Things that BUZZ [and i know why]
Dear GSM mobile phone carrier,
Fix your network. Fix your communication protocol. I am sick and tired of hearing interference from every cell phone which is on your network on my speakers, on my headphones on my landline on the conference room phone, and seeing my monitor shake and shimmy every time my LG decides to talk phone home like ET to the mothership.
This is entirely unacceptable. How much money did you have to shove in the FCC’s pockets to get this horribly engineered, chattery wireless protocol approved? I was hoping that maybe with the update of the W-CDMA/3G protocol that you’d have this fixed. I guess that wasn’t an option? Or are you just lazy and ignorant?
How did Apple overlook this gigantic flaw when choosing AT&T as their sole provider of the iPhone? For being so concerned about aesthetics and pleasure of use, forcing your customer’s speakers blast digital chit-chat interference at them every 5 minutes is not going to boost your sales or reputability. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, because if I have to listen to this garbage noise then your music-playing phone is worthless to me.
Stop blaming the “poor” shielding on my [everything]. I’m sorry that not all of my electronics are wrapped in lead so that you don’t have to think for yourselves and come up with a protocol that doesn’t suck. Even Evil Verizon decided to go with a protocol that doesn’t suck.
I guess that means I’ll be switching back to crappy, Evil Verizon or maybe try Sprint. Thanks a lot.
Sincerely,
-Brian Saghy
Things That BEEP [and i don't know why]
The piezo-electric buzzer salesman is one of the most successful businessman of his time. Perhaps not economically, but he certainly got his product into more devices around the world than I personally would ever have wished for.
The buzzer is a simple device – a piece of flexible crystal which flexes itself when an electrical current is applied. Turn the current on and off in rapid succession, and you get a frequency. You attach that frequency to a spasming piece of metal or plastic, and you get movement of air. You move air, and you get a blaring obnoxious noise entering your ear, waking you up at 6:30 in the morning as a construction worker decided to put his vehicle in reverse not too far from your bedroom window. Read the rest of this entry »
Foreign Accents
So I’m back in Ohio for the holidays. In a coffee shop.
There is a table to my right, with two older women and an Amish man seated. They are speaking. I cannot understand them.
Dutch?
The women are not dressed as Amish, and it would be odd for them to be speaking Amish Dutch.
Iba fume ieeheh. Shon shanganiz if albenen on ten. Thurrsde if lar eh iz bizzeh. Auff en war mar der car crashen.
What the hell is this? I try to focus.
It is – surprisingly – English. Is this the accent I grew up with? It sounds like these women are from Minnesota. Are they rolling their r’s? Where are these z’s coming from? Where are the “th” sounds? Why do all vowels sound like a soft “i”?
This has happened before, where English sounds foreign to me. I can zone out and unfocus to a point where it just sounds like phonetic noise. As if I were watching TV in Chechloslovakia. Meaningless combinations of consonants and vowels with an occasional understood proper noun… “Bleh nartio ard funfo par kun Wal Mart der hur friewenhsha bata da hunse bata subitastar.”
What it boils down to, is that we sound pretty funny speaking English.
Café Tacuba [Chilanga Banda]
Tonight I went to see Café Tacuba live at La Zona Rosa. They opened for themselves, playing a total of two and a quarter hours with just a five minute break or so at the end of the first hour. It was a long, but very entertaining performance.
They were supposed to start their set at 8:00pm, but naturally ran 40 minutes late. When they began to enter the stage, the crowd went wild, and the lead singer, Rubén Albarrán, stepped front stage wearing a large black velvet tophat, his hair in pigtails, and some slight facial hair. I couldn’t help but see Jamiroquai on stage, or perhaps the lead singer of Ghostland Observatory. Rubén can match the stage presence and energy of either.
As one could imagine, the crowd was mostly Mexican. They certainly knew how to pump up the venue full of energy. At one point, the crowd was in this pseudo-mosh state, where the whole mass of people was behaving like particles in a fluid, waving back and forth like the tide on a beach. I don’t mean slow swaying holding lighters up in the air singing Hey Jude style, I mean a gentle yet distant 4 steps forward, and a harsh undercurrent feeling that would rip you quickly 4 steps back. Repeat. It was strange, but at the same time relaxing.
Out of all of the songs that they played, many of which came from their new album, Sino, I only recognized maybe 5 or so songs. It turns out that the crowd’s favorite songs (2/4 timing which allows for happy jumping music) seldom aligned with my favorite songs by the band.
My only disappointment came when they played Dejate Caer, which is probably my favorite song of theirs. For whatever reason, they just didn’t seem in sync, and at times it fell apart. Up until that point, they had performed quite amazingly. Oh well, their little dance routine interlude was still campy and fun (as much as I anticipated it to be).
Apparently I have a lot more of their music to continue discovering.
International Dvorak Layout
Before my study abroad in Spain, I realized that I was going to be doing quite a bit of writing en español, and that this was going to require some new keyboard adjusting, since I didn’t feel like doing the alt-01249 key combinations to get characters like ñ € ó ç º ü ¡ ¿, etc, since they would be quite frequent.
This is great and simple, if you use a QWERTY-style keyboard. The problem for me is that I use the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout, and I have been since my Junior year of High School. Though I can type in QWERTY, I find it uncomfortable and slow. There exist several Spanish-Dvorak keyboard layout setup files for Windows, however they are all designed for the Spanish keyboard layout, not the US layout. This moves around some keys from where I am used to having them on my US-Dvorak layout, which again is uncomfortable. I already know two layouts, why should I force myself to learn a third? All I wanted was my US-Dvorak layout with the special accented characters and symbols. This shouldn’t be too hard.
Doing some long and tedious searching, I stumbled upon Colin at carfreeuniverse.org’s US-Dvorak with Spanish Chars implementation. This was a great starting point, but it still lacked some of the symbols that I wanted. I can’t remember what at this point, as it was a year ago when I first looked at his layout. I believe I needed most the €, º, and ç symbols, especially if I wanted to write some Català. So I modified his layout for my own purposes, and added characters as I found necessary.
Now, I’m trying to teach myself Português, and along comes a whole new set of letters that weren’t needed in Spanish – ã, õ, à, ô, â, ê, etc. So, nearly a year later, I open up the old Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator and start doing some edits, and add the characters I need. Finally, this is installed on my desktop, so I can send e-mails in Spanish and Portuguese to my friends without looking like a fool and causing vowel confusion.
The result is a keyboard layout that can be used as the default keyboard dvorak layout when typing in English. When special characters are needed, the ‘, ~, `, and ^ characters are all “dead keys” which are used to modify the following character. The layout thus will not get in my way for any of my everyday typing, and allows me to hold IM conversations and write Spanglish/Esportuguês with zero transition between languages. This may even cover French, but its probably not quite there yet. Maybe in version 3.0. The only thing I modified was swapping the shift state of the ~ and `, since ~ characters are used much more frequently. This may be confusing, because its opposite of the key printing on the keyboard itself. I may change it back if it gets confusing.
Here are some screen shots of the layout:
Default
Shift
Alt-CtrlI figured I would post all my hard work for undoubtedly enormous population of US-dvorak-native tri+linguists out there. I can think of at least 2 other people who may find this useful that I actually know, that is, if they even use Windows. More importantly, I’ll be able to access this website and install the layouts from anywhere.
Feel free to comment on the layout. Perhaps I missed some characters or made a goof somewhere. I’d be happy to fix it, so long as I’m in agreement 
New Clothes
Basically, I just wanted to post this picture.
But really, I decided that my wardrobe needs some revamping. Europe has made me realize that baggy shirts are not the way to go. The problem is that finding long sleeve shirts with my neck size and sleeve length is apparently near impossible. I did get some short-sleeve shirts at Armani Exchange yesterday. Previously, the only thing that I owned by Armani was a bottle of cologne that I bought on Champs Elysees in Paris. Really, the only reason I bought that bottle of cologne was so that I could say I bought it on Champs Elysees in Paris. So there. Thats what I did. Now I have two shirts, too, that I bought in a mall in Austin, which, by the way, is far less exciting.
When did I become such a consumer whore?
