Utterly bizarre fact, but 25% of all chocolate sales in Japan are on/around February 14th.
In Japan the women give to men, there are two types of chocolate: giri and honmei—giri is given to say “thanks” to people who have helped out, such as bosses, co-workers, etc., while honmei is given to a love.
White Day, on March 14th, is used by men to return the favour. Chocolate could be given, but it is not uncommon for lingerie to be given… even to female co-workers.
I mean… seriously. What’s wrong with Japan?
There’s a really neat visual comparison of these four licenses over at http://blogs.sun.com/chandan/entry/copyrights_licenses_and_cddl_illustrated—well worth viewing if you’re in any doubt at all as to what each allows.
Seeing things like this only helps confirm my feelings about the GPL: it’s a virus.
I also can’t help but think that whoever came up with the idea of restricting our rights to guarantee freedom is an utter hypocrite.
As they say, bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity. But let’s not go there.
Magnum have an absolutely awesome set of interviews/photos with Steve McCurry. Head over to inmotion.magnumphotos.com/essays/mccurry.aspx to learn a little more about one of the world’s greatest photographers.
There are a bunch of really amazing photos over at a rather bizarre Chinese Esquire blog hosted at sina.com.cn.
I think they’re totally cool shots… there are some football ones too, all of the photography outstanding… but you’ll have to judge for yourself :)
Thanks to the way our 15k course fell, Anton, Chris and I ended up with the morning off. This was to allow every person on the course to get up close and personal with the procedures required to remove system and IO boards, expander boards, system controllers and centerplane support boards.
I personally took used this time in bed asleep. The (extremely) long weekend had left me pretty tired and I was glad to get some time to recoup. Around 9:45 I got up, read my email and did all of the usual stuff. I used the time to prepare dinner this evening, which means I’ve only got to drop my veg and chicken into the wok to get going. A real time saver.
The kitchen was getting pretty messy too, so I tidied up and hoovered the floor (and the hall and living room) in preparation for the mop. Much easier when there aren’t loads of little crappy bits that stick to the mop. I’ll do this shortly; right now Charlotte is working in the kitchen, so I’ll do it once she’s finished (or maybe I’ll cook first).
In other news: Win4BSD sucks, the single application mode is a cheesy Windows hack to replace the explorer.exe shell with a single application. No use to me at all. Needless to say I’m back running Ubuntu Edgy Eft and will be scrapping the FreeBSD partition shortly.
Tomorrow my two new books should turn up: Solaris Internals and Solaris Performance and Tools. I’ve got a battered Solaris Internals I accidentally bought second hand; this will go back on Saturday when I get to the Post Office.
This evening I’ve installed FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE on my desktop machine; it’s triple-booting with Windows XP and Ubuntu Edgy Eft for now. I’ve used Windows once: to mess around with the shocking driving theory test software I borrowed from Liam.
I decided to give FreeBSD another go for one reason only: Win4BSD. Yep, this is Win4Lin, except compiled natively for FreeBSD. In addition, it has one superb new feature: the ability to run a single application without all of the regular clutter that comes with the Windows desktop. I believe this to mean that I could fire up Photoshop CS2 and have it appear as a regular window managed by my GNOME window manager (metacity).
Right now Windows XP Pro SP2 is installing and I’m hoping to test a really simple application like notepad.exe later on this evening. If it works as expected, I do believe that Win4BSD is an absolute winner. With any luck the feature will be ported over to Win4Lin soon afterwards so I can continue to run Ubuntu. Don’t get me wrong, FreeBSD is a great OS, but it’s not quite as simple to manage on a desktop machine as Ubuntu.
More to follow.
MozEx is one top Firefox extension. It allows you to hijack links, edit boxes, etc. and pass them to some external programme. A very basic setup (for now) is to allow me to hit CTRL+e and have the content of textboxes fire up inside of gvim for me to edit quickly. Now that gvim has tab support it would be really easy to allow it to open a new tab to edit the text.
I’ll be heading home after work tomorrow. The idea is to start looking for a car. It’s obviously fairly unlikely I’ll find a suitable car, get it bought and paid for, as well as sort my insurance out in one weekend… it’d be seriously cool if I did though :)
After work it looks like I’ll have to catch the Sun bus to Blackwater station as everybody else is heading back home as well. It shouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve got a fairly tight schedule in getting from work, to the train station, to LKX in time to catch my train home.
I should have plenty of time to catch up with “Dance, dance, dance” my current book, as well as flick through some photos and maybe even watch some TV on my laptop.
Right, time for me to get ready for bed now.
I’ve been busy recently. Not entirely sure what I’ve been busy with, but obviously it must have been good.
This evening I have done some light playing with Vim 7’s new omni-completion. tbh I’ve not used completion like this since I left the sheltered little world of Delphi programming on Windows (btw, Pascal is an awesome language and I shall smite all those who say otherwise!). But for a lot of stuff it was really handy… from time to time I find myself not being 100% sure of the function I want to run and have to look up: this is where omni-completion will hopefully benefit me.
So, feast your eyes on Vim’s in-built PHP completion, helping me remember the substr() function (and providing all of the friendly arguments, or something):
Pretty nifty for an editor that was born in 1976… and even then it was an add-on to ex, which was an improvement to the original ed.