Huh!

I was wondering why he never came here any more.

But this is a strange move.

@Cerb then, you confirm! David is no longer among us. Ohhh... I'm sorry, sorry, sorry.

All I know is that I haven't seen him in chat for a while.

Like two weeks?

Maybe less.

Yes, I have already asked here for his absence, but now I do not see him among the users of ELU.

@sim do you know something?

@Carlo_R. I can't tell you what other users talk to us, or the Team, about.

Hi.

Yes @sim, but can you confirm that David is no longer on ELU as user?

@Carlo_R. Again, I'm not telling you.

Yes, he has deleted his account.

Just check his SO account.

@simchona You can just say "he has deleted his account".

Because I can see that.

So everyone can.

@Cerberus Except that I wasn't here, so I didn't know yay or nay

It's further in the chat logs

Haha, then you can say that.

What is in the chat logs?

@Cerberus Jasper saying he left

Did he announce his deletion?

Oh.

Ohhh... I think that this is a grave lost. He was a great user.

I remember I had some problems with Reg when Reg proposed ELL.

But I never would have believed that he want leave ELL.

I do not even have his mail for a final salutation.

@Carlo_R. He's still on SO, not dead.

@sim thank you, I'm going there. Maybe he can tell me the way of his decision. Bye.

@cerberus bye and thank you for the feedback. You are a nice user too.

This question makes me want to do either.

@Carlo_R. Thanks!

@Robusto Don’t do either: do both.

@Robusto I guess the ECT the user mentions didn’t pan out for him.

@MετάEd Might we perhaps chat about your ngram project sometime, please?

Ugh, why am I still Matt in here?

@cornbreadninja I’d don’t know, Matt: who would you rather be?

@cornbreadninja Who is that guy?

Matt, yes, but Matt who?

@Mahnax A sex-change artiste, apparently.

@tchrist Interesting.

@Mahnax Just curious, and if this is too personal, it would not be rude not to answer me, but I was wondering whether you started learning French before your brain’s code-switching centers largely ossified at puberty. Did you?

There is another, earlier breakpoint, but given that you live in Alberta, I’m guessing you missed that one.

I could, as always, be wrong.

@tchrist Hrmm. Well, I guess you could say that I did start learning it before that. My first French education occurred seven years ago, and stopped for a few years between grades six and ten.

And please forgive my comma key, which hasn’t had enough exercise of late.

@Mahnax Good for you. It really does help.

Or maybe, good for your parents’ foresight.

See what I mean about that comma key? :)

@tchrist It was mandatory, hehe.

I was just about to ask that.

Yeah, all public school students have to take a bit of French in elementary school here.

Two national languages and all that.

I’d thought it was, but perhaps this “obligatory-ness” varies by province, rather than being imposed throughout by Ottawa.

It might vary, I'm not certain.

It is said that non-Francophones never rise high in Canadian government.

Eek. :)

By “non-Francophone”, I mean only those with no French at all, not maternal-tongue speakers.

It is necessary to speak both French and English to be a member of the government, IIRC.

You can't be an MP without both languages, since the House frequently switches between the two.

But not by law or statute, but by . . . de facto “reality”, right?

The House switches between the two?

I suppose it must.

I believe so.

But one would hope there would be real-time translation available.

Some people are more comfortable with French, particularly the Quebecois MPs.

I am certain that there are Members whose second language is less fluent than their first.

In Italy it is not necessary to speak Italian to be a member of the government.

Of course.

And so those members deserve real-time translation, I feel. Perhaps I am too leftist, but so it seems to me.

That’s the way Europe handles it, where MEPs never speak all the “official” tongues, and seldom more than two or three. Usually is is little more than one.

@Carlo_R. No, nor here either, but how often does that occur? Don’t normal electoral pressures weed those out?

> 4. (1) English and French are the official languages of Parliament, and everyone has the right to use either of those languages in any debates and other proceedings of Parliament.

> (2) Facilities shall be made available for the simultaneous interpretation of the debates and other proceedings of Parliament from one official language into the other.

laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/O-3.01/FullText.html

No @tchrist, Italian only believe in the promise of more prosperity. There is no awareness of State here.

Although we’ve only a single state that legally grants Spanish coëval status with English (that being New Mexico), in practice a great many states include Spanish versions of their official documents and election materials. Mine, for example, does, and not simply because Colorado pertenece a la antigua Nueva España, sino también because that is the best way to reach the majority of the populace without excluding anyone.

In Italy Everyone can be elected. This has created a level of corruption not imaginable elsewhere.

Come on, Symbola. You're better than this.

My last sentence is the kind of thing that you hear on the buses in the Denver area. There’s a great deal of code-switching.

It is not Symbola’s fault.

Well, maybe it is.

I think it is.

They've put in some other font every time a diacritic shows up.

It seems to lack that code point. Just a sec, lemme check in Font Book.

Perhaps Symbola is afraid of being diacriticized by its peers.

Uh-huh.

Hm, not even ISO-8859-1 (aka, “Latin-1”).

I guess that shows he made it as a fallback font for missing symbols.

His other fonts are all pan-European.

Whose?

George Douros’s.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot that he made Symbola.

The ¨ looks funny in Alfios.

You can do command+shift+4+(pause)+space to take a screenshot of an individual window.

That would be faster than switching to Grab and using command-shift-W.

Which requires an extra click, too.

The problem is it doesn’t name it.

Looks like that, with the shadowy background.

I guess I could switch my upload directory to wherever that puts it, and sort by date-time as I do now.

~/desktop is where it goes for me.

I wonder if you can change that.

I think you can.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location <path>

Right-o.

@tchrist That looks nice.

You can probably change it in your browser, just by last-selecting that directory with that sort order. I’m guessing.

@Mahnax Slimbach does a good job.

@Mahnax it's the Gravatar and, evidently, the Wordpress guy.

And here we have Matt the font-guy.

Typeface!

:P

@tchrist -t

Ya know, I could have used subjunctive there, “and not just because Spanish should pertain to old New Spain”.

But I don’t think you really have to. It may depend on formality and nuance.

Spanish uses subjunctive after things like “the fact that”, which surprises Anglophones. “The fact that he should have been Quebecker changes nothing.” You would think that fact would be more indicative.

Or should be. Etc.

@cornbreadninja -t means isatty(3).

Pronounced izzatitty if company isn’t too mixed.

If the company is too mixed then how is it pronounced?

iz ah tee tee why

That’s because tty is pronounced “titty” in Unixese. It means terminal, originally teletype.

Right.

sips tea

There’s a tty command you can type into your shell.

macbook# tty
/dev/ttys001

It tells you which actual device file your controlling tty is.

You can always use /dev/tty, which means your controlling tty and connects to the actual one. Your /dev/tty varies from user to user. It is a “virtual” device.

The actual name of the device varies between systems.

chthon(tchrist)% tty
/dev/ttyp1

I believe Linux uses some fancier naming scheme, like /dev/ptys/03.

sorry, was reading this

I tend to respect the awards in the order of Locus first, Nebula next, and Hugo last.

Is that too snobby?

@tchrist I was thinking of ls -aFt

I’ve gone and aliased my ls to ls -F, and my ll to ls -lh.

I too often deal with big files.

@tchrist I had forgotten about Locus. Is that too uninformed?

I like ls -laFR of late.

Locus is critics, Nebula is writers, Hugo is readers.

Of course, I am only a reader.

Locus is more rarefied than Nebula, as is Nebula more rarefied than Hugo.

But fan-appeal should not be dismissed.

@cornbread Still feeling manly?

I’m in the middle of Iain Banks’ new Culture hardcover.

@cornbreadninja Oh wow! I linked that to @Mr.Shiny earlier this year. Someone posted it in the writer's chat this summer.

@KitFox nice!

@Kit How's the story coming along?

@KitFox only in chat. :\

@cornbreadninja Did you log out and then back in?

@KitFox ooh, I shall do that.

@Mahnax It's coming. I need to write one more good scene to make my quota for the day.

I wrote 420 words yesterday!

Yay!

@tchrist I used to read Locusmag once in a while.

@KitFox yes!

I wrote 4103 words yesterday…

@KitFox Glad to hear it.

I am still reading Bend Sinister and am now going to inspect John Cheever's enormous radio.

@Mahnax 0_0

@Mahnax w00t!

Hey, are we writing buddies?

Nope, I don't think so.

What's your handle?

I'm almost caught up, thanks to yesterday.

KitFoxfire.

He must not have gone drinking this weekend.

Ooh, I'm 379 words ahead of you.

commutes

I spent yesterday evening fixing my word counts, which didn't help.

@Mahnax Noooo!!!! writes furiously

@KitFox Hey, that's what I'm doing!

writes furiously-er

But I think my friend has us both beat.

Hahaha. But I should get back to writing, since my boys are only gone for another hour.

And I've got to write as much as possible before they get back.

@Mahnax Do I want to know?

@KitFox 40215.

Why, kit?

@Mahnax Nooooo!!!!! writes furiously-est

@KitFox Haha, he doesn't get out much.

But back to writing with me!

@Carlo_R. I have 12 more days to write 22,000 more words.

pseudo-poof

poof

Ah, but it seems not possible?

I poof too

@tchrist Sure.