I’ve noticed in the past the slyness with which Yahoo tries to have you install its applications on your browser.

I remember the first time that I was caught out, asked whether I wanted not to install Ask Jeeves. “Why not?”, I thought. “It could be useful.” So I didn’t uncheck the box.

When I started up Firefox, I realised that there had been a problem. Where there once was a Google search box, there was now Ask Jeeves. Indeed, I’m not the only one to get caught out. I used to work in an office where we would sometimes swap workstations, and somebody had inadvenently seen to it that a few of the machines were bedecked with pointless Yahoo paraphernalia. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the rights to remove programs at work. Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to my parents (for purchasing the wood) and my sister and brother-in-law (for doing the craftwork and installation) Clare and I got to spend a couple of evenings this week emptying our two wardrobes, which have spent the last six months holding a few trees’ worth of books.

I haven’t got around to counting quite how many we have; it’s simply too many. It’s only by creative stacking that we’ve been able to put them all in place, so I’ve identified about twenty that will be given to a charity shop, so that we’ll have a little bit of space to hold the ones that will be undoubtedly purchased in the near future.

This is what our newly equipped office now looks like. Read the rest of this entry »

150 years ago today, December 15th, Ludwik Zamenhof was born. His was a divided city, partitioned in four quarters. Four identifiable groups (Germans, Poles, Jews and Russians) lived in Białystok, each category keeping to its own area.

The young Zamenhof was touched by the unnecessary violence exhibited towards others who were different, the segregation. Having witnessed for the umpteenth time the beating dished out to a member of one group who strayed into another’s area, the young Zamenhof thought to himself that the situation would not have arisen had the two groups involved been able to talk to one another.

So he started work on his project for an international language, a mutually understood yet neutral language that each group would have in addition to its own. The Russians would still have Russian, but switch to the international language when speaking to Germans, who would keep their Germanic tongue, but opt for the international language when in conversation with the Poles, and so on.

At the party for his 18th birthday Zamenhof presented to his friends his lingwe uniwersala, the first draft of what would become nine years later Esperanto.

Since the 1920s Esperanto-speakers have celebrated December 15th as “Zamenhof Day”. Having started with only one member Esperanto has wound its way around the globe; the World Esperanto Association has members in 121 countries. Not a bad rate of success for a project started by a teenager, especially when compared to the results of efforts of intellectual heavyweights such as René Descartes

Anyway, aided and abetted by Google China’s logo today, I’d like to wish well on Zamenhof Day to any and all curious souls who may have stumbled upon this blog entry.

If you’d like to find out more about Esperanto I’ve written a brief description of the language’s history, provided some useful information such as details about its alphabet, how it sounds, and how many speakers it has, and run some online forums where you can get a flavour of some of the young people who speak Esperanto in Britain, find information about our meet-ups, and get answers to any questions that you may have. Have a snoop around; it won’t take more than a few minutes and, you never know; you may find something interesting. I know I did

Thanks!

(Esperantan version mi afiŝos poste.)

Well, it’s not so new anymore, since we’ve been here since August 28th, but this is the first time I’ve gotten around to taking some photos.

So, welcome to our house.  This is it from the outside.

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I’m so mad at myself today.

I’m trying to be mature, but I could quite happily bang my head into a wall in frustration.

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I hate multiplication when one of the multiplicand or multiplier heads into double digits and beyond.  I’d rather shoot myself when both parts become larger numbers.

Fortunately, Russian peasants and the Ancient Egyptians were kind enough to impart the knowledge of how to handle these numbers and come up with an answer with very little effort involved.

Thanks to a book that I’m reading from 1955 I’ve now discovered an even easier way, however large the numbers involved happen to be, which was used by the Mesopotamians.

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Having picked up the engagement rings, it now rested on me to successfully get one on Radio’s finger without losing it in the intervening couple of days.

My plan was to drive to Radio’s, head to our favourite restaurant, then visit Stratford, where I remembered seeing ducks on the river.

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To cut to the chase, Radio and I got engaged this past Valentine’s Day

I decided that I was going to propose in early January. Radio has not been shy of the subject recently, hanging from my neck in a swimming pool in Szombathely and saying “See, they got married Babel, so why can’t we?” and writing that her ideal station in life now would be to be married.

I drove up to her parents’ house one January morning and decided that I would propose that we find out each other’s ring sizes “just in case I ever do decide to propose to you one day.”

Armed with that information, I decided to start the hunt for rings, so that I could pop the question on Valentine’s Day, at that point about four weeks away.

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Sufiĉis jam.

Mi nur malofte uzis na Facebook, tamen lastatempe pasigis pli kaj pli da tempo ĉe ĝi, pro tio, ke mi instalis iun programon Vida Librobreto, kiu necesis pli ol mia kutimo duonsekundo da atento.

Tamen pli kaj eĉ pli ofte amikoj ĝenas min per la babilada funkciilo, kiun lastatempe instalis la kreintoj de FB. Aparte du amikoj ĉiam saltas sur min tuj kiam mi malfermas la paĝon, unu el kiu neniam meritas konversacion, ĉar ŝi ne havas interesindajn diraĵojn.

Sufiĉis, do mi eltrovis kiel ŝajnigi min esti for. Pro tio, ke mi uzas la Esperantan version de Facebook, mi decidis fari tiun afiŝon en la lingvo internacia.

Do, por kaŝi vian retstaton, por ke teduloj ne interrompu vian retumadon nur pro tio, ke vi pekis per okulumado de via Facebook-paĝo, faru tiel:

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I was perusing eBay earlier whilst killing some time. My plan was to pick up a couple of small Transformers, since my nephew, all of twenty months old, loved playing with my cuddly plush of Bumblebee, which even transforms into a Volkswagen Beetle.

He enjoyed playing with his new buddy so much that I went as far as getting some friends down, this time my keyrings of Windcharger and Brawn.

So far, so good, since I’ve found a bulk lot of minibots going for a pound, so I’ll be sure to keep my eyes open there.

I used the broad search term decepticon and quickly descended on the most unusual gift, though one that is perfect for someone who meets my characteristics of being in a settled relationship that could get a little bit more serious over the next few years … Read the rest of this entry »