@snailboat Because an octopus is like a bug somehow? Lotsa legs?

@Robusto Arthropods and molluscs differ seriously, and their teuthonic majesties will be the first to insist on respecting that. Or else they'll eat you.

One has crunchy arms witnout cooking and the other with cooking.

Greetings.

@tchrist How is your friend?

Had skin grafts on the 3rd degree burns on his lower right arm yesterday. They also disabused him of all notion of an early checkout. His sisters come to tkae care of him Friday andd he should get a few days away then. Next week he gets more ggrafts for his back.

He will probably be a month out of work. His boss is furious. The hospital papers proving he can't work for a month may not be enough. They will probably fire him anyway. They certainly are not paying him which is its own disaster.

And you cannot change your own bandage for the back.

He will probably owe several years' salary even with insurance. Basically complete servitude and poverty for the next 5-10 years and no escape. He is very distressed.

I in contrast would not only pay nothing, but would get full salary for like um 3 weeks Then like 65 or 80% for several month if needed.

And that right there is the immense gulf between the working poor and the working professional. It is a gaping abyss of despair that ruins people.

However, I would not be out of work as long at all. His job requires physical labor and a lot of motion. I can do mine from bed.

@Cerberus How many crimes is that? I've lost count.

I also make about 4x what he makes. I could hire help.

I pray I never need it.

The belly and side are 2nd degree; the forearm and back are third. He probably fell backwards against the heater and rolled himself off with his arm, getting the lesser burns on the front. too drunk to know the damage, passed out, then awoke to find the dangerous disaster but remembering nothing.

I'm glad he has family coming but they cannot stay long and he cannot go there. It's a 3h drive for his dad and a somewhat treacherous 4h one for his sisters, mom, grandma over 11 and 12k winter-spring passes.

I see why they have him on anxiolytic medications. Hardly blame them. Thing is he is under very closely monitored care at the ICU, so those can be safely given there in that environment even with the very strong opiates. It simply would not be safe for him at home to self-medicate. I don't think he has the discipline not to take more than he should under great pain. That is exactly how our other friend perished less than 24h released.

My minds circles relentlessly on all this.

Life is a series of mishaps, disappointments, and failures punctuated by regular and fairly predictable disasters with the occasional random calamity thrown in. Nothing this side of the grave can wholly assuage all that, so we all muddle through the best we can. But sometimes, sometimes it is not enough. Catastrophe comes knocking and will not be denied, falling equally and randomly on every last one of us.

Outrageous fortune's slings and errors are our lot to suffer, and the sea of troubles that is life is too vast ever to take arms against and so end. Will we or nill we, Fortune shall have her way with all of us, and she is a capricious mistress and cruel. There are no happy endings.

@Robusto Management consultants have made products of Agile.

I have a recipe for effective meetings. Book them 15 minutes before people go to lunch.

@Robusto the real question is: where the hell is the eszett on a Swiss keyboard?

@JohanLarsson good plan!

morning

@tchrist No, the radical @snailboat posted, which is the radical used in taco, is by itself the kanji for "bug"; that's all I meant by that.

@RegDwigнt I have never used one. Nor would I, unless I were desperate.

@JohanLarsson That is either a good plan or a way to miss your lunch date.

I have used it many times, it works in Sweden.

@JohanLarsson Well, what works in the People's Republic of Sweden and what works over here are probably very different.

Yeah, you guys probably eat more :)

No, we crucify ourselves for work more.

The last refuge of incompetence is to call a meeting.

insta star

Heh. So you know I'm right. :)

but maybe not the last refuge

It is what they industry pays for.

No. I just borrowed the form from a well known trope.

ARe you thinking about quitting again?

That explains why meetings are so violent

@JohanLarsson Sí, todavía y siempre.

Ha, we have a QA person whose first name is "Harsha" . . . descriptive name, yeah?

Kill it with ire.

But I need to know!

Too late.

It goes like this: da dum, da dum, da duttity dum and then there's something about love

*da duddidy

At least that's how I heard it. Yours is a mondegreen.

Close. It went something like Lady Madonna, dum dum dum dum dummidy dum. and then something about ... January?

@Mitch Clean out your ears, pilgrim. It's "tum tum tum tum" not "dum dum dum dum" . . .

You kids these days and your autotune. Back in my day the scratching of the needle was an integral part of the song

I have fond memories of one of those 20 minute songs by Pink Floyd where at about 17:53, it'd skip back. But those guys are so consistent, I'm expecting the skip for about 10 minutes

@Mitch "Careful with that axe, Eug/Careful with that axe, Eug/Careful with that axe, Eug . . ."

Several species of small furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a Pict

@terdon I knew it! Pink Floyd was really a Morris Dancing group that got way out of hand!

Heh, that might explain a few things. Still has my vote for best song name EVAH! though.

@Mitch Q. Why do Morris dancers wear bells? A. So they can annoy the blind as well.

@terdon Also something you find in the dim caverns of an acid trip at 3:00 in the morning and wonder how the hell you got there.

In Turkey, 'fascist' means 'Morris Dancer'. So I can understand the jail time.

@Robusto I find it hard to believe the artists were stoned all the time. You have to have a bit of perseverance to be so successful (and write coherent music).

@Cerberus So it's like the universe is conspiring against me buying a phone. I went to a place two days ago who were ready to sell me the phone, except they only had one in stock and it had been returned as defective. I went to another place, but the phone kiosk in the larger store was closed, despite their website telling me it should be open, and none of the other employees in the store would sell me the phone.

@Mitch I didn't say they were tripping. I said I was.

Although I do believe, and I think history will back me up on this, that they were thoroughly conversant with the practice of tripping.

@Robusto Oh sure. I didn't mean to imply otherwise.

@Robusto Yes. That's my point. I have a hard enough time putting two words together when sober. So I'm impressed with their ability to put many notes together, one after the other, repeatably. And then Dark Side of the Moon was so normal.

I saw Pink Floyd live in Chicago back in the day. I was tripping then, but they probably weren't. I recall that I kept wishing the crowd would STFU during the quiet parts of their songs.

Had they just changed over to caffeine for that?

Dunno. Didn't have a backstage pass.

@Robusto other people ruin everything.

also, people are idiots.

L'enfer est les autres, as Sartre said.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Ouch, you are one unlucky man.

Is it still the Moto X you want?

@Cerberus no, I switched to the N5, because it's nexus and because my wife agreed to take it from me as soon as I want to buy a different upgrade.

@tchrist That is indeed horrible.

I thought Obamacare was going to partly solve this social problem?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Haha I love you and your wife's perverted system.

How much is the N5?

You can't order it from the Play Shoppe?

Play Shoppe?

You mean Ye Merry Old Play Shoppe?

@tchrist God bless America!

@Cerberus nope

play.google.com/store?hl=en

@Robusto I look at the reflections in the eyes of people in photographs to see the photographer.

and I saw an N6 at a kiosk and it's way too big for me. It's bigger even than the OnePlus1 which I thought was too big.

I see they don't sell it here either.

And you are still set on a Nexus?

@Cerberus The place I went to yesterday had it for $360, which is cheaper than when it was new at the play store.

Hmm.

@Cerberus I like having the latest android.

Still more expensive than the LG G2, which has the better hardware.

Just saying, just saying.

@Cerberus: In other news, my battery seems to have stabilized in Lollipop. I worked from home yesterday and it only ate 6% battery.

The G2 is nearly impossible to find here

Ah, good!

and also the G2 doesn't have the latest android.

@Robusto Is that because they released a new update that fixed it? Or just...some unknown factor changed?

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Even the Gnex has various Lollipop ROMS, I believe.

I have to admit I'm getting lazy too.

@Cerberus No new update. Some people say that it takes a while for Lollipop to quite whatever agitation causes it to devour power.

Okay.

Good to know.

Although I will not update soon anyway.

@Cerberus 3rd party rom support is meant to be a backstop for OEM failure to deliver, not the main feature.

I actually preferred a custom ROM over Google's own ROM on my Gnex.

But I know I cannot convert you.

I like, eg, Cyanogen, but it takes them a long time to get builds out.

I'm lazy enough to keep the LG stock ROM, because it works well enough.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Unlike Verizon . . .

@Robusto well, that's just it. If I don't buy an unlocked Nexus, there are dozens of factors slowing down the update stream. Carriers, OEMs, etc.

That's why the Nexus family of phones is ideal for me... if only the Nexus 6 had a phone-sized variant!

Instead of that phablet monstrosity

@Cerberus yes, great, they've just started the alpha testing! woo!

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I don't like a phone I have to carry in a backpack.

@Robusto me neither.

If I want a tablet, I'll carry a tablet.

Hell, if Google would make a Nexus 6 that was the same size as the 5, and otherwise indistinguishable from the N6, and even charge the same price, I'd buy it now.

Just because I could actually place an order for the phone and have it delivered to my home in Canada and the phone would be unlocked and would get updates.

that combination of (unlocked, updates, purchasable) is maddeningly difficult to find

@Cerberus Yes. And you're always going on about not being an early adopter... I don't do CM nightlies until at least the first stable release.

not on my daily driver anyway

Neither do I.

But I can afford to wait 2 or 3 months: you cannot.

So, yeah, they've managed to get builds for 12.1 amazingly quickly compared to their past performance. But these are still alpha builds.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 There's a reason it's called the bleeding edge. A lot of folks don't think about that.

So I think a few months is incredibly quick, it'll be over before you know it.

@Robusto I'm fine with installing the android updates as soon as google releases them. I'm less fine with installing the CM updates as soon as CM manages to make them compile.

@Cerberus But it's not ready yet.

And they struggle to keep up... every time Google releases a new update they abandon an old branch and start trying to merge and stabilize a new branch... Some versions on some phones never stabilize

CM is undermanned for their job.

It's just too big a task, because the phone industry is so undisciplined compared to the PC industry.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 It's only been one month.

Every phone is different enough from the reference standard that it requires a custom-made kernel just to boot and find the hardware. Oh, and sometimes there are multiple variants of a phone that are difficult to identify. And there's no way to replace a single bit of misbehaving hardware.

Yeah, that sucks.

So devs quickly abandon models they can't support, because it's too hard

Hell, even the manufacturers abandon old models

how is a 3rd party dev supposed to be able to do anything?

And yet, many people are very happy with some custom ROMs that are not extremely far behind, and the official Google version, on the other hand, is often riddled with bugs in its .0 version.

I have a not-that-old Android tablet that is basically useless now because nobody can support new builds on it and performance is stagnating as Google keeps changing its play apps

@Cerberus "offten riddled with bugs"... I have yet to see that. I've been slavishly updating since 2.3

You know what, I hate that.

Google auto-updating software on my phone.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 And I have yet to see bugs in CM.

We're probably both lucky: the Internet is full of reports.

@Cerberus Well, I've seen many.

I've run CM on my Asus Transformer TF101 tablet, and on my Nexus S. The Nexus S had tons of bugs, but mostly minor and it wasn't a daily driver so I didn't care as much. The TF101 was totally unstable.

By the way, why don't you go back to an earlier version of the Play Services and block the updating mechanism? It can be done; I have been planning to do so.

Those are ancient devices.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 Is your phone rooted?

Perhaps it was a lot worse back then.

The TF101 had a bug where it would randomly reboot. Asus finally fixed it in the last update they delivered which was a 4.0 version. Every CM release I tried had that bug. It wasn't until I tried some bastard custom rom that was cobbled together from CM and some other things that finally fixed the bug and let me run 4.2. No stock CM release worked.

Perhaps CM has improved a lot after the Nexus S.

@Robusto currently, no. I unrooted to get Lollipop and haven't bothered rooting since, and now the screen is busted so....

CM for the Gnex was fine.

I still use it on my old phone, in fact.

CM 10 or so.

By the way, my friend dropped his Iphone 6, and I watched a video on how to replace just the glass. It's horrible!

@Cerberus Well, it's stable on the Nexus S, but there were still lots of bugs. And lots of regressions. On CM 10 I could make it rotate the phone any way I wanted, which is handy because I have my Nexus S upside down (because of the cables). In CM 11 that feature disappeared for no reason.

You can probably get that function back with Xposed.

I got it back by editing some configuration file that enables tablet mode or some such.

But, yeah, that's why I take the time to do an update and test it a little bit.

I also worked around the deficiencies in the CM 11 launcher by switching to Nova

Anyway, CM is fine, but they're not fast enough for my taste. If they could somehow get early access to the android source they could probably be really awesome, but they're not, so they play catch-up. And that means that only the most popular phones get good CM support for a couple versions and then it fizzles.

Well.

Oh, and a minor point, CM has changed their release structure so many times it's impossible to tell what is the most recent release build for any particular phone.

Or what is the most recent build that is of release quality.

Like, whatever build I'm running on my Nexus S seems really stable, but I don't know what that kind of build is called, or how it relates to the nightlies. Is it just a nightly with a special label? or is it forked from the nightlies? etc.

I mean, seriously, how is a non-expert supposed to make sense of this page

@Robusto Desperate Houserobs? I've heard good things about that one. Especially the episode in which they use a Swiss keyboard.

@RegDwigнt Reg! long time no chat about lego. Did I tell you I joined a cult LUG? And being a lug member is what gives me access to the AFOL Days

@Robusto the name of the song is Susan Weinstein. That's common knowledge.

@RegDwigнt Hey, as a translator would you say translating inter-language contracts is about the hardest thing to do?

Mkay, what is an inter-language contract?

Is that like, English's promise to never steal French words again?

Two corporations enter into a contract with each other.

To do whatever corporations do: rape, pillage, slaughter, etc.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 that is great news. And it reminds me that my own AFOL-Day pass will expire this year, I will need to renew it. And for that I will need to get active on that one forum again...

@Robusto I think rape and slaughter translate pretty well into a great variety of languages.

But I wouldn't know.

@Mr.ShinyandNew安宇 I believe everything above Nightly is probably OK.

@RegDwigнt once you've raped and slaughtered, there's no need to translate?

@MattE.Эллен Everyone needs an avocation.

I specifically dropped out of my studies precisely because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life translating vacuum cleaner instrooctions. And it's rather tough to get a job translating poetry.

True.

And hello.

So now I just translate poetry for fun, while playing World of Tanks. The best of both worlds. Also, the best of both tanks.

@RegDwigнt I said "hard"; I didn't say "fun" . . .

@Robusto sorry, you will need to translate the difference for me.

I didn't know you were a first-class WoT player.

Abkhazian would be great, thank you.

@Cerberus and now you do. Isn't progress great?

Those tournaments must make you a lot of money.

Like WMT.

Oh, wait...

Nah, tournaments is for PC idiots.

@RegDwigнt Moving on . . . what are some dialectical anomalies of the Köln region, if any.

I play on 360.

@Robusto uh. It is very specific. I can tell it right away when I hear it. But I couldn't name one now that you ask.

I was talking to a guy on PSN the other night. He was from there, and I had a hard time understanding some of the things he said.

Features in comparison to Standard German

The L bit and the SH bit are probably most prominent for a novice.

He could understand me, but everyone understands Hochdeutsch, I guess. Germans, anyway.

I should add that quite a few of these differences Kölsch shares with my dialect, to some degree or another. Which might be why I couldn't think of them right away. That said, even so I can tell it from my dialect right away.

Even the same differences are not the same but different.

It didn't help that the PSN earbud and audio quality are terrible.

That is strange. Normally that does help quite a lot.

Right?

Perhaps you didn't bang on the PS hard enough.

I will bang on the PS hard enough for 3000 dollars.

I wasn't sending Morse code.

Quick, name the Russian letter: — — — —

yeri?

I think it's Ш.

shah

Wow, children are insane.

I think that's the only letter I somehow remember.

The Ш of Iran?

Have you heard of this game where they push against each other's neck arteries to stop oxygen from reaching the brain?

Coulda been zheh as well.

I think А is — . or . — , but I don't know.

@Cerberus That's a wrestling hold from WWF.

World Wildlife Fund?

World Wrestling Federation.

@Cerberus stop reading Fifty Шdes of Gray.

It's in the papers. Some more kids died.

Good for them.

@Cerberus Natural selection.

In related news, RIP David Carradine.

They also have this game, a slightly less dangerous one, where they squat for a while, then suddenly jump up, which results in fainting.

And Robin Williams.

And Heath Ledger, no?

@Cerberus No. You jump up and hold your breath at the same time. That's how we played it when I was a kid.

@Robusto Well, you could say the same thing about babies who choke on a toy or something.

@Cerberus you have some idiot children in your country. Also, some idiot games.

Go play some baseball, man.

@Robusto Jesus, you have played this game too?

@Cerberus No, that is natural selection once removed.

Crazy.

@RegDwigнt Also in Belgium. And America.

@Cerberus We used to play that when I was like 11. It was a free high, in a world that have very few highs for 11-year-olds.

Weird.

@Cerberus well. I did say "idiot".

Heh.

So you did.

For all I hear, children dying horrible deaths is part of Belgian culture.

It might be even in their Constitution, but nobody knows because they never have a government.

They do have a king that looks like a pancake, gotta give them that.

Heh.

Hey, what about our king???

He is the bigger pancake!

Your king is an idiot. That's what his wife says, and if she's not informed then nobody is.

@Cerberus The queen holds the power in your country.

Maybe jinx.

Not really no.

His Majesty.

Oranje.

@Robusto She abdicated two years ago.

@Robusto wow, you kids crazy. We played safer sports like throwing knives at each others feet or pouring glue on model airplanes stuffed with firecrackers and lighting it and then shooting at it with a BB gun.

(disclaimer: not making it up, no exaggeration)

Haha, seriously?

If you wanted people to take yourselves seriously, you'd elect Van der Sar president.

@Cerberus See? More powerful than her hubby.

Instead you don't even have a president.

@Mitch We shot each other with BB guns and sling shots too.

@Robusto She was indeed more influential than her son is.

What? She married her son?

We shot each other with BB king records.

Abdicate ≠ marry.

@Robusto OK, that's hardcore. well, BB guns. nobody was ever a good enough shot with a sling shot

My father made bombs as a kid.

He made gunpowder from stuff from his father's shop.

Or Jr. Walker records.

@RegDwigнt you could put out an ear with that.

Kids are insane.

@Mitch That is why Russia is superior and good.

@Robusto Those royals!

Incestuous lot.

I could annex an entire Krim with a single vinyl. On a good day.

I would ask my pupils, but I am reluctant to give them any ideas.