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August 28, 2006
~A mass of tears have transformed to stones now / Sharpened on suffering / Woven into slings / Hope lies in the rubble of this rich fortress / Taking today what tomorrow never brings~
So yeah, taking a long weekend from a blog is a bad idea, because then you end up doing the same thing again...
Nice article about using screen
Basically, screen allows you to create virtual terminals which are not connected to your actual xterms or console screens. You can then disconnect from a screen session and reconnect from somewhere else while preserving your shell or other running processes. For an introduction to screen, check out this Linux.com article.
This is just the beginning of screen's power and flexibility. You can connect to a session more than once using the -x argument to screen. That means you can for example leave your mail program running in a terminal (under screen) at work and then connect from home to read your mail in the same process. There's no need to disconnect at work, and when you come back in the next morning your mailer will be exactly as you left it, with all your state perfectly preserved.
Screen takes this feature, which is called multi-display mode, to the next level with multi-user mode. In multi-user mode more than one user can access and control a screen session. The problem with this mode is that it's not obvious how to set it up.
There are lots of ways to go about getting magnification with a camera, and I'll talk about many of them here. The topics below are arranged roughly in order of difficulty.
Here's a good comparison photo that shows why RAW is better than JPEG for image detail.
Wikipedia on prescription vs. description in linguistics.
Last year the USDA came up with some fun food safety tips for college students:
leftover pizza is safe for 3 to 4 days
"The Dialect of the Appalachian People"
The reason our people still speak as they do is that when these early Scots and English and Germans (and some Irish and Welsh too) came into the Appalachian area and settled, they virtually isolated themselves from the mainstream of American life for generations to come because of the hills and mountains, and so they kept the old speech forms that have long since fallen out of fashion elsewhere.
Things in our area are not always what they seem, linguistically speaking. Someone may tell you that "Cindy ain't got sense enough to come in outen the rain, but she sure is clever." Clever, you see, back in the 1600's meant "neighborly or accommodating." Also if you ask someone how he is, and he replies that he is "very well", you are not necessarily to rejoice with him on the state of his health. Our people are accustomed to use a speech so vividly colorful and virile that his "very well" only means that he is feeling "so-so." If you are informed that "several" people came to a meeting, your informant does not mean what you do by several - he is using it in its older sense of anywhere from about 20 to 100 people. If you hear a person or an animal referred to as ill, that person or animal is not sick but bad-tempered, and this adjective has been so used since the 1300's. (Incidentally, good English used sick to refer to bad health long, long before our forebearers ever started saying ill for the same connotation.)
Many of our people refer to sour milk as blinked milk. This usage goes back at least to the early 1600's when people still believed in witches and the power of the evil eye. One of the meanings of the word blink back in those days was "to glance at;" if you glanced at something, you blinked at it, and thus sour milk came to be called blinked due to the evil machinations of the witch. There is another phrase that occurs from time to time, "Man, did he ever feather into him!" This used to carry a fairly murderous connotation, having gotten its start back in the days when the English long bow was the ultimate word in destructive power. Back then if you drew your bow with sufficient strength to cause your arrow to penetrate your enemy up to the feathers on its shaft, you had feathered into him. Nowadays, the expression has weakened in meaning until it merely indicates a bit of fisticuffs.
One of the most baffling expressions our people use (baffling to "furriners," at least) is "I don't care to. . . ." To outlanders this seems to mean a definite "no," whereas in truth it actually means, "thank you so much, I'd love to." One is forevermore hearing a tale of mutual bewilderment in which a gentleman driving an out-of-state car sees a young fellow standing alongside the road, thumbing. When the gentleman stops and asks if he wants a lift, the boy very properly replies, "I don't keer to," using care in the Elizabethan sense of the word. On hearing this, the man drives off considerably puzzled leaving an equally baffled young man behind. (Even the word foreigner itself is used here in its Elizabethan sense of someone who is the same nationality as the speaker, but not from the speaker's immediate home area.
Reverend is generally used to address preachers, but it is a pretty versatile word, and full-strength whisky, or even the full-strength scent of skunk, are also called reverend. In these latter instances, its meaning has nothing to do with reverence, but with the fact that their strength is as the strength of ten because they are undiluted.
In the dialect, the word allow more often means "think, say, or suppose" than "permit." "He 'lowed he'd git it done tomorrow."
A neighbor may take you into her confidence and announce that she has heard that the preacher's daughter should have been running after the mailman. These are deep waters to the uninitiated. What she really means is that she has heard a juicy bit of gossip: the preacher's daughter is chasing the local mail carrier. However, she takes the precaution of using the phrase should have been to show that this statement is not vouched for by the speaker. The same phrase is used in the same way in the Paston Letters in the 1400's.
Almost all the so-called "bad English" used by natives of Appalachia was once employed by the highest ranking nobles of the realms of England and Scotland.
Posted by Jon Rubin at August 28, 2006 11:48 PM
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