palordrolap

I reckon I’ve been pretty lucky. The handful I’ve attended haven’t been that bad.

The “worst” one, at least from my perspective, was probably a relative’s where I was an usher and messed up something with the church seating. The guests sorted that one out themselves when they thought I wasn’t looking. The wedding itself went without further problems, but that minor mess-up on my part will always stick with me.

The next “worst” was the one where the reception / after-party had a DJ who cranked the music volume another notch every 10 minutes. The venue had a literal decibel meter on the wall, and I think he had made it his goal to max that sucker out. I’ve been in clubs where the music is so loud you can’t hear your own voice when you’re talking (shouting) to someone else and this went well beyond that.

By contrast, the ceremony itself had been very demure and pleasant, in an English country manor house no less, and were it not for that DJ, it might have qualified as the best.

The best one was probably when I was a kid. I don’t have any memories of the church ceremony, which has to mean I was bored out of my mind, but must have behaved myself and there were no problems of any sort. I vaguely remember the reception in a function room at a hotel and there was nothing of note there that I remember either, except exploring the hotel. Weather was good. Must have been perfect.

Nowhere. If this was a video game I would have quit playing a long time ago.

Wow. You were lucky. That abort might have been what saved you there.

It sets permissions (ch ange modification rights) on all files (-R = recursive, stepping down through directories) in the file system (hence starting at /) so that they can be read, (re)written and executed as programs by all users (the 777 part). 000 would be no permissions for anyone (except for the root user), which would be just as bad.

So I was watching a video the other day about weird coincidences, and there was one entry where some guy was told he’d already checked in for a flight. After much confusion, it turned out there were two guys of the exact same name booked on the same flight going to the same place.

Two balding middle aged white guys. Travelling alone - until they each made a new friend anyway - to Thailand.

And yet, paradoxically, it is far more intelligent than those people who think it is intelligent.

These are all contemporary turn-of-the-century comedy TV series where each pairing shares at least one cast member:

• Spaced - You’d probably want to be reasonably familiar with UK pop culture of the time to truly appreciate it, but it’s still somewhat entertaining even without that.

• Black Books - Sister series to Spaced. Probably not in the same universe, but shares some of the same cast. A bit more surreal and doesn’t require so much pop culture knowledge.

• Green Wing - Turn the surrealism up yet another notch, add in a teaspoon of darkness, then set it in a hospital.

• JAM - Turn the surrealism dial fully around to the black setting, to the point of being outright disturbing and wrong.

• Big Train - Turn that dial back into silly and relatively light hearted… though you can tell there’s something a bit troubling going on at the same time.

Outside that stable, but you may have watched:

• Babylon 5 - Top rated sci-fi. Some episodes can be a bit meh, but the ones that aren’t are amazing.

• The Animatrix - Apocryphal short animations of various stories set in the universe of The Matrix, which you might want to rewatch first.

Yes, I have been under a rock since the turn of the century. I like it under here.

Updating databases to support anything other than that which would run on a 1970s mainframe costs the sort of money that eats into C-level’s yacht funds, so it won’t happen. These are the people who when faced with the “pick two from done right, done quick and done cheap” will never pick the first one.

Or in other words, if your name contains something outside the English alphabet’s A-Z, you’re out of luck. They’ll give you an approximation you don’t want and you’ll like it. Lower case? What’s that? You’re Irish and your surname has an apostrophe? F**k you, that’s in the bin, you’re OBRIEN now.

I was about to suggest SHXWMATHKWAYAMASAM as something that would be bound to work, but it’s 18 characters, and, being two more than a power of two, that all but guarantees that someone will truncate it at 16. Sigh.

There’s a bit in an Agatha Christie Poirot story about how if composer Guiseppe Verdi had been English he’d have been “Joe Green”. I’m not sure if Verdi ever used a translation, but it’s known that Beethoven referred to himself (or allowed himself to be referred to) as “Louis” in French. “Ludwig” is the German equivalent of that name.

I can recommend behindthename.com if this sort of thing piques your interest.

Obligatory DO NOT RUN THIS ON YOUR COMPUTER (or anyone else’s).

You’d think with fully open permissions, everything would work better, but many programs, including important low level things, interpret it as a sign of system damage and will refuse to operate instead.

If you do run it, you’d better have a backup or something like Timeshift to bail you out, and even if you do have that, it’s not worth trying it just to see what will happen.

It’s not quite as bad as deleting everything because you can boot from external media and back up non-system files after the fact, but the system will almost certainly not work properly and need to be repaired.

You have been warned.

when

can

Almost. You did well, but it’s too hard for me, except maybe for short phrases like this, which, regardless, still requires effort well above my comfort. It’s the sixth most used letter by some measures. Seek out the typesetters’ placeholder phrase where the first “word” has it as last (sixth), place, before the successor “SHRDLU”, which show the order of the most used letters of, uh, latter-day British? Oof. Edit: Modified to avoid a superfluous usage.

This hurts, so it’s time for me to stop.

“N-words” plural? I can imagine edgy students going out of their way to avoid all words starting with that letter as a result of that rule, just to be difficult.

The sign itself lacks words starting with that letter other than the rule which bans it, and the separate quoting of one word that has one in it somewhere suggests they’re allowed as long as they’re unspecified on the list (otherwise that entry would have been omitted), so it’s entirely possible to misinterpret.

On the other hand, avoiding all words starting with that letter seems like a fun idea, but will people even be able to tell? And it’s surprisingly hard to express some concepts without it.

Check the backs of the handles. Sometimes a manufacturer will stamp their name there. Or the name of the restaurant they were made for, but that’s less common, I think.

Kind of obscure, but Brits of a certain age will always think of Alan Dale as “Jim from Neighbours”. Another one being Guy Pearce as “Mike from Neighbours”. Pearce has had a slightly bigger career than Dale maybe, but you’ve almost certainly seen them both in popular movies and TV shows.

Neglectful / high threshold. A post or comment has to be extremely one way or the other for me to click one of those arrows, and as for boosts, basically forget about it, even if they are the right thing for stellar content. I would like to give out more (of all kinds), but never seem to be able to bring myself to do it.

I think seeing a ratio that already looks right might play into it a bit (since I’m on an instance that shows both up and down), but there are plenty of 0/0s that don’t get anything from me either.

Getting into the further “why” is deep existential, psychological stuff that’s probably well beyond the fluff level of an internet points discussion, and I might not even be able to begin to examine that without the help of a qualified therapist or something.

The other way around maybe, that is, an English word becoming technically foreign because we decide that we are going to write its definition in a different language in the dictionary.

It wouldn’t make sense to do that though, which kind of breaks the analogy. Unless you count words borrowed wholesale because we didn’t have that word, and those definitions were written in a foreign language first.

As it is “one pound” now translates exactly to “nought point four five three five nine two three seven kilograms” where it didn’t before 1959. “kilogram” is one of those foreign borrowings.

It’s not a defined conversion, it’s the literal, internationally ratified definition of what those units are. Or maybe “redefinition” ought to be the word there; prior to that definition there were several very similar, roughly equal but ultimately not internationally standardised units in use. And since they were redefined in terms of SI units, they’re technically SI.

This is one of those “tomatoes are technically fruit, but no-one with good sense would put them in a fruit salad” situations.

As far as I know. But if you really want to p*ss people off, deliberately self-censor when you do.

Wikipedia currently says:

the international avoirdupois pound, […] is legally* defined as exactly 0.45359237 kilograms

So, technically, a pound is a metric weight, only a niche one whose use may or may not be permitted by local regulations.

Similar is true* of the inch, which is defined as precisely 25.4 millimetres.

* The US, UK and a handful of others collectively signed this into their respective laws in 1959. You might think we don’t use the pound in the UK any more but it still shows up often in informal situations. Ditto inches and feet.

Thinking about what I would answer to this question.