beetroot garlic aids

South Africa's ex health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang believed that garlic, beetroot, lemon, beer and sweet potatoes can cure AIDS. While this is of course completely silly, it made for good headlines for a while and inspired numerous jokes and comic strips.

Source:
http://www.iol.co.za/news/south-africa/eat-garlic-beetroot-and-lemon-manto-repeats-1.280721#.UD78L5bkp8E

dilbert flat tie

Scott Adams admits that he doesn't know why Dilbert was created with a curved neck-tie and the at could mean either

1. It’s a metaphor for his inability to control his environment
2. He’s just glad to see you.

But there is a rumor (created by Scott Adams himself) that should Dilbert ever get lucky his tie would be flat the next day.



There only a couple of strips where his tie lies flat, according to the Dilbert Wikipedia article.

• He may have gotten lucky with Liz on the night of 8 August 1994: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1994-08-09/
• He is impressed by Antina on 2 Jan 1996 the non-stereotypical woman's ability to control her environment: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-01-02/
• Dilbert has "pon farr" in January 2011: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-01-13/ and http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-01-12/
• And on 6 May 1991 Adams tried to explain http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1991-05-06/ . Dogbert postulates that it is an aversion of his clothes to be near him.

 Also when he get a fright his tie stands up straight (12 August 1998): http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1998-08-12/ and on 5 August 1996 http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/1996-08-05/

There is a strip on 13 April 2003 where he is not wearing his usual striped tie: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-04-13/

colosseum tickets

The boss was saying today that the Romans had a better system of distributing tickets to the Colosseum than we have for selling Red Hot Chili Peppers tickets.

So I searched for "colosseum tickets" but that only showed me pages for modern day ticket sales to the Colosseum, then searched for "colosseum" only which brings up the Wikipedia page first. from there I navigated to http://the-colosseum.net/ but did not find the information there either.

Then a colleague was reading from the article he found by searching for "how did the ancient romans sell tickets for the colosseum in 80 AD" which is where I found the following information.

• The games held at the Colosseum were free, but you would have to have a ticket to gain entrance.
• Tickets were pre-manufactured and distributed to various organisations and groups, which would then distribute them to their members.
• If you did not get a ticket beforehand you would have to have taken your chances by standing in a queue on the day of the event.
• There were never enough tickets for the events at the Colosseum and it is speculated that there was a large black market for tickets.
• Tickets to the tiers were assigned according to status (determined by the clothes you wore or who you were with)
• Tickets were marked with the Section, Row and Seat number but not with a date and were probably discarded after each event, which ran over several days.
• When you arrived at the correct entrance (one of 76 to 80) you handed your ticket to an usher who would then let you in.

So pretty much nothing has changed in 2000 years except that they didn't facebook where you could voice your discontent in a public forum :-)

Source:
http://www.roman-colosseum.info/colosseum/tickets-to-the-colosseum.htm
http://the-colosseum.net/around/essay_lyes.htm

neil armstrong jokes

@draxar: Apparently Neil Armstrong used to tell unfunny jokes about the Moon, and follow them up with "Ah, I guess you had to be there."

Now that Michael Jackson and Neil Armstrong are dead, the world better make a plan. We are quickly running out of moon-walkers.

The confusion between Neil and Lance Armstrong is pretty funny too.

lorem ipsum

The standard Lorem Ipsum looks like this. It is used to indicate a filler text so that typesetters can lay out a page without worrying about the content. It resembles classical Latin, but isn't

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

There are several other Lorem Ipsum generators which sometimes produce hilarious results.

There is for instance the Bacon Ipsum generator which produces text like this:

Bacon ipsum dolor sit amet elit nisi consequat exercitation spare ribs sirloin cow enim ea labore turkey in filet mignon kielbasa. Jowl cow leberkas, short loin andouille strip steak ham magna culpa dolore. Id in tongue swine t-bone meatball esse ball tip capicola chuck proident shoulder nulla. Ground round veniam sirloin frankfurter, in pancetta sed et proident laboris corned beef. Esse jowl est salami bresaola hamburger ut adipisicing pariatur veniam corned beef do beef ribs. Labore beef in commodo ut.

or the Liquor Ipsum which makes me thirsty:

Liquor ipsum dolor sit amet knockeen hills irish poteen paddy. Eu luctus kahlua nulla, wine cooler egestas. Margarita glenglassaugh risus gravida sit euismod black velvet velit ultrices; manhattan praesent bibendum convallis spritzer screwdriver churchill curabitur flaming dr pepper widow's cork! Sapien semper ornare yorsh balblair." Sodales knockdhu ut iaculis himenaeos egestas ramos gin fizz seagrams sed: diam faucibus inchgower brave bull glen elgin porta nec scapa. Nullam ramos gin fizz godfather.

or if profanity and/or blasphemy is your thing the Samuel L Ipsum:

The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who would attempt to poison and destroy My brothers. And you will know My name is the Lord when I lay My vengeance upon thee.

lorem ipsum

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com/got-bored-of-lorem-ipsum-22-different-alternatives-for-placeholder-text/

there is no we

There is no "We" in "I" ~ Ayn Rand

http://thwok.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-we-in-i-ayn-rands-anthem/

swaddling clothes

Today I was reminded on how schools try to educate children about the responsibilities and costs of having a baby by having each child take care of an egg for a week or two week period.

They have to work out budgets and wake up every four hours to "feed" and I suppose take care that the egg doesn't break.

One boy when asked about his clothing budged replied that he intended to keep his egg wrapped in towels inside a shoe box. This reminded me of Jesus who was wrapped in "swaddling clothes" and placed in a manger.

In the German New Testament, swaddling clothes are called Windeln, which in today's language would translate to "nappies". But after reading the Wikipedia article on swaddling I realised that word Windeln probably has the same root the word winden, which means to turn or wrap.

Even though swaddling has fallen into disuse because of various health issues, it seems to be making a come-back.

responsability

What does it mean "You are responsible for your own actions"? Or "You are not responsible for somebody else's feelings"?

I misspelt again! But I was able to find out the etymology of the word "responsible" after a couple of searches.
I tried:
"responsability"
"responsibility meaning"
"responsibility etymology"

responsibility

"condition of being responsible," 1787, from responsible + -ity. Related: Responsibilities.

responsible

1590s, "answerable (to another, for something)," from Fr. responsible, from L. responsus, pp. of respondere "to respond" (see respond). Meaning "morally accountable for one's actions" is attested from 1836. Retains the sense of "obligation" in the Latin root word.

respond

c.1300, respound, from O.Fr. respondere "respond, correspond," from L. respondere "respond, answer to, promise in return," from re- "back" + spondere "to pledge" (see spondee). Modern spelling and pronunciation is from c.1600.

spondee

late 14c., "metrical foot consisting of two long syllables," from O.Fr. spondee, from L. spondeus, from Gk. spondeios (pous), the name of the meter originally used in chants accompanying libations, from sponde "solemn libation," related to spendein "make a drink offering," from PIE root *spend- "to make an offering, perform a rite," hence "to engage oneself by a ritual act" (cf. L. spondere "to engage oneself, promise," Hittite shipantahhi "I pour out a libation, I sacrifice").

pledge (n.)

mid-14c., "surety, bail," from O.Fr. plege (Fr. pleige) "hostage, security, bail," probably from Frankish *plegan "to guarantee," from a West Germanic root meaning "have responsibility for" (cf. O.Saxon plegan "vouch for," O.H.G. pflegan "to care for, be accustomed to," O.E. pleon "to risk, expose to danger"). Meaning "allegiance vow attested by drinking with another" is from 1630s. Sense of "solemn promise" first recorded 1814, though this meaning is from c.1400 in the verb. Weekley notes the "curious contradiction" in pledge "to toast with a drink" (1540s) and pledge "the vow to abstain from drinking" (1833). Noun meaning "student who has agreed to join a fraternity or sorority" dates from 1901. Related: Pledged; pledging.

promise (n.)

c.1400, from L. promissum "a promise," noun use of neuter pp. of promittere "send forth, foretell, promise," from pro- "before" (see pro-) + mittere "to put, send" (see mission). Ground sense is "declaration made about the future, about some act to be done or not done." The verb is attested from early 15c. Promised land (1530s) is a reference to the land of Canaan promised to Abraham and his progeny (Heb. xi:9, etc.; Gk. ten ges tes epangelias). Promising "showing signs of future excellence" is from c.1600.

What does all this mean?
Taking the first two together:
responsibility already means: The condition of being morally accountable for one's actions.
and going further:
The condition of being able to answer for your actions.
and ever further:
The condition of being able to guarantee your actions?
or finally:
The condition of being able to predict your future actions from your past?

I think however the phrase means that you should not lay blame for your actions on someone else and that you cannot accept blame for the way somebody else feels. And that you therefore have to be true to yourself and should not let other people determine your future or your happiness.

Edit:
A friend suggested:
And that you therefore have to be true to yourself and should not let yourself or other people believe that others determine your future or your happiness.

Edit:
After some more thinking I have come to the following:
1) "Take responsibility for your actions" is a tautology since "responsible" already means to be morally accountable for your actions.
2) This lead me to: "to be responsible" means to have an internal "moral" framework in which your actions make sense, are reproducible and nachvollziehbar (comprehensible, understandable, replicable, reasonable, open to scrutiny) It also means that your "moral framework" is the basis in which you live your life and interact with others. Even though you actions can be influenced by others you moral framework should not be.
3) I also have come to realise that I do not possess a fixed moral framework, at least not in the traditional sense. Which has brought me to another query, that is: "morals vs ethics".

on being a nun

I did not search for this but I found the quote amusing:

"Why would I want to become a nun? It's like living with lots of other women that all think they are married to your husband."

yarnbombing pictures

I think it's brilliant! "Knitting's answer to graffiti" ;-) It's even called Strick-graffiti in German.

More:
http://reginaurbanecology.wordpress.com/2010/08/08/yarn-bombing/
http://www.pixelsmithstudios.com/categories/graphic-designers/graphic-design/yarn-bombing-knittings-answer-to-graffiti
http://followthedotxoxo.blogspot.com/2010/08/yarn-bombing.html
https://www.facebook.com/pages/B-Arbeiten/108190085915547

sometimes wisdon comes with age

Yes, I wrote "wisdon" instead of "wisdom" but Google is clever and found me the right quote anyway.


“With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.”
-- Oscar Wilde

LCD TN vd IPS

This morning I received the Gadget Digest which contained an article about LG's new IPS monitors. Remembering that I had recently read about the very same thing in Jeff Atwood's blog entry I had to look up what the difference is between TN and IPS.

According to Wikipedia TN stands for twisted nematic and are relatively easy to produce but suffer from limited viewing angles and bad colour repoduction due to the limited bit depth.

IFS stands for in-plane switching and has better viewing angles and better colour reproduction. Earlier models had slow response problems but those have since been fixed and the technology has been surpassed by S-IPS, AS-IPS and now IPS-Pro.

13 hands in meters

Tanya is reading a book about ponies that turn into unicorns and came across a small pony that was 13 hands tall.

A "quick" look up in Google from my phone got me to this meter to hand conversion page, which I read incorrectly because it converts meters to hands and not vice versa. Fortunately one meter is close to 10 hands so the answer of 127.952756 cm was satisfactory.

Later I looked up the real value from my PC and Google calculator told me this:

13 hands = 1.3208 meters

Now, why do I get the handy Google calculator result on my PC but not in Opera Mobile?

finding the last character Excel

Would it really kill Microsoft to provide a FINDLAST or SPLIT function (or even accepting negative values in the position parameter) in Excel? And why can't OpenOffice do it either? I hate technological debt!

I need to split a file path like this C:\Program Files\Flintstones\fred.txt into two cells, one containing C:\Program Files\Flintstones and the other containing fred.txt.

I came across this solution at CodeGeek

To find the directory:

=LEFT(B1, FIND("*", SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "*", LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" )))) - 1)

Lets break it down:
1) since * cannot occur in a file name we can replace the \ with *.
2) this allows us to calculate how many \es there are in the string.
2.1) replace all \ with an empty string - SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" )
2.2) count how long the string is without all the \es - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" ))
2.3) subtract that from the length of the string - LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" ))
3) now replace only the last one (n-th occurence, where n is the value found in 2.3) with a * by using SUBSTITUTE's 4 parameter form. - SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "*", LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" )))
4) then find the one we replaced - FIND("*", SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "*", LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" ))))
5) and get only the text to the left of it. - LEFT(B1, FIND("*", SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "*", LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "" )))) - 1)

To find the file:

=RIGHT(B1, LEN(B1) - FIND("*", SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "*", LEN(B1) - LEN(SUBSTITUTE(B1, "\", "")))))

References:
http://code-geek.blogspot.com/2010/05/find-last-character-in-excel.html

snow in johannesburg

Yes, this happened last in 1981. There have been times since then where the ground was covered in ice, sleet, hail etc. Today however the snow fell in soft white flurries of fluff. For the most part it melted as hit hit the ground but here or there it persisted a little longer and made everybody a little bit crazy.

http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Light-snow-falls-in-Johannesburg-20110729

heritage museum cape

I'm trying to find a museum in the Cape that I have visited with the kids and found quite educational.

Searching for: "heritage museum cape"

Hm, not the ones I want!

Searching for: "cultural village cape"

Ugh, nothing!

Ok google maps here we come; Retracing my steps.
It must be in Worcester!

Searching for: "museum near worcester cape"

There! I found it! Third one in the list:


Kleinplasie Open Air Museum.

Nina vs. Siri

Nuance (the makers of Dragon Naturally Speaking) have a new toy and it looks/sounds absolutely cool. Not only is it a voice recognition and phone command system is also recognises your voice and thus can be used as a biometric device too. In other words as close as you can get these days to a digital assistant. This technology is very promising and I can't wait fo6r the first apps using the API to appear in the Google Play store.

More here:
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/370775/20120806/nina-siri-nuance-apple-review-dragon-iphone.htm
http://www.nuance.com/landing-pages/enterprise/meet-nina/default.asp

The Well-Grounded Java Developer

I found a book review of "The Well-Grounded Java Developer: Vital techniques of Java 7 and polyglot programming" by Benjamin J Evans and Martijn Verburg on Dr. Heinz Kabutz's (a german speaking South African living in Crete) Java Specialists blog. I read his blog regularly as it provides me with a lot of insight into the more arcane and lesser known aspects of Java programming. Given Heinz's endorsement, this is definitely a book I would buy.

peas with honey

I heard this poem along time ago and my friend reminded me of it again today.

I eat my peas with honey;
I've done it all my life.
It makes the peas taste funny,
But it keeps them on the knife.

I wondered who the author was.

The Poetry foundation list the author as Anonymous and the source as The Random House Book of Poetry for Children (1983)

Several sites however list the poet as Ogden Nash, which sounds about right.

http://hugogrinebiter.com/?p=2109
http://www.dpchallenge.com/image.php?IMAGE_ID=379457

Ankole-Watusi images

fascinating horns!

https://www.google.co.za/search?q=Ankole-Watusi+images

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankole-Watusi_%28cattle%29

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=368213493248277&set=a.361801333889493.75971.120578284678467&type=1&theater

swapping banks

Swapping banks merely exchanges one known set of problems with one unknown set of problems.

copyleft

I wanted to make this blog available under a copyleft license. The way to do that is to still create a Copyright notice, but include the terms of use. Like this:

Copyright (C) <date>, <name of author>

This information is free; you can redistribute it and/or modify it 

under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details. 

Adding a copyleft © symbol is superfluous but cool (and only available in CSS3 compliant browsers):

<!--[if lte IE 8]><span style="filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.BasicImage(rotation=2); display: inline-block;"><![endif]-->
<span style="-webkit-transform: rotate(180deg); -moz-transform: rotate(180deg); -o-transform: rotate(180deg); -khtml-transform: rotate(180deg); -ms-transform: rotate(180deg); transform: rotate(180deg); display: inline-block;">
        &copy;
</span>
<!--[if lte IE 8]></span><![endif]-->

more information here
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.html
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/copyleft.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft

display google search history firefox

It turns out that Google can keep your search history for you, but only if you turn it on and thus giving Google even more information to profile you. If you are OK with that, you can do that here:

https://www.google.com/history

Of course there is always the brute force mechanism. Just type a letter and see the searches you did with that letter. To get all you would have to type all 26 letters of the alphabet and there you have it. But you wont have the time you did them.