*Snort* *Chuckle* *Guffaw*

"I shut down my Tablet PC most evenings and start it up from a fresh boot. Why do I do that? Because I've been using computers for 20 years and have learned that's the best way to work." - MS Blogger Robert Scoble, explaining why he loses valuable time every day dealing with a bug in his employer's software.

Holy Toledo, if I reboot my laptop it's a seismic event. A properly built operating system should never require a reboot for software-based reasons. Scoble defends his position arguing that crafting, certifying and deploying a single change, like the one needed to replace tabtip.exe, the program at fault here, is "hard".

Isn't that what your customers pay you for? Aren't your repeated growth in earnings over the past sixteen quarters there precisely because MicroSoft can do the "hard" things?

A security flaw was found in emacs yesterday. Emacs is my editor, word processor, news reader, and LJ posting engine (among many, many other things). The patch fixing it is already installed; I saw it and approved it this morning. Linux users can do the hard things, because they've made it easy to do the hard things. From what I've seen, Mac OSX users are getting similar benenfits.

Homework!

I finished lesson #63 of the Pimsleur's course today, and watched episode one of マリア様がみてる.

様, pronounced "さま", a suffix meaning "Mrs."

春, pronounced "はる", meaning "Spring."

(In case anyone's curious, yeah, I had to master spelling マリア様がみてる so I could ask for it at the bookstore. Important phrase of the day:"マリア様がみてる" が あります か？ ("Do you carry Maria-sama ga miteru?")

I'm going to repeat this for my own benefit. You don't have to follow along, but I keep forgetting. The おん reading of a kanji is the original Chinese reading of the ideogram and to reflect their foreign origins is usually spelled out using カタカア. おん readings are typically used when the kanji is part of a compound. The くん reading, based upon the Japanese reading being tacked onto the ideogram, is used when the kanji is used stand-alone or as an adjectival or verb stem. くん readings are usually written in ひりがな.

月, meaning "month" or "moon." On: ゲツ. Kun: つき. (The latter is useful to me because I'm starting to actually enjoy 月詠みMoon Phase quite a bit.) Common combination: 月曜日 (げつよび)、"monday" (lit "Moon's day of the week") and 一月 "January" (lit. "First month.")

Did aliens kidnap John Derbyshire?

Is it just me, or has someone kidnapped John Derbyshire and replaced him with a well-educated replica? This is the guy who just a few years ago said that he didn't buy the whole ID thing anyway because it was clearly a political ploy, but that he could accept that they might have some arguments worth looking at, but that he didn't have the time or inclination to actually read up on either side's argument.

Now not only does he understand both side's arguments but he understands *why* the ID argument is "low grade comic-book metaphysics" and can explain it clearly. (Oh, grief, I just linked to The Corner.)

My usual misanthropy is becoming misplaced if Der Derb can be rehabilitated.

I gotta admire his other comment: "I don't want other people worrying about me. If you disagree with what I say, my preferences are, in order, (1) Reasoned argument, (2) venemous abuse, and then (3) expressions of concern." Go, John.

Given what I've said to Derb in the past, this is a refreshing sight.

Those eyes! Those horrible eyes!

And I thought Dora The Explorer was bad.

I stopped by Kinokuniya on the way home and picked up a volume of Maria-sama ga Miteru (I'm not going to bother pulling up the Kanji-enabled editor right about now). Not the comic book, the novel, which was the original. The drawings are about right (you can see the character designs here) but inside the book were a couple of drop-out flyers advertising the DVDs, the manga, and the dolls. Those dolls you see to the left. Oh, my, gods those are creepy-looking. It's as if Maria-sama ga Miteru was put into Tim Burton's hands. Not a healthy thing to think.

And while I was looking around, I found a rather cute example of cosplay (probably safe for work). Kawaii!