Category: It Happened to Me

In the blog entry titled Oddball Cover of a French Book on China and Africa, I quote a description of a French book:

L’une étonne le monde; l’autre le désole. La Chine, le dragon rugissant du 21ème siècle, et l’Afrique, l’autruche impuissante à affronter ses défis.

Babelfish (which often gives wonky translations) and I have interpreted the line “L’une étonne le monde; l’autre le désole.” as “One astonishes the world; the other afflicts it.” Some people have suggested that the line would be better translated as “the other makes [the world] grieve”. Perhaps I’m not clear on the use of the verb désoler. I’m familiar with its use in the apology “Je suis désolé”, but that’s about it.

In the interests of fairness and accuracy, if you speak French fluently and have a firm grasp of its idioms, could you please read that description in context and let us know which translation is more accurate? Just post it in the comments.

If you were to visit YouTube at the time of this writing, you’d be greeted with this image:

If you need your cheap home-made video fix, here’s something that might help: it’s a video showing me and Wendy in the last stages of making peanut butter fudge ice cream in our ice cream maker (ah, wedding presents). If you have an ice cream maker — they go for about $50 or $60 at Williams-Sonoma or any other kitchen equipment store — the recipe is pretty simple:

Peanut Butter Ice Cream Base

• 2 cups cream
• 1 cup milk
• 2/3 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup peanut butter

Warm up the peanut butter so that it becomes more like a thick sauce. Wendy used the microwave, heating it at high for 15 seconds, letting it rest, and then heating it up again for another 15 seconds. Blend the peanut butter with the cream, milk and sugar — one of those hand blenders or stick mixers makes this much easier. Pour the resulting mixture into your ice cream maker.

Adding a fudge ribbon is pretty simple: you simply add fudge sauce very close to the end of the ice cream maker cycle. This video [2.7 MB QuickTime] shows us doing just that.

Click the image to see the video.

Still Under Construction

If this blog currently looks half-done, that’s because it is. I’m generally pleased with the look of the content section — that’s the middle column — but the sidebars need a lot of work, and that temporary title graphic has got to go. Work and life have conspired to keep me busy as usual, but my inner Japanese engineer keeps looking at the blog and yelling “Kansei!” and “Kaizen!” and won’t let me rest until this thing looks just right.

Accurate and Up-to-Date

I just completed the clean-up task that involved the most drudgery: the cleaning up of my blogroll, the list that appears in the right-hand column. I’ve gone through every blog in that list and for each one, I checked to see:

• That the blog still exists
• The the blog is still being maintained (I treat having at least one new entry in the past 12 months and not having announced that it is shutting down as “being maintained”)
• That a link to this blog exists in a permanent list on that blog

Any blog that met all three criteria stayed on the blogroll and any blog that didn’t was removed. I also added a few new blogs that met the criteria. As of this writing, the blogroll is up-to-date.

“He’s Vewwy Highwy Wanked in Wome, You Know.”

If you’ve got a blog that meets the criteria listed above, let me know! Having your blog appear in my blogroll is good for your Google ranking. This blog has a Google PageRank of 7. For comparison,

• Little Green Footballs’ PageRank is 6
• Reddit and Digg have a PageRank of 7
• MetaFilter’s is 8
• BoingBoing’s is 9

Google’s algorithm gives your page a higher ranking when people with good PageRank link to you, so if you’d like to give your blog a boost, link to me and let me know about it!

Heading to work this morning, with the sun in a bright cloudless sky, the temperature unusually cool for the middle of August (23 degrees C, or about 73 degrees F for my American readers) and a cool breeze blowing about, I got hit with deja vu. Then it struck me: this is what the weather is usually like when it’s time to go back to school.

It’s funny how that feeling came up; I haven’t been in school since the end of 1994, when I wrote my last final exam ever. It was for my fourth-year databases course, and to commemorate the end of an era, I wore a suit to the exam, after which I joined my database prof, the late Dr. McLeod, at Crazy Go Nuts University’s Grad Club for some Glenfiddich.

I toasted the Good Doctor with John Belushi’s line from Animal House: “Christ! Seven years of college…down the drain!” [52 KB .WAV sound file]

Good times.

Do you still get school-related deja vu? Or anxiety dreams? (Very occasionally, I still have the nightmare where I’m being hit with a surprise exam or realize that I’d never even heard of the assignment due today.) Or are you still in school? Comment away!