"There are so many people under repressive regimes for whom filesharing and the Internet is the link to the rest of the world that inspires, gives hope and makes it endurable to fight for human rights and democracy. The state's control system is expanding. We used to heavily criticize the intrusions of privacy and control systems in place behind the Iron Curtain, but now we are building this ourselves." -- Akko Karlsson, member of the Swedish Green Party's executive board, "Filesharing is not theft" [editorial published in two Swedish newspapers, I don't have a link to a copy of the entire editorial], as reported on TorrentFreak 2008-02-09
Someone posted some questions to the abcusers mailing list,
that had the side effect of alerting me to a tool I have a use
for. First problem: I can't get it to work for any chords
that have sharp signs in their names (either as the root or
as an added bass note; e.g., F#m7, E/G#). Second
problem: while the file has extensive comments, including
an explanation of the syntax to use, the comments and the
(Postscript) variable names are all in a language I don't
know. I think it's Italian.(Babelfish seems
to think it's Portugese) So there's a pretty good chance
I just need to RTFM, but Google Translate didn't help.
(I'll try Babelfish next.) (Got an intelligible translation but
the clues I sought are not in the documentation.)
Worst case, I dive into debugging in a programming language I only almost kindasorta know, with cryptic-to-me variable names and no readable-by-me comments. Best case, the file's author pops up on the mailing list and tells me a really simple fix before I get into the headache zone.
Had a plan for the day, until I stayed awake all night tossing and turning nd trying to uncramp my right calf and finally crashed at 9 AM. Slept a few hours at last, but not enough, so I'm not at my clearest-headed this evening. Big plan for tonight: try to manage to sleep at such a time that tomorrow I'll be awake during the hours when folks at City Hall answer the phone. Big plan for next year: be well enough (and be able to afford) to go to Baitcon and Conterpoint (unless their dates overlap), and more than one evening of Balticon.
In the meantime, I'm already focussed on not letting Pennsic get screwed up for me.
If I'm going to bother shaving my legs, I need to get some shorter skirts. (Or lose enough weight to fit into the short skirts I used to wear, tens of pounds ago.)
[1] The European riddle goes, "If someone who speaks two languages is bilingual and someone who speaks three languages is trilingual, what do you call someone who speaks one languge?" -- and the expected answer is, "American". I know a few phrases in Greek and can make a little sense of really simple written Greek on a good day, et je parle Francais un petit peu,, but today I'm feeling painfully stereotypical-American.
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