I'm very proud of my big sister, who was one of 16 teachers picked as the Los Angeles County teacher of the year. To put this into perspective, there are over 80,000 teachers in LA County, and she was one of sixteen to win. Very freakin awesome! I went to the banquet last Friday honoring these teachers, and had a really nice time. It was held at the Hilton in Universal City, and took pretty much the entire day. There was a media event (my sis was on TV and in the newspapers!), as well as an awards ceremony, etc. Fun times!
I bought Heroes of Might and Magic 5 before going to Austin about a month ago, and let me tell you... this has been the biggest disappointment I've had in a long time. The game looks awesome. And the game is fun to play. The problem is: their freaking protection scheme is the biggest pile of crap I've ever seen. It's absolutely, insanely, without a doubt, the stupidest and worst-written pile of dung I have ever encountered. It causes random blue screens, for starters. Then, today I found out that if you ever run Process Monitor or Process Explorer, the game refuses to launch until you reboot -- it thinks you're trying to cheat. This would be somewhat understandable if either of those applications were actually *running* when you go to launch HoMM5... but that's not the case. It's if you've ever run them during your current logon session. So that means, if you are doing some debugging, you get to reboot your machine if you feel like playing. LAME! For as fun as the game is, I would say: avoid it like the plague as it will only cause you heartache. Which is sad, because it has the potential to be a good game if you remove all of the "protection" BS which makes it impossible to play (even when you legally own it).
Elissa and I went up to the mountains this past weekend, to Idyllwild. We decided that since it was her last free weekend before school starts up, we would spend it camping and having fun. The weather was awesome! 60s in the day, and 40s at night. We had a really nice time, and it is frickin gorgeous up there. What's even better is that it's only about an hour away for us -- so it's not a terribly long ride to get out of the crappiness that is Rivertucky.
One of my primary dev boxes died today. RIP you pile of crap. After one year, the hard drive failed. So now I'm in the process of finding and ordering another hard drive for it. Thankfully, my current primary dev box (my tablet pc) is still up and running nicely. Except when playing HoMM5, whereas it blue screens every 10 minutes or so. ;-)
I had a lot of geeky fun yesterday learning about cuneiforms, logograms, ideograms and other things that 99.9% of the population could give a rip about. Language theory amazes me, and I really do enjoy it. Here's your neat factoid for the day about linguistics:
I'm sure you've seen the ampersand character before (&). Well, it turns out that the ampersand used to be a ligature! The word "and" in Latin is "et", and if you draw a fancy looking "e" very closely with a fancy looking "t", you'll notice that it forms an ampersand. However, it's pretty much ceased to be a ligature (no one writes "et" anymore!) and become a logogram instead. Fascinating, eh? ;-)
There's plenty more I could prattle on about, but I think my small break from reality is over now. Told you this was a random memory dump!
I'm not sure that's linguistics but it's interesting.
I did a couple linguistics courses at U.
I never realized how easy it is to say a word in another language once you know how to put all your "sound producing mechanisms" (lips, mouth, tongue, chest, nose, and anything else you might use in sound procution) in the right position.
We learned how to say Innu words that at first seemed incredibly hard and even a few from an African tongue that uses clicks and pops (watch The Gods Must Be Craazy and you'll know the tongue I'm talking about)
It's a fascinating subject.
Too many fascinating subjects not enough time :)
Very interesting about the ampersand. I'm a language nerd, too. My favorite college courses were Intro to Language Study and Transformational Grammar. Oh, yeah, and volleyball.
Anyway, congrats to your sister. That's truly a high honor!
Wow, Idyllwild...that brings back memories. My friends and co-workers and I used to go up there to shoot our guns off. Pretty hairy because you'd have some crazy folks shooting machine guns without too much regard for who else was there :O
Anyway, glad you guys had fun.
the "et" in "et al" => "&", in handwritten French it really looks like an "E" with a "pipe" (ok, I'm a geek...)
Ligatures are funny, but you need a Mac to handle them properly, turning fi and ffi into correct ligatures is a sure sign of Class in a newspaper.
/msa
Why would you need a Mac to handle ligatures properly? I can enter ligatures just fine on Windows, and it is displayed properly in the given font. For instance U+FB05 shows the "ſt" ligature just fine. If the ligature is incorrectly, there's only two reasons: 1) No unicode support with whatever you are using to display the character, or 2) No font support for the glyph in the selected font.