Kindness of a random stranger
April 27th, 2009
This weekend something interesting happend to me. I was sitting in McDonalds (I know its unhealty) and eating a Hamburger.
The thing costs only 100 yen and for that price its a really cheap and quick supper. It was already quite late so I just wanted quickly to eat something. Well I was sitting there and eating while a elder japanese woman was staring at me. She was maybe 70 or so. So, well she stared at me and I got annoyed for a moment and looked back, smiling. She smiled back and left me alone (looked some other way). I didn't think much of it and continued eating my food. I didn't have anything to drink but I thought, hey, just buy yourself later in the late-night supermarket something.
She got up and went to the counter to buy something leaving her things unattended at the seat. I found that not so good but hey, it's japan and here its a bit safer than in other places around the world. Well, she came back and put a coffee cup with extra milk and sugar in-front of me and said I should drink something.
As you can imagine I was totally baffled and kindly refused. I tried talking to her and seemed she just found it too terrible just eating something and the coffee was so cheap too (120 yen) so no problem. I thanked her and tried to talk to her until her husband came who was totally confused why she was talking to not only a stranger but a foreigner here in japan. Very amusing.
This was the first time a random stranger was kind to me here. I'll not forget that.
Anyway I just wanted to share this interesting, friendly and memorable coincidence with you.
Have a good start into the week!
Aptitude not your super cow ;)
December 2nd, 2008
Sorry for the long break everybody. Hope somebody still has me in his/her rss reader...
Sometimes when apt-get gets too annoying because due to pinning and mixing there is a lot of trouble I use aptitude.
By coincidence I looked at the help section of the command (doesn't happen often, thanks zsh) and look what I saw:
That kind of reminded me of this here:
Did you know those things and April's jokes already? Well if you have something more on the commandline like this, please let me know!
Cheers!
A true WTF Microsoft style
February 20th, 2008
It doesn't happen very often that I see stuff which will make me speechless or just *really* give me this strong WTF feeling.
This one though which I stumbled upon did a great job.
What will be next?
The arch enemies GNU/Linux troll, MacOS imp and the ugly UNIX beast in the list? What do you think?
PS: For more happenings like this I recommend this reading literature for further study ;)
The right Jargon
February 5th, 2008
Reading from the headline you might think what is he up to now again? Jargon? What the..?
Firing up dict from the commandline we get this explanation what the word actually means:
From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:
Jargon \Jar"gon\, n. [F. jargon, OF. also gargon, perh. akin to
E. garrulous, or gargle.]
1. Confused, unintelligible language; gibberish. "A barbarous
jargon." --Macaulay. "All jargon of the schools." --Prior.
[1913 Webster]
2. Hence: an artificial idiom or dialect; cant language;
slang. Especially, an idiom with frequent use of informal
technical terms, such as acronyms, used by specialists.
"All jargon of the schools." --Prior.
[1913 Webster]
Apart from the obvious first explanation I am actually referring to the second one and want to let you in on a quite funny trade secret. Some of you might have heared that Doctors often talk to each other in latin especially infront of patients using medical slang (e.g. Plumbum oscillans).
So what is the deal you say?
Well people in the IT world tend to have those ways too and most ,,normal'' people don't get them. Some funny expressions are e.g.
| pebkac /peb´kak/ | Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair | Userfriendly about it |
| UBD /U·B·D/, n. | User Brain Damage | |
| Fractal Wrongness | The state of being wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. | More info here |
| ID-ten-T error aka Ten-T error | Ten-T Error is a term often used by tech support operators and computer experts to describe a problem that is due to the user's ignorance instead of a software or hardware malfunction. | Another slight variation is known as a ,,Layer 8 error'' |
... and many more ...
Should you have encountered them then beware and maybe now you understand why your account gets mysteriously deleted sometimes ;).
So do you know any other slangs like the mentioned ones? Maybe from other majors?
PS: Shame on the one who thinks I only know the latin expressions from earlier practice ;P
PPS: Please do read this stuff it is funny as hell and will save your ,,life'' if you are a non tekki.
PPPS: Please don't scold me for spilling those secrets ;)
Invasion of the garden gnomes in Japan
January 2nd, 2008
Sometimes on the way I find some funny things as here in Setagaya-Daita. Remembering a funny (,,the invasion'') picture Martin a friend of mine took, I counter with this one. Its outside a barber shop, which makes this even more interesting.
Not quite as good as his, but hey we are here not in Germany right ? ;)
(Sorry for the poor quality but its from my mobile phone).
New Year joke the Japanese way
January 1st, 2008
Between the 29th december and the 3rd january even japanese people tend to have holidays. I know its incredible ;).
Anywho, in Shinjuku some construction workers had some fun with glowing pylons which are normally used to redirect traffic. Have a look what they did :
Nifty smiley ;)