Found Objects

These days, now that everybody in the house can understand English, we don’t watch English films with Dutch subtitles so often any more, but whenever we do there are always a couple that make me shake my head and say “I can do better!”

And I got a chance to do better: two videos made, and subtitled in English, by a friend who works at a university library in New Zealand.

It was fun, easier than I’d thought (dotsub has a good user interface, though it’s confusing that you get to the next input box with Enter, not with Tab) and I think they’re pretty decent. I want more! If anybody reading this has a video in English or German that needs a Dutch translation (or a video in Dutch that needs an English translation, for that matter) don’t hesitate to drop me a line.

Time for another roundup of search terms.

(apropos of nothing, I seem to have about 30 regular readers)

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I’ve now had a counter on both Found Objects and the church pages for the whole month of April. I know our server must have stat-counting functionality somewhere too, but someone pointed me to Statcounter and that works, it can be invisible, it’s free and easy to use, so I’d rather be lazy and let something else gather the information for me.

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I’ve overhauled my categories. All the old posts are still there apart from two outdated announcements. With the right date, too, because I discovered cp -p. It may cause flooding of your RSS feed (though I hope preserving the dates will prevent that), for which I’m heartily sorry, but my blogging habits have changed and the old categories didn’t work for me any more.

Internal links will work again when I’ve overhauled those too; that may take a while. [ETA: now done, it was less work than I’d thought because I could at least semi-automate the searching]

If you’ve lost the link to a post and can’t find it even by searching, please pipe up and I’ll tell you where it is.

Bless curse bless you, Kiya, for pointing me to Hitherby Dragons.

Right up there with Fredric Brown and R.A. Lafferty.

Reading too much of it in one go makes me think that the world really is like that.

When life hands one lemons— or, more to the point, a generous helping of the Family Cold, one does not only make lemonade but also try to see things in a larger perspective. There’s a big universe out there. And I’ve just found out that the Astronomy Picture of the Day doesn’t break my RSS reader any more with overly wide pictures (they have thumbnails in the feed now), so I’ve subscribed again.

Reading random things while ironing, I also found someone who says at least some of what I was going to say (continuing what I’ve already said) when the cold caught up with me.

And here is an article explaining how not only actual practice, but also going over it in your imagination and sleeping on it helps to learn music faster.

Here endeth the linkspam in lieu of a post.

… but it’s now explicitly so. I found this on Rafa Minuesa’s blog.

By using this icon on my website I am stating…

1. That I am opposed to the use of corporate advertising on blogs.

2. That I feel the use of corporate advertising on blogs devalues the medium.

3. That I do not accept money in return for advertising space on my blog.

signed,

Irina

The wackiest translation job I ever had was to translate user manuals for consumer goods into Dutch. It was wacky because the originals were in Engrish. I went to my employer and asked “do you want a faithful translation or working instructions?” and he wanted working instructions, of course. I was glad that it wasn’t an engineering manual and I knew how all those things actually worked; what I did was write the whole thing myself.

One thing I remember word for word is a line from the instructions for a toaster: “You can now set the knob according to your flavour.” That means, probably, that if you taste like strawberry you should set it to 1, but if you happen to taste like vanilla you should set it to 2.

And recently I read Language Log and found a pointer to this: (the picture is a link; the rest of that site is hilarious too)

Trouw brought it as breaking news: Children perform best without TV, but with computer. (disclaimer: this may be free for subscribers of the paper newspaper only, but everything is in the articles it refers to). The girls were thrilled: they’d always known that it’s watching too much TV that makes the rest of the class stupid. Hours later, I found the same item on the news site nu.nl.

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This is Lionel. He (or perhaps she, or it; I don’t know whether blobs have gender at all) is my useless blob. I’ve wanted to adopt a useless blob for a long time, but never had a place to put it. I may put him in a box in the sidebar when he falls off the page, but he’s all right here for now.

No, I don’t know why he’s called Lionel. That’s just his name.

You can adopt your own useless blob too: click on Lionel to go to spacefem.com (not a bad place to be anyway) and get one.

Or rather, I hate guessing. I was brought up not to peek at the ending of a book because “that would spoil it”, but I’m learning to indulge. If I know who killed Cock Robin I have more brain-power to find out how it was done, and how the author describes how it was done and how people react to it, and I enjoy the book much more. My first reading of a book is often just to know what happens, and if it’s good enough I tend to read it again immediately to really savour it.

Ruined Endings peeks at movies for all of us who’d rather be spoiled than uncertain. Some have the whole plot, most just the ending. Some of my favourites aren’t there (Willow and Labyrinth, for instance) but if I want to go and see something there’s probably a plot summary of it on the site already; it seems to list lots of new(ish) and popular films.

Finally I’ve upgraded (downgraded? well, let’s call it sidegraded) to a real blog. What decided it was an event I wanted to write about when I didn’t have something to write in every category of old-style Found Objects.

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