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1:00 PM
I think you mean potting.
Or possibly patting.
 
I thought you said plotting
 
I am not a Korean.
 
>! Spoiler.
Hmm.
 
Putting the IT in KITT since 1982.
 
How am I supposed to know what works in chat. The faq doesn't tell me anything.
 
1:01 PM
@RegDwigнt It's more idiomatic to drop the article.
 
>! Spoiler: Jim Carrey is dead the whole time.
 
@Alraxite There's a sandbox.
 
@KitFox I knew it!
 
@KitFox but that was not what I wanted to say.
 
OK.
 
1:02 PM
Rick Bombastley.
Speaking of which, I think we need to pipe more questions into this room.
BRB fixing.
 
Huh wait how did we dunit?
 
Are you piping the feed?
 
I thought we could just add and remove tags, but it's way more complicated than that.
 
@KitFox Or how about you make an all-inclusive chat faq
rather than make us try stuff out
The current faq doesn't list how to make tags, for eg.
 
1:05 PM
Looks like I need to create a new tag set, then use its feed's URL as input here.
 
@Alraxite That sounds like a great idea. Thanks for volunteering to do it.
 
But where do I create tag sets?
 
in the topic?
 
In the who?
 
the topic. where the tags go
 
1:06 PM
Oh, so that's why we don't get all the questions in the drop.
@MattЭллен No, it's something else.
 
@KitFox yes, JSB identified some tags of interest. Then either himself or myself set it up. I don't remember!
I not know how use it.
 
Right, yes. Let me think.
You can use the tagged url.
Crud. I don't know.
 
Worst of all, I don't remember what JSB's original tags were, and I am not seeing a way to see them anywhere. So I can't just nuke this feed and create a new one from scratch, either.
He used , and then one or two more.
 
Oh, found it!
You need to add a filter.
 
1:11 PM
To what and where?
 
Yeah, I was looking for that.
Except I stripped off the URL and arrived at tagsets instead. Then at feeds.
Yup, they both use the same ID. But one is called tagsets, and the other filters.
Okay, let's see, then.
 
Yay! I helped!
 
Six tags!
Six!
Good thing I didn't try to remember them all.
 
Maybe we should have a SWR feed, so we can jump on them right away.
 
1:16 PM
Oh come on, there's a limit on the number of characters you can input for the tags!
And JSB used it all up. Every last character.
I can't even add a whitespace.
 
efficiency!
 
Well okay.
I will just add a second filter.
Oh wait. That's not how the form works.
I have to enter each tag individually.
That's why there's a size limit.
Man, this Internet is so complicated.
Also, it appears we have successfully nuked some of the original bad tags.
 
Yay us!
 
the words tag is long gone :)
 
1:23 PM
Yay.
Thank you, Kit.
Now let's wait and see how it pans out.
 
RegDwigнt has made a change to how people experience life
 
With a club.
 
In a club.
 
No half dollars in this chat.
 
Whoa!
 
1:25 PM
Yep. Four out of five not tagged properly. The filter works.
 
You included German, Japanese, and Russian L&Us.
Not sure if you realize that.
 
@RegDwigнt You created a feed that lets you know when things aren't tagged properly? That's impressive.
You know what would be funny... is if I created a sockpuppet that auto-posted questions from ELU and ELL to each other.
 
Yeah, but not really.
 
@MrHen well that was the original idea behind the original filter. I have but expanded it a little bit.
 
@KitFox Clarification: It would be funny as long as I wasn't elected mod.
 
1:28 PM
So when is this damn thing finally over?
 
@MrHen wait, are you blackmailing us into voting for you?
 
I thought it was to be at 8pm on this day.
 
Off to work!
@RegDwigнt I would never!
 
I think MrHen is blackmailing us into voting for him.
 
Good thing we already did then.
 
1:29 PM
(... but is it working?)
 
We will see in... when will we see?
Like one day left or what?
 
> Election closes tomorrow.
 
@KitFox yes.
 
But what does that mean? As soon as it is tomorrow, the election is done? Because SE's tomorrow starts at 8pm.
 
@KitFox I do.
 
1:30 PM
Of course you do.
 
@MrHen Do you play video games?
 
I want entertainment from other sites, too. Just made sure to except ELL.
I was torn on SO, but then decided against.
They probably have two hundred questions a minute with the tag.
 
It seems like "Apply non-breaking space to the end of genotypes to fix IE display issues" is maybe not as robust a solution as I would like to see.
 
I really need a filter for questions that can't spell English correctly.
@KitFox so you're saying your standards are too high. Solution: lower your standards.
 
Oh that worked. Thanks.
 
It works for education and diplomacy, so why shouldn't it work for programming.
 
@Alraxite I do, yes.
 
> “One of the more peculiar attempts to throw light on the question of whether drinking coffee is bad for one’s health’ was carried out in the 18th century by King Gustaf III of Sweden…. A pair of monozygotic twins had been sentenced to death for murder.
Gustaf III commuted their death sentences to life imprisonment on the condition that one twin drank a large bowl of tea three times a day and that the other twin drank coffee. The twin who drank tea died first, aged 83-a remarkable age for the time. Thus the case was settled: coffee was the less dangerous of the two beverages. The king, on
 
@MrHen Have you played Myst III?
 
That is damn interesting.
 
1:36 PM
@Alraxite Ha, you're good at this. :)
 
I never got to play it.
 
Also, obviously they just gave him bad tea.
 
I'll probably get them later.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 clealy a conspiracy by the coffee plantation owners
 
@RegDwigнt I think it just proves that drinking tea OR coffee is good for you
 
1:37 PM
@Alraxite I enjoyed the first two more than the others.
 
OK.
 
Alright, really off to work!
 
I've met one of the Myst guys. He has a new game coming out soon.
 
@MrHen So, is that mystery considered solved?
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 yeah, like it proves sitting in jail is good for you.
 
1:38 PM
@Alraxite Works for me.
 
Still likes to mention frequently that he worked on Myst.
 
Yay!
Oh my god, @Cerberus just left.
R.I.P. Cerberus.
 
@KitFox That's the sort of thing that works well when trying to pick up gamer girls who were 12 in 1992
 
I suppressed rolling my eyes.
Also refrained from telling him that I finished it in under 12 hours and didn't see what all the fuss was about.
 
We're talking Myst?
 
1:41 PM
And was it really 1992? I thought that was 1994ish.
 
@KitFox I wonder if he hears that a lot? "Didn't last as long as I expected, can't see what the fuss was about"
 
Hahaha
He was reasonably attractive.
 
@KitFox yeah 1992-ISH ish ish
 
@KitFox you couldn't tell him that you myst the point
 
@KitFox Election chat ends at 2014-06-24 12:00:00Z; election ends at 2014-06-24 20:00:00Z
 
1:42 PM
@MattЭллен Oh ugh.
@AndrewLeach Thank you.
Dunno why I couldn't find the actual time.
 
Just hover over the references in the sidebar. Works for most relative references like "tomorrow".
 
Yes, I realized that must be it after you posted.
Also, I adjusted the Election Chat notice.
 
@KitFox I feel I myst out, not having played it
 
hugs
Please stop.
 
gets mysty eyed
 
1:48 PM
headdesk I need moar coffee.
 
Oh, OK
 
Now I wonder why he named himself Hen.
 
It's truly a mystery
 
@MattЭллен myst you keep doing that?
 
@Alraxite The reason is lost in the mysts of time.
 
1:53 PM
Oh good.
 
But probably his surname is Henderson, or something.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I'm just up to a little mystchief
 
Myster Hen!
 
We'll myst you!
 
2:00 PM
@MattЭллен Tschüß.
 
2:13 PM
Good to know you lot haven't forgotten me. :/
 
Who?
0
Q: Is it A Honorable or An Honorable

ThiharaWhich is grammatically correct? Honorable starts with an H so it should be a honorable but it's pronounced with an vowel so it can also be an honorable. I've heard the argument both ways , so which one is correct?

 
Someone just upvoted that.
Why on Earth?
 
I closed this as a dupe, but I feel like there was a better dupe, one that specifically addressed the leading 'h'.
Now I'm off to a meeting.
 
55
Q: When should I use "a" versus "an" in front of a word beginning with the letter h?

crowleywilsonA basic grammar rule is to use an instead of a before a vowel sound. Given that historic is not pronounced with a silent h, I use “a historic”. Is this correct? What about heroic? Should be “It was a heroic act” or “It was an heroic act”? I remember reading somewhere that the h is sometimes sile...

 
@KitFox It's a silent h, so the Q you posted is fine
 
2:23 PM
@RegDwigнt That's the one I was thinking.
kbai.
 
@RegDwigнt Because downvoting is rude and offensive and upvoting is nice and cuddly. Who doesn't like nice things?
 
I don't like nice things. If they were any good they wouldn't need to be nice. They could just go ahead and be awful and still be good.
There should be rep points for using the search feature.
Right now you get rep for not searching the site.
Dupes are actively encouraged.
 
That's always been the case.
 
Yes, so?
 
2:35 PM
I, and others, have complained about that for years.
Well, you said "right now", as if it were new.
 
Nah.
Actually I wonder what I would say if it were new.
Probably just "now".
 
hm.
I guess your previous sentence, which I hadn't read yet, does change the context a bit
a'ight, nm. it was fine the way you wrote it. I humbly withdraw my statements.
 
Cool. We have a great tagline for tomorrow.
Don't forget to subscribe by sending money!
 
In the moring we set up a meeting to talk about software for project component X, as project component X is highest priority! Come the meeting in the afternoon and project component X is now least important and highest priority is project component Y, which I have nothing to do with. Yay!
 
I am sending all the money to a high-rep user named Mr. Shiny and New 安宇.
 
2:40 PM
A fat lot of things will he subscribe you to.
Probably even MEGABLOCKS and Playmobil.
 
blasphemy!
flags
 
stiklebricks?
meccano?
 
Hijo de la puta.
Or something.
 
son of a whore?
ah, son of a bitch
 
2:42 PM
@MattЭллен oh, that reminds me of when a toy store opened near my workplace, and I went there after work to look for Lego, and couldn't find any, so I asked the woman behind the cash if they had some, and she said, in the snootiest british accent I've ever heard, "We have MeccANo".
 
I forgot I was not talking @tchrist.
 
jajaja
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 lol
 
Apologies for shitty camera work, but my lego street has grown
 
Still waiting to build the PR.
 
2:44 PM
@RegDwigнt It's great
 
I know.
I skipped on the City Wok, though.
 
I laughed when I found the brick-built writing
 
It is missing a line.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 very nice
 
@RegDwigнt which is?
 
2:45 PM
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 the one between the two top lines of the ah screw it you know the hanzi why am I falling for this.
 
@RegDwigнt oh, you mean the 国
 
Of course.
Also, it's the two bottom lines. Good thing I stopped while I still could.
 
Yeah I never figured out a way to get that little dot in there.
 
I think I will brick-build 中华人民共和国.
In microscale.
 
2:47 PM
Then put it up on LEGO Ideas and have two billion people vote for it.
@AndrewLeach why does the Lego bus stop mark the Year of the Bus, and not the Year of Lego?
Nonsensical Brits are nonsensical.
 
It's outside Hamleys.
Or Hamley's. I can't remember.
 
@RegDwigнt ...and neither are the Brits
 
@AndrewLeach it's in the article (hint).
It is also spelled out in Lego above the stop.
 
@RegDwigнt clearly that would be marked by a lego block made from 100000 lego blocks
or would that mark the year of the fractal?
 
@MattЭллен the giantest POOP ever!
 
2:51 PM
@MattЭллен The year of the 'year-ofs'
 
@RegDwigнt yes
 
@RegDwigнt Is it a poop if it's actually brick-built?
 
@Mitch interesting.
 
@RegDwigнt Oh, so it's because of you we can't have nice things?
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 that's the fun thing. It would be an actual Part made of Other Parts, yet you wouldn't call it that.
 
2:52 PM
That's why we have plastic covering all our sofas.
@RegDwigнt I want a Lego part made of less than one Lego part.
 
@RegDwigнt The problem is that acronym, POOP, leaves out the most relevant letters.
 
Legatoms.
 
@Mitch Does the box count? It's made by lego. Sold in stores. Isn't made out of lego parts.
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Yes, it counts. Should be lego attachable to other lego boxes though for it to be legitimate.
 
@Mitch that's called Galidor.
 
2:55 PM
To make the box out of Lego would be just gilding the lily.
 
@RegDwigнt I don't believe in your non-canonical bastardized cartoony pseudo-Lego
Like it's made for kids.
 
@Mitch and yet it is precisely what you asked for.
 
You and your ... logic and ... words,.. and stuff.
 
2:56 PM
 
defender of the iotei dimension!
 
I gotta run. Lators.
 
^ lego box lego attachable to other lego boxes
yet not made of lego
my answer is way less offensive than Reg's Galidor answer.
 
what you need to make now is a box made from lego bricks that isn't attachable to other lego boxes made from lego bricks
 
2:59 PM
That's easy
Just put tiles on top
 
And the bottom?
 
and the bottom?
 
They even have bottom tiles now
 
jinx!
:-o
bottom tiles!
 
so, yeah, you could do that too
 
3:00 PM
we truly are in the future
 
I know!
I was trying to figure out how a particular Lego Minecraft thing had been made. It looks like a brick, with a tile on top, but underneath has little triangle wedges, and they are upside down. I was amazed: had Lego finally made the two-sided plate?! But no. They used the new tile-on-bottom piece and just printed the minecraft ghost's face upside down.
 
cheat sheets are meant to make things easier
3
now I feel like I know less than nothing about vim
 
I see. very clever
 
3:04 PM
That clever trick almost made me buy the set.
 
@MattЭллен That’s kinda what I was thinking.
 
@tchrist It, like Vim itself, must really just be a cruel joke.
 
vimplosion
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Hm. It’s certainly not the cheat-cheat I ever always gave out to people learning. vi is really simple to use.
 
Vim probably feels very natural to guys using DOS
 
3:11 PM
I doubt it.
 
@JohanLarsson I think vim only feels natural to people who are used to using vim. When I was using dos, we had full-screen editors that used the arrow keys to insert text just like a modern word processor.
 
They are very stupid un/mis-educated about Unix conventions, such as $ for EOL.
 
I'm pretty sure switching from any IDE one is used to is painful
 
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 yeah, DOS had EDIT. it was similar to nano, but with fewer controls :D
 
@MattЭллен It got better over time. Mouse support, etc.
 
3:13 PM
@JohanLarsson vi is an editor; Unix is the IDE.
 
This is the kind of thing that I would normally give my students.
 
but EDIT never made you switch from navigate to edit mode. I guess that was implicit in the name
 
@tchrist nice. bookmarked, if I ever get stuck editing text on a server again.
@MattЭллен yeah those modes have their uses, but they confuse the heck out of people.
 
3:19 PM
The main power of vi is that it is made for typists. You don't have to look at the keyboard or use the mouse to do stuff. It’s command structure is [COUNT] VERB OBJECT, where COUNT is an optional integer repeat-count, VERB is something like d for delete, c for change, etc, and OBJECT is a motion command like w for word or $ for EOL. So 3dw or d3w both delete three words. If you double the edit command, like dd, cc, etc it means to do it to the whole line.
It also has memory buffers that you can put stuff into, or even append into. There isn’t just one single “mouse buffer” for copying and pasting.
The hardest part about vi for me was remembering that y is the copy cmd, standing for yank. So something like y} puts a copy of the text from the cursor through the end of the current paragraph or block into the default, unnamed buffer. You can use 'ay} to put it into buffer a, 'by} to put it into buffer b, etc. Then you go somewhere else in the file, and “put” the text (paste the buffer) using something like 'bp to put the b buffer after the cursor, etc.
 
I like applications that can be operated from the keyboard alone.
 
You can also place "mark(er)s" in your file. These are then legal motion targets, and thus also lead arguments to edit commands. For example, ma marks the current cursor location as location a. Just saying 'a from anywhere is a sort of "goto a" motion command, while saying d'a would delete through the a mark.
I taught vi to incoming freshmen lo these thirty years ago and then some.
Now, vim for “vi improved” does much more, and this is reflected in that God-awful “cheat” sheet. But I have just given you the basic overview of the combinatoric command structure.
 
Have you seen Rob today?
 
No.
 
3:39 PM
@Mr.Shiny LEGO Juniors, I meant.
 
@KitFox oh
Like this?
 
Yes.
 
the Miley Cyrus kit!
 
heh
well, at least the junior stuff is still real lego, even if the kits are a bit dull
I forget @kit how he got them? gift from someone? Can they be exchanged somewhere?
oh, his birthday, right?
 
Yes, his birthday and they've already put them together.
 
3:43 PM
ah
So was there a problem, or ....?
 
No. Just I said "Friends" yesterday, and didn't have time to figure out why I was wrong.
 
ah, okay
yesterday my kids were discussing what they'd do with all my lego after I die.
 
do they think you'll have to die before you'll let them play with it?
 
Well, those are the rules. Over my dead body.
 
3:47 PM
But actually the rules are "wash your hands"
 
I was having utterly unprofessional thoughts in the business process meeting I just attended.
And I acted all stupid for the few minutes I actually spoke.
Embarrassing!
 
I hate it when that happens.
 
@RegDwigнt The “abbreviation” joputa generally gets the point across clearly enough in casual conversation. It punches a bit above bastard, more towards asshole. If you want something as strong as fucking assholes, you probably need to spell it out and maybe qualify it, too, like (esos malditos) hijos de puta. That sounds a bit formal; I’d have to rattle my head a bit for minute to think of something just as strong but shorter.
 
@tchrist I thought we didn't want to help people be mean? ;)
 
I couldn't help it. I don't work with many really attractive people.
 
3:50 PM
@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Reg is too nice. I’m trying to lend balance to his life. :)
 
ima get lunches brb
 
ima commute bbl
 
ima get lunch too, bbl
 
@Cerb vvvvvvvvvvvvvvv
"To ask" already implies a question, which is similar to the Dutch verb "vragen", not so much "stellen" (to pose). In both Dutch and English, the default is to omit the preposition in that case. But similar as Dutch and English may be, prepositions are the major exception. My (native Dutch) mother invited the neighbor's kid and me (both 4 years old) to sit on the table, and we happily complied ;) — MSalters 8 hours ago
 

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