Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

Slashdot is well-known for the quality of discussions.  Minus, of course, trolling anonymous cowards.  Here is a quote from the comment to give you the sense of how clear some Slashdot users can express themselves:

Did you actually try to develop anything for Symbian?
Well, I did. And let me tell you this: Windows APIs, complete with their haphazard organization and historical baggage, lunatic bugs and arcane undocumented extensions are an example of Reason and Logic, when compared to this positive 10 day old vomit which is Symbian. Any ole Linux API is like an Extatic Symphony of Cosimic Joy, Eternal Purity and All-Encompassing Sanity, next to this 10 day old vomit which is Symbian.

I would have a lot of hard times, if somebody asked me to translate this to another language…

My co-worker and I were composing an email today. He was writing and I was watching over. When I pointed out to him that he wanted to write “vacation” instead of “vocation”, he argued that if the word was wrong, the spellchecker would have underlined it in red. Since I was 99.9% sure that I was right, I aked him to double check.

It turned out that both “vacation” and “vocation” are legitimate words. But what surprised me was that their meanings were almost opposite.

“Vacation” has to do with resting and spending the time nicely. “Vocation” has to do with hard work. If you don’t believe me, check the definitions in the dictionary. Here are the words in Dictionary.com : vacation and vocation.

P.S.: And I was right.

Yesterday, when I wrote about Maxim’s first food I of course meant his first solid food. It’s just that I didn’t know that solid food is called solid food in English. The direct translation from Russian is “solid” indeed, but when I was writing the post, I wasn’t sure that I could the word “solid” to describe food. And I was too lazy to check in the dictionary. Today, when I was replying to a comment for that post, I noticed the Google Adsense banner which was promoting some “solid food” website. I checked the site, double checked in the dictionary, and it was indeed - “solid” food.

Either I am being too smart or too stupid. I don’t know.

P.S.: Maxim seems to really enjoy his new diet.

Consider the joke told by Richard Stallman that I read in this article:

Once I was eating in Legal Sea Food and ordered arctic char. When it arrived, I looked for a signature, saw none, and complained to my friends, “This is an unsigned char. I wanted a signed char!” I would have complained to the waiter if I had thought he’d get the joke.

Until today, the word “char” had only one meaning to me. It was a computer term, which is used as a declaration of a character or string variable in some programming languages. Such as C, for example.

It turns out, that there is another meaning. Here is a quote from the dictionary for you:

also charr (n. pl. char or chars also charr or charrs)

Any of several fishes of the genus Salvelinus, especially the arctic char, related to the trout and salmon.

Wikipedia entries for those of you who want to learn more on this fishy subject: Salvelinus, Arctic char.

During the last few days I started to change my understanding of the word “enlightment”. I think I already mentioned that Maxim loves looking at light sources (lamps, windows, etc). He loved looking at them from his very first day in this world and he still enjoys it.

Sometimes he would lay on the bed looking at the light bulb, thinking about something. And than he would suddenly start talking in his meaningful manner (’Rggggrgg’,'Arrrrgggrrgg’, etc). When I see him like this, I say that he just was “enlighted”. Thus “enlightment” is talking your mind out after watching a light source.