I am glad to announce that I am back from an involuntary blogging hiatus. My old computer died, and I have finally gotten a new one. This means that I will be back at blogging.
I am glad to announce that I am back from an involuntary blogging hiatus. My old computer died, and I have finally gotten a new one. This means that I will be back at blogging.
A feature recently added to WordPress is Plinky Prompts, which appear at the screen just after you publish a post. They provide suggestions as to future posts. For my last post, I got these ones (see picture [click to enlarge]):
For those who can’t read the circled writing, the one in the upper left says “349th post.” The one in the lower right says “Do you blog? Why or why not?”
Epic FAIL.
As for those questions, the first one is pretty obvious and is utterly unworthy of wasting any more attention on. As for the second, I blog because if enough people speak up, all will hear us.
As for the Plinky Prompts, this is another example of why dictionaries define human intelligence, animal intelligence, military intelligence, extraterrestrial intelligence, and artificial intelligence and in that order.
An actual conversation I had today:
Another person: What are you doing on that computer?
Me: Stuff for college. Why do you ask?
A: I tried using it earlier today. All I got when I turned on the monitor was a logo saying that there was no signal.
Me: Did you turn on the box?
A (looking at the CPU part): What was the computer doing turned off?
Me: I’m pretty sure they turn off the computers when the place is closed, so that they save power.
A: Tell them to keep them on all the time.
This is a good arrangement of the most famous duet in classical music. I really like it because it’s instrumental (and therefore non–sung, making it a billion times better than the sung version), because this number is one of my favourite pieces of classical music, and because I played the flute in school band.
If you cannot see the video, click here.
If you recognize the music, you’re in good company. “The Flower Duet”, also known as “Viens, Mallika” and “Sous le dôme épais“* has been used in gazillions of commercials to sell all sorts of different things.
And what’s with this number having all these titles, some of which look like French phrases?† Any what do I mean by being better because it is “non–sung”? To me, that raises an unsolvable issue with (some of the) classical music I like. I like lots of classical music, but I don’t like the singing that does with some parts of it. Basically, I don’t like the sound of the voices in that style of singing. In other words, I don’t like opera, cantatas, etc. The unsolvable problem is that several of my favourite pieces of classical music, happen to have singing in their “complete” versions. “The Flower Duet” comes from an opera and I like the music, so long as Lakmé and Mallika aren’t singing to it; I like playing the Queen of the Night’s vengeful call for murder on my flute, but not the Queen of the Night herself; “Sheep May Safely Graze” is Bach’s best work, so long as Pales isn’t singing in it; and so on. And sometimes it’s hard to find good–quality instrumental versions of such music, unless you play it yourself.
Today marks the end of two years blogging about whatever is worth talking about.
As I have no intention of stopping, to celebrate the start of year 3, I’d like to thank all my readers and commentators.
Thank you, everyone.
In my neighbourhood there lived this really friendly cat, a black longhair. We called her Spook. She was always visiting everyone on the neighbourhood. But she especially liked us. Whenever she appeared on our deck or on our street, we would always open the door for her and she would always come. We often fed her, and oftentimes she would sleep in our house, sometimes on our beds. Spook was the best cat ever.
Today, Spook’s owners moved away, taking her with them.