Satya's blog - 2007/03/

XKCD has a comic which references Ender's Game. The joke is absolutely hilarious. Unfortunately, only people who have read Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card wrote it, by the way) will get it. Sigh. But if you have, it's totally worth the payoff. Don't miss the alt text.

(For those who miss the comic:
Stick 1: Sorry, Ender -- seems there were some system crashes. The battle's gonna be cut short.
Ender: The lasers still work.
Stick 1: Yeah, but the enemy's gate is down.
(Cool stick-figure art irreproducible here. Sorry.) )

This is weird. I once wrote an article about Pine, the email client. That article is available on FreeOS.com and on my web site under " Pine". Apparently someone decided to post it on a forum as well: http://www.trilightzone.org/board/about1842.html.

I live in a wooden shack that probably can't stand much wind. The slightest storm causes weather warnings in my area. I'm surrounded by snakes, bees, spiders, and cockroaches. It's too cold in winter and too hot in summer. Until recently there were gaps and cracks between door edges, walls, windows, etc. I'm lucky if a neighbour's bathroom doesn't flood mine. The toilet has backed up several times. In the last year, we have been without water for more than 2 hours on at least 3 separate incidents, one of which lasted over 4 hours. We've been without electricity for most of an evening, too. Twice. I'm lucky if my phone rings -- callers usually get diverted to my voicemail without my phone ringing even once. For the last 10 days, there has been water seeping into the bedroom. The management's response was to have the carpet cleaners come by. This morning we found out that a water pipe under the foundation is leaking. On top of all this, my job-taking ability is artificially restricted and my wife is simply not allowed to work anywhere.

Thrff jurer V yvir. Uvag: Vg'f gb gur fbhgu bs Pnanqn.

So, pardus chat... has next to the input box, before the submit button, a dropdown: "normal" and "emote". People often accidentally do one when they mean the other.

Satyap: This is Normal

Satyap demonstrates an emote, or action

It's just "/me"! I can do "/me" in Pardus chat! I can, literally, type "/me emotes" and it works like it does on Jabber and IRC. And people don't get it! I bet they type a line, mouse over (argh!) to the dropdown, select what they need, and click send! Then they make a mistake, then they go, oops, meant to emote. And some people plain don't get it at all. You get this:

Satyap: does something

Instead of:

Satyap does something