I’ll skip the bits about how cool it is to have my brothers with me here in Slovenia; it’s been a blast. In the short time they’ve been here, we’ve gone through at least a life time’s of adventure. As proof of this, I present the following video shot just a few hours ago.
Carbonite!
They have this tradition here in Slovenia where carbonite is placed in a barrel, soaked in water, and then tapped with something hot; a stick-on-fire is apropos. The explosion is something akin to a canon. Now, normally all goes on without a hitch. Until a Canadian shows up. If you haven’t already guessed it, this is not what’s supposed to happen.
I was in the process of moving some of my wife’s archives from position X to position Y when I stumbled across this jewel. It’s a tourist pamphlet of Ptuj circa 1987. I found it interesting enough to warrant a quick scan-and-post.
The cover page is actually quite nice. Could be reused. Hint. Hint.
A few weeks back, Anej and I set out to develop a no-nonsense Android application for submission to the Mobitel Android competition. The basic premise was to create an application that provided the full range of services offered by mobitel: a blog reader, an application installer, support information (mobitel centers, etc) and a subscriber’s quota information including support for ordering new quotas. Jan Ferme has a great write-up of the application complete with screenshots.
A bit about the competition …
There were 54 applications submitted. Some of them are really quite impressive and were obviously created with as much commitment and enthusiasm as we put into Moj tehnik. I’m in awe at the amount of skill and creativity that has, well, oozed from the woodwork. Not that I should be surprised, Slovenia is a technologist’s dreamland.
So, how can you help?
At the bottom of Moj tehnik’s submission page there is the omnipresent “Like” button. Just click it. The more votes, the happier we will be. They kindly don’t have any geographic restrictions; anybody, anywhere is accepted.
One more thing. There’s an easter egg in Moj tehnik. The first person who reports it will have a video of me singing about them in the shower submitted to Facebook. (No nudity of course.)
As part of my immersion into the landscape that is Slovene, I’ve started asking for some purely native insults in the language; words or terms which are not inherited from others. Having lived in Flanders for some years, I was sort of expecting some colorful remarks akin to “your father should have speckled the sink”. The results thus far are slightly different.
It turns out that it’s a hard question to answer. Apparently, most of the terms come directly from English or one of the neighboring languages. Anyhow, to keep this short so you can better spend your time with a peder, I present you the results of two weeks intense research. I’m still looking for more|meaning if anybody would care to enlighten.
I’ve got it good. I wanted to play on the Duke Ellington tune “I got it good,” but backslid to real grammar when I realized the language police – i.e. one of the many fine hobbyist grammarians that populate this land – might not get it. That’s not a barb. I hope that one day Canada can reach, say, half the level of bilingualism there is in Slovenia, that we will one day have as many little Anglophones running around able to swear in French as there are little Slovenians able to cuss in English.
Today I received a nice spam message from the incumbent Mayor of Ptuj. By nice I mean: crap. By incumbent I mean: he lost my vote. This is my vengeance.
We all have stupid nagging regrets: why didn’t I buy that 50%-off jacket? Why didn’t I give a euro to that guy in the street? Why did I go back for seconds? These are not the serious regrets at life-turns we’ve taken or missed. They’re just, well, stupid nagging regrets.
You never call your bank to say, “Great job, guys! Thanks for not screwing up.” I know this because I used to work at a financial institution fielding 90 calls a day as a Client Services Representative. It was a brief stint to pay off my student loans and both I and the financial services industry survived.
This was a place where I wrote a complete (thesis) response about a certain set of requirements in old English. It has been redacted based on completely nonsensical grounds. I digress, and digress for the last time.
I’ll keep this short yet still cathartic: please, people, don’t waste other people’s time with nonsense. If you don’t know what you’re doing, start the conversation with “I don’t know but …” and not some unjustified list of demands. On that note, I hence forth ignore demands. Questions and concern are accepted at par.
My daughter and I have recently been infected with Lyme disease compliments of some neighbourhood ticks. We were (hopefully) fortunate to detect the infections before they became too severe. In any case …
I was in the process of moving some of my wife’s archives from position X to position Y when I stumbled across this jewel. It’s a tourist pamphlet of Ptuj circa 1987. I found it interesting enough to warrant a quick scan-and-post.