All of the houses are sideways.

At least, compared to where I grew up. See, as long as I can remember, houses have always been wider than they are long - that is, the front door facing the street was on the longest wall of the house. You can get a pretty good idea of what I’m talking about by looking at this picture - you’ll see that the long side of the houses are facing the road:

But here, the part of the house facing the street is the shortest wall of the house!

I’m not sure how I feel about this.

Some favorites: Don Nadie (”Sir Nobody”, Argentina), Marko Marković and Petar Petrović (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Jos Bleau (Quebec), Joe Borg (Malta), and Johnny Foreigner (UK).

I had a teacher in high school who would regularly use “Joe Bag-o’-donuts”, of which I am particularly fond.

On a side note, I think that with the right intonation, you can quite productively create new names like this - you just have to start with a generic first name (Joe/John/Jane) and then have a multi-syllabic last name, which sometimes (but not always) lends some of its meaning (e.g. Johnny Mailman refers to your generic, everyday mailman, but Joe Bag-o’-donuts doesn’t have anything to do with the fried circles).

The background: Will and I have a wireless router to share our internet. We both have laptops in our rooms. The wireless has worked without any major problems for weeks.

And then…

All of a sudden, Google stopped loading. And when I say Google, I don’t just mean search. I mean GMail, Froogle, image search, everything. The pages just timed out. Pings didn’t return, traceroutes just sat there.

That in and of itself wouldn’t be so strange, but:

1. All other pages loaded fine (and other protocols worked fine, too)
2. Plugging either computer into the ethernet jack caused Google to load fine, but it would stop working when going back onto the wireless
3. A third compy (my old laptop), which hadn’t been on the network in something like a week, was able to load Google with no problems

I tried everything - I checked the /etc/hosts files of all computers involved, I checked if the firewalls had mysteriously been turned on on both Will’s and my computer, I even did a hard reset (to factory settings) of the router. Nothing.

Based on a wild guess, I tried turning off WPA, and lo and behold, it started working! There is *no* reason (that I can think of) that this should have any effect on loading an individual page. Can you?

(PS, guess we’re now using WEP for our network…)

After a grueling 30 minutes of carrying, quickly putting down, and picking back up again, we arrive 2 blocks from our place, only to find a bigger, more comfy couch.

Of course.

I flew in to Boston and crashed with Alex, then took a nice little road trip down here.

I moved in to my new apartment.

I’ve even already gone to a concert in the city (Ted Leo and the Pharmacists at the McCarren Park Pool)!

I’m off now to go find a bike!

There are just so many things wrong with this: She Who Must Not Be Named will be starring in a movie version of “Repo! The Genetic Opera”, “set in 2056, when the human race is almost destroyed and survival depends on organ transplants.” I might’ve actually been interested in seeing it if she weren’t in it… (Who am I kidding? How could I not see a rock opera with that premise?) For additional info, see the website of the Broadway production.

Inter-community Church of God is a non-denominational Protestant church, which serves hearing people, Deaf people, and their families. Early morning worship is done in English, followed by ASL worship. During the English service, there is an ASL Sunday School, and during the ASL service the English Sunday School takes place.

As soon as I walked into the foyer, I was greeted by several Deaf congregants, all of whom knew right away that I was not deaf. An old lady came up to me, and signed that her name was Rosie, and asked my name, where I was from, and what had brought me to their church that day. Luckily these were questions I was prepared to answer in ASL, and doing so made her quite happy. Several other Deaf congregants expressed similar feelings. Everyone made an effort to communicate with me, signed slowly and deliberately (thank goodness), and were tolerant of my horrid “accent” (oh let’s face it - my lack of knowledge).

Walking into the chapel, I noticed that there were a lot of speakers and audio equipment around, which I (understandably) assumed was for the English services. Boy was I in for a surprise. Read the rest of this entry »

     

That is all.

The Beeb pitted a spelling reform advocate against a linguist who is against such change. Spelling reform for English based on links between sounds and letters has to relate to a single accent… This disadvantages once again children with non-standard accents, say those who would naturally spell “bath” as “barf”. It also cuts accents of English off from each other; a Londoner would not be able to read Geordie, a person from Sydney a letter from someone in Ottawa. The cost of any change would be astronomical. [While I like this quote, the real reason I excerpted it here is because it has an example of gapping in it :)]

Linguist Kristin Denham (Western Washington University) talks about bringing linguistics into a primary school setting.