Lost: language
Posted 29 Sep, 2004 at 14:10 by matt in /Books | Permanent link
Earlier this year, my friend the Ultimate Corruptor of Souls (or Brent
, as he's usually known) tried to convince me that we should travel to Italy in October. I had to turn him down, unfortunately; as an academic I get a fair amount of vacation time, but I don't get a lot of flexibility about when it comes up.
However, I would like to go to Italy someday. Specifically, I'd like to visit the province of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, where several hundred years' worth of my ancestors lived. Ideally, I'd like to do so in full possession of Furlan (Friulano
in Italian, Friulian
in English), a local dialect of not-quite-Italian and my mother's native tongue.
This is a bit of a problem, though. My mother never taught us the language; mostly when I heard it spoken as a kid, it was when she was talking to my grandparents about the children and didn't want us to understand what was being said. (Or so I always assumed.) And living over a thousand kilometers away as I do right now, it's not like I can just commute in for lessons. So if I could find a book, that would be great.
As far as I can tell, though, no such book exists. It's hard finding language books on Amazon -- they don't seem to put them anywhere obvious. Powells and Chapters are better, in that they quickly lead me to the conclusion that there are no Learn Friulano in 30 Days
books available. I suppose it's not much of a surprise -- it's not like Furlan's a terribly popular language. But if I ever do get a chance to visit Italy, it'd be nice to speak to any random cousins I might run into in their own tongue.
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Result
Posted 29 Sep, 2004 at 12:33 by wendy in /Books | Permanent link
I was in a little bookstore in Switzerland last fall, and found this really cool looking set of books about this retired guy who decided to travel the Silk Route on foot. Unfortunately the store was a co-op and only members were allowed to buy books. I left the store feeling pretty annoyed but figuring that when I got home I would attempt to track down this book...but I managed to lose the little piece of paper where I had scribbled down the title and author info...and spent several frustrated hours typing "samarkand, on foot, french, retiree" and other such useful things into Google and Amazon with absolutely no success.
I've done this at intervals every few months...probably more because it bothers me that there's a book I've actually held in my hands and read the first chapter of which I cannot successfully Google. Anyway, I tried again this morning. Did a fancy search on Amazon with the settings "French" and "travel". And very slowly read through several hundred pages. Several of the books looked like they might be the one I was looking for but it never was. Finally I stumbled upon one with the word "Sarmacande" in the title...which struck me as being a really funny spelling...and maybe one of the words from the title. So I tried some variations on a theme and found them!
"Longue Marche" and "Vers Samarcande" by Bernard Ollivier.
I guess I had never managed to get quite the right french spelling for Samarkand. Now I'm all excited because I read a few reviews of it and they were all pretty positive. Amazon is my friend. It's way way too easy to buy books that way. Someone mentions a book that sounds interesting, you type the title into Amazon, push a button and they deliver it to your door. I usually try to get it out of the library first...but the library doesn't deliver.
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I have a desk again
Posted 28 Sep, 2004 at 13:45 by wendy in /Chatter | Permanent link
In a continuing attempt to postpone writing a "Statment of Interest" for my scholarship application or a "Proposed Training program" for my grant application (they're going to be pretty much the same thing) I cleaned my desk. To the extent of implementing a filing system. I'm trying to convince myself that this is a more productive use of my time than hanging out on the internet or reading knitting sites. The end result is a desk that my mother would probably consider to be relatively cluttered, but (as I'm sure Matt understands) I'm incapable of working in a space that is too tidy.
A while back I read an article about how some people (the really effective ones) use the surface of their desk as an extension of their brain as far as organizing information goes. I can usually locate stuff in the clutter, and I tidy it often enough that I usually deal with all the things that need to be dealt with before it's too late. I'd love to have some sort of 43 folders filing system, but I don't think it would really work for me. I'd have too many empty folders and after a while I'd just stop checking them. Someday maybe, if I have an office where I spend most of my time. Currently I'm finding a Palm Pilot to be too much effort.
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Colophon
Posted 27 Sep, 2004 at 15:09 by anonymous in /System | Permanent link
This site is built using Blosxom, a lovely little perl-based blogging tool built on the principles of simplicity and modularity. Enhancements to the basic functionality are provided by the plugins:
- blox
- categorylist
- entries_index
- fauxami
- file
- find
- flatarchives
- flavourdir
- seemore
- storytitle
- update
At a deeper level, the site is run on Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). Hosting is provided by our friend Brent.
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Yay I'm purple
Posted 27 Sep, 2004 at 11:25 by wendy in /System | Permanent link
And on top of that I can now see the title bars in all the little boxes all over the screen. I realize that it's a very sad thing that I happen to be using IE, but for the most part it seems to work pretty well and I honestly just can't be bothered installing something else. If it ain't broke, I'm not gonna bother fixin' it. Especially not if I can manage to get someone else to fix the broken things for me. But I would never take advantage of friends in such a way. That wouldn't be nice.
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A to-do list for this site
Posted 21 Sep, 2004 at 23:29 by matt in /System | Permanent link
- Fix Wendy's colour to something less pink
- Add in
Hows & Whys
sidebar - Tweak the stylesheet a bit to make the search form look better
- Figure out what the problem with IE is
- Comments / writebacks of some sort
- Sell the idea of this blog to others in the GE community
- Bios paragraphs for the authors
Anything I'm missing?
Update 2004/09/22: Progress...
Cross off numbers 1 and 3. There's something else that I wan't to change, and which should therefore be added to the list, but damned if I can think of what it is right now.
Update 2004/09/26: More progress
Mark off numbers 2, 4, and 7 as essentially done. IE seems to interpret CSS in ways which are at odds with the other browsers that I've tested (Safari, Firefox), so I've added in a (slightly bletcherous) hack to make IE do what I want it to do.
The Hows & Whys still needs finishing; if nothing else, the items should actually be links to places. Doing that right will probably involve making a well-behaved RSS flavour, so let's call that item 8 on the to-do list. But we're coming along; the official launch
of this site should be coming up soon.
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So I'm pretty sure this isn't going to work...
Posted 15 Sep, 2004 at 14:19 by wendy in /System | Permanent link
But just in case it does I'll actually type something.
And maybe add an extra paragraph just like that.
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Welcome!
Posted 06 Sep, 2004 at 21:29 by matt in /System | Permanent link
So this is Dangling Conversations, a collaborative weblog. At the moment there's just two of us contributing to the site, but that could well change in the future.
The place is still a wee bit under construction -- like that's a surprise for a website -- and I'm still tinkering around with a few features here and there. So don't be surprised if there are sudden changes to the look of the site... or the operation of the site, for that matter.