02 Apr 2006
Samuel Butler appears to have translated The Odyssey expressly for the purpose of “suggesting” Homer was female in the footnotes throughout, by way of building on (and substantiating) his earlier work, The Authoress of the Odyssey. Heh. What a shame his friend Lord Grimthorpe utterly mis-read the nature of the execution of the twelve maids, and Butler blindly accepted this mis-interpretation as more ‘evidence’ for his (possibly true) claim.
According to my reading of it, at least, the maids were hung with individual ropes suspended from a ship’s cable, hauled into place prior to any weight resting upon it. There is no impracticality to using a pillar as a pulley, for the ship’s cable’s weight would not be prohibitive before further burdens were placed upon it. Lord Grimthorpe, consider your understanding easily imposed upon. (Nevermind that both he and Butler have been dead for the better part of a century.)
01 Apr 2006
Well, turns out last month’s HTTP bandwidth usage wound up at around 3.75GB. Coolness. It recently occurred to me that I don’t particularly have any “Slashdot-me” ambitions for this blog at present, but it’s still fun watching the numbers increase every month for no apparent reason! Except, perhaps, ‘the plebs’ catching up with my occasional open-source trendiness ;-) Or something… probably more of the ‘something’. Heh.
120,000 hits and nearly 7,500 unique visitors to this site last month were served 56,000 pages by Dale’s metro FreeBSD server… heh, from one of the most serious-looking home server setups I know of. Still, ‘consumer-grade’ though it may be, it’s doing rather well! Technology is fun ;-)
30 Mar 2006
I missed the fastest bus trip to-from Sydney Uni I’ve ever been on today. Well, slept through it (actually good sleep, which is weird for anyone on public transport, I think!) and woke up perfectly-timed at the stop before mine. The whole thing took twenty minutes, which is pretty awesome. More awesome in light of the fact that I didn’t have to wait for a bus. My last lecture finished at 4 and I was home by 4.30. Eggcellent.
Ah, and no, I don’t often sleep on that bus… I just didn’t get to bed until particularly late coz I got to speak to Katy/yana/kt/how-many-other-names? for the first time in aaaagggeeeesss, so yeah. That was cool. Excited to know she’s alive and stuff! ;-) It was suggested that blogs are a great way of judging people’s existence. So Katy should get a blog happening. On which she would whinge about many things, as that is the pivotal aspect of the genre — note this is the first comprehensive definition of what exactly a “blog” entails that seems to adequately match… well, most blogs I read. Good stuff!
30 Mar 2006
… or Telstra’s capping system just stopped working. I like.
Update: We’re now at 11593.49 MB usage, but everything’s back to normal speeds. The IP changed for some reason… so it seem as though it’s maybe an IP-based restriction validated every X hours — and we’re not yet at that revalidation point, I suppose. Interestingness. Shrug, it’s nearly April!
26 Mar 2006
Wow. I haven’t been able to get here for like… a day. And it’s not because I’m capped and the Internet is slow and I’m impatient, so shut up already :P
So if you can’t read this message blame a three-letter-acronym (DNS) being attacked by a four-letter-acronym (DDoS), both of which will be understood only by a small fraction of you, I guess!
Geek geek geek.
Erin’s farewell party was last night in like… Hobart or something… so a bunch of us drove down there and it was good. Or, I drove down with lots of passengers and it was a good night/trip, once we found the river under the bridge in Hobbitsville. Thanks Selo ;-) I only discovered yesterday that driving actually can be tiring. Or draining, one of the two. Anyway, enough about driving. I’d post photos but
a) It’d be painfully slow to upload, and;
b) … nope, that’s about all the reason I’ve got.
It’ll happen April 1. No that’s not an April Fools’ joke. Wow it’s April already. Uni calendars suck/take getting used to. I totally don’t know what I’m doing with my life/when anymore. No diary can save me. It’s odd… I love paper but need my wall calendar and my uni diary and my home Exchange and work Exchange to all magically sync with one another. Guess it’s time to buy a cheap Palm Zire… Doh. Tempting, though. It’d save carrying lots of books for the bigger days at uni!
Stream-of-consciousness blog posts are fun. I’m going Zire shopping tomorrow I think. Well, online at least. After I fail my Greek test, and after I get home from work. We’ve got a new guy coming in tomorrow called Niels (I think? Dunno about spelling… and I have a brother called Neil so it’s not that name…) so the Australian:German ratio of our office is shifting more in favour of the Germans again. Heh. In other exciting-work-related news that probably means nothing to anyone who hasn’t seen the office, everything’s been re-arranged over the weekend. So I’m going to go in on Monday afternoon and my PC will have moved again. I’ve seriously had… one, two…. two and a half different desks/desk locations since I started last December! (Or was it November?) Change is good fun.
I haven’t posted on Ï„ÏανσλιτεÏατιον this week, have I? Probably not. Badness. I am constantly thinking about that stupid subject, it’s just that real work for it eludes me. Mark quipped this evening that he shouldn’t have done two subjects in a semester he actually wanted to do well in. I think I find myself agreeing! Hehe. I’m really excited about our first English assessment, even if it is a paltry 1000 words and so on. Just to write academically again. And I know the HSC year wasn’t about that but I tried to make it that anyway … hence my English Advanced teacher saying to me she didn’t think I could get a band 6. A comment on arrogance, perhaps, but I love that subject too much to just let things go and regurgitate. Unlike Emily I don’t just enjoy the idea of languages… they’re genuinely interesting (irrespective of whether or not I actually study them — I read this great bi-lingual English/Spanish culture blog that’s pretty random but just occasionally has absolute gems of information/new perspectives) in their complexities, irrationalities, quirks, and associated cultures. Intertexuality is great, too.
Tonight in church we were doing the last bit of Mark chapter 7, and there’s this bit that says “He looked up to heaven and with a deep sigh said to him “Ephphatha” (which means, “Be opened!”).” — and I couldn’t help but wonder “why not translate that word?”. Turns out it actually says ο εστιν διανοιχθητι, which apparently translates as “which is “Be opened!”” or similar. εφφαθα is actually an Aramaic word (I don’t know what characters Aramaic uses, even, let alone how to transliterate that back!) that just happened to be rendered in Greek in the original. So we’re actually getting the undoctored version in the Bible, even though it’d be simpler to translate “ephphatha” as “be opened!” and just skip that step. Good stuff.
Speaking of all that Greek, I should go sleep so I have time tomorrow to learn three weeks’ worth of vocab for a test at midday. Yay.
*files post under category “Everything”*