| Ugh |
[May. 19th, 2012|02:28 pm] |
Trying to cancel Comcast, seeing as, you know, I don't live in America any more. You can't do it online, of course. 15 minutes on Skype navigating the phone menu (it didn't always pick up my key presses), to get a recorded message saying to 'please call during normal business hours, 7am to 8pm Monday to Saturday'. Uhh...I called at 9.30am US time...
On the plus side, I'm viewing a house in about half an hour. It's only about two streets away from where I am now, so it'd be a really easy move! |
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| Teh Romes |
[Jan. 29th, 2012|12:56 pm] |
I recently finished the TV series Rome...a bit rushed towards the end, but very good. It's fairly widely known, but the two main characters, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus, were real people, mentioned by Caesar in his book on the Gallic wars.
These are his words.
I thought it might be instructive to have a go at translating it, and am pleasantly surprised to find it more or less comprehensible (apart from having to look up some vocab). I'm not going to dump a translation of the whole thing in here, but the first couple of sentences go something like 'There were in that legion very strong men, centurions, who drew near the first ranks, Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus. These perpetually had arguments between themselves, regarding who would be brought in advance, and every year disputed about their rank with enmity.'
Note that Pullo and Vorenus are the same rank, centurions (commanding 80 men, roughly equivalent to a captain today); and by 'drawing near the first rank' I deduce they were competing for the post of Primus Pilus, acting as the legate's XO and perhaps equivalent to a colonel. Poor old Pullo took a bit of a demotion for the television.
Here's a translation for the rest of it - basically this is the first scene of the TV series, where Pullo goes charging off into the Gauls and Vorenus rescues him, then they end up best pals.
It feels weird, incidentally, knowing there was a real Julius Caesar, gone to his grave two thousand years ago now, and yet here I am reading his words as he wrote them. I'm sort of curious what the real Pullo and Vorenus got up to.
(Sidenote, the word vaginam appears in that passage. Turns out vagina is Latin for scabbard or sheath. Logical I suppose!) |
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| Somewhat random |
[Jan. 26th, 2012|02:09 pm] |
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This academic paper on female nerdspeak in a California high school might interest some people on here. :) |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 23rd, 2011|10:48 pm] |
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Posting this from ics though :-) |
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| Wootles |
[Dec. 23rd, 2011|05:45 pm] |
I have finally got Android 4.0.3 built directly from Google's source drop and running, graphics accelerated, on my Pandaboard, built directly from the source. The only reason I'm not posting this direct from the board is that it's pretty sluggish but I suspect that's because I'm running the engineering debug build; I'll rebuild tonight using optimised settings (Android takes quite a while to build, maybe 4-5 hours on my machine).
Still, success! Turns out I had no chance to live because Google set me up the bomb regarding the Pandaboard ES; their source tree supports the original Pandaboard but needed some changes made to even get as far as installing the bootloader on the ES. Those changes got pushed on, ooh, Tuesday sometime and I only found the relevant newsgroup thread about it today.
Finally I can mess around with Android and see what I can customise. Might look into porting Qt/Android to it, too, if it doesn't already work. |
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| Accomplished |
[Dec. 16th, 2011|06:28 pm] |
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I just finished my supplementary exercises for Chapter 20 of Wheelocks Latin, meaning I'm now precisely halfway through the course. :) |
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| I finally got around to finishing up my Imperial Guard |
[Oct. 30th, 2011|05:15 pm] |
It's a tiny little mini-army, 500 points, but here they are.
Company HQ 50 points
+voxcaster 5
+grenade launcher 5
+power weapon 10
+medipack 30
+standard 15
= 115 points
Platoon HQ
30 points
+boltgun 2
+commissar 35
= 67 points
Infantry squad
50 points
+grenade launcher 5
= 55 points
Infantry squad
50 points
Heavy weapons squad
60 points
+2 lascannon 30
+missile launcher 10
= 100 points
Veteran squad -
70 points
+2 melta 20
+1 plasma 15
+voxcaster 5
+bolt pistol 2
= 112 points
for a total of 499 points.
I also have the option of swapping one squad out for two bodyguards for the company commander (erroneously shown in that picture) and four grenade launchers. |
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| Huh |
[Oct. 16th, 2011|03:36 pm] |
I never realised that at the back of my apartment complex is a little gate, leading onto a quiet residential street, which comes out on Packard next to Morgan and York. It turns a ~20 minute walk into a 5 minute one.
In other news, apparently the entire universe shops at Trader Joe's on a Sunday afternoon.
In other other news, pizza is a great way to use up leftovers as long as you have somewhat catholic tastes. I wonder how my feta, olive, curried beef, bell pepper and pineapple pizza will turn out. |
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