I wouldn’t ever have set foot in otherwise (and will never set foot in again if I can help it; the combination of dry air and bad acoustics gave me a two-day sore throat from talking, and the dim lighting and low ceiling made it a very uncomfortable place).

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Repost, because there’s a new really awesome version: the xkcd comic animated by Noam Raby and sung by Olga Nunes.

Discovery Channel loves the world (and for the video-challenged, here is the whole thing in text).

ETA: Here’s a Star Wars version. The galaxy is awesome!

ETA: And a Harry Potter version, too.

xkcd loves the Discovery Channel.

These people love xkcd.

It’s been around for some time, but I rediscovered it by accident and thought I’d share it in case you haven’t seen it yet. I love the blogosphere, too.

Rain at last, though it didn’t start raining properly until I was back on the bike. I almost turned back for more swimming, but the prospect of having to put on a wet swimsuit and use wet towels kept me from it.

But it was enjoyable anyway. Especially the large heavy raindrops bouncing back up from bubbles were pretty in the lamplight (I was very early so it was still dark).

One woman came out with her towel, started hanging it on the back of the seat as she does every day, only then realised it was raining and ran back inside to lay it on the bench there.

It’s actually less annoying to cycle in the rain after swimming in the rain. And my new(ish) jacket turns out to be waterproof, or at least water-resistant enough to keep my upper half dry until I got home.

I thought at first that this was a lamp for the road-builders to see by, but it turned out to be a lamp-post that someone must have driven into last night. When I came back an energy-watch man was sawing it into one-meter pieces of scrap metal and the road was too busy to take another picture.

Case: I have some files from folder A open in application X. I create a new file and want to save it. Where does the application suggest I save it? And if I want to open another file, what folder should the application give me to open from?

A well-behaved application should offer folder A in both cases, because that’s where all the rest of my work apparently is. It’s a sensible default— opening in A and saving to B does occur, but not as often as opening in A and saving to A. Kate does this, and goes even further in predicting correctly which folder I want; just now I opened a file and closed it in the folder where I want to save what I’m currently typing, and it got it right. Also, if I have a file from A open in one tab and a file from B in another, it gives me A when I hit ^o (for Open) in the A-file and B when I hit ^o in the B-file.

Not so OpenOffice. It stubbornly offers the last folder used, even if I already have a file from another folder open. But then it seems to open every file in its own instance, so that makes a weird kind of sense. Its options are hard to find —they reside in at least two different places in the menus— and harder to understand, so if it can be changed I haven’t found how.

I probably wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t working on several different projects at the moment that all involve more layout than I can manage with just a text editor, and I don’t trust KOffice yet for critical business stuff.

Swimming at sunrise these last few days, and going from summer to winter time means I’ll get to do it again next month.

Air temperature: 0°C
Water temperature: about 22°C
In the water: about a dozen people, mostly middle-aged and older women with a sprinkling of old men. Are we really so much more hardy than our younger sisters? It’s not that swimming is something only older people do, because the indoor pool is full of young women (and other people of both sexes and all ages). A few days ago I heard a woman say that her sixteen-year-old daughter swims indoors because she has too little body fat to stay warm, but it can’t be only that, because several of the outdoor regulars are lean and one old woman is positively scrawny.

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I have an embryonic business web page at irinarempt.eu. It has a standard footer as a server-side include, to be expanded with more relevant information later. For now it contains a small blurb and the last-modified date as <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" --> .

It works perfectly one level down (on both of my mail-form pages) where it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: October 12, 2009

but not on the main page, where the timefmt directive doesn’t seem to work, so it reads

Optimised for Konqueror and Firefox | Last updated: Monday, 12-Oct-2009 20:39:05 CEST

WTF? I copied the relevant line (<!--#include virtual="/include/footer.html" -->) from one file to another, so it can’t be a typo in the text; it can’t be a typo in the footer itself either, because it appears as it should in the mail forms. It’s reading the file, because the “Optimised” part does appear, and when I add something arbitrary to the include that appears on the offending main page as well. It’s only this directive that works in the subdirectory but not in the root:

<!--#config timefmt="%B %e, %Y" -->

This should give “October 12, 2009” and indeed does in the subdirectory.

Is there anything about timefmt that makes it not work in the document root? Am I missing something glaringly obvious? Should I give the main page a different footer and dispense with the server-side include there?

I should have taken the picture from the other side, I see now, because that’s stamped “Made in Czechoslovakia”. I don’t know if these things are being made in Czechia (or in Slovakia) these days. It does date it; this is an indestructible cast-iron meat grinder. I used it to grind a kilo of meat for the pork pie, but it’s also perfect for dried fruit when I want to make fruit jerky in Lent.

And still people are surprised that I don’t have a food processor. I should be telling them that I process my own food.

Autumn seems the perfect time for English cooking. Last Sunday my other half made perfect roast beef, this Sunday I made a pork pie.

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I promise I’ll stop spamming now…

But this was too strange to pass up, especially at 50 cents. It tasted like energy drink, so I let someone else drink it.

These are ecologically-conscious dishwasher tablets. So why can’t they package their regular dishwasher tablets neatly arranged in a small box like this, too, instead of throwing them haphazardly in a box three times the size so it’s two-thirds full of air? According to Prima, who is quite good at economics, because transporting air is still cheaper than getting a machine or a human to stack dishwasher tablets this neatly.

They work well, and they don’t contain phosphates or perfume, and they’re only marginally more expensive than the other kind, so I’m sticking with them. Also, the little box is very cute.

… but how do I get in?

Here’s the cat that tried to sample our roast beef. We used to call him and his sister “the Cats of Little Brain” because last summer, whenever they saw us on the roof terrace, they looked up longingly, mewing, without seeing the obvious way up; but this one seems to have figured it out.

At last I’ve cleared my folder of cat pictures! I’ve given up trying to bake cupcakes for humans belonging to any cats appearing here.

The scruffy-looking stray kitten only didn’t run away as it saw me because it really wanted to lick the last drops of chocolate milk from the tin. The haughty one next to it is called Keesje and lives in the same house as the black tomcat one shouldn’t ring the bell for, who turns out to be called Beau. There’s also a Kareltje, but I haven’t seen him yet.