The poem on the left side was written by Christian Morgenstern. This version is the “German” original. The right side version is the “Czech” translation.

Well, anyone who writes poems only with words that have no sense probably suffers from serious brain damage. But maybe he was just making fun of people actually publishing and buying this crap…

But anyone who translates such a poem to another language must be a total moron. Yeah, go ahead and write your own bullshit poem, but please don’t call it a translation to sell better…

Saying that something will happen nexet weekend can be very confusing. What exactly does “next weekend” mean?

Say it’s thursday (it actually is, but that doesn’t matter). Now read this: “It will happen this weekend.” and “It will happen next weekend.” Is there any difference between those sentences at all? This weekend is obviously the closest one, but what about the next weekend? For me personally it’s the same, but some people perceive it as the weekend after this one. It’s similar with the last weekend: “It happened last weekend.” and “It happened this weekend.” Well actually I think that there’s no argument there, the last weekend just has to be the last one, or do you think that the last weekend is the weekend before the last weekend? ;-)

I don’t know how this works in various languages, but at least in czech it’s very unclear. I experienced several misunderstandings because of that. What’s your point of view? (and please don’t pretend that you are not here, it’s getting tiring..)

PS: When I write that I’ll post something tomorrow, it means that I’ll maybe post something during the next week (whatever “next week” means).

I only very recently discovered Nightwish (their official site is also worth visiting). The trick is that they have a real singer – Tarja Turunen (well, she’s not their singer anymore, but the past albums are sung by her). I’m not going to just copy wikipedia here (go read it yourself) so I’ll add my subjective opinions about the albums:

• Angels Fall First – their first album, I really like it, the best songs are Elvenpath, Beauty and the Beast, Astral Romance, Angels Fall First, Eramaajarvi
• Oceanborn – most the songs are a bit too fast but good nevertheless, particularly good are Gethsemane and Moondance (czesc kotasz); Sleeping Sun is one of the best Nightwish songs that can be found on new releases of this album or as a single
• Wishmaster – nothing except the Wishmaster caught my attention on this album
• Over the Hills And Far Away – only few songs, the good ones are Over the Hills And Far Away and the cover version of Astral Romance
• Century Child – there are some good songs: End of All Hope, The Phantom of the Opera, Beauty of the Beast; and there is one excellent song: Feel For You (I can listen to this one on repeat over and over again)
• Once – this album was a complete hit and contains many great songs: Dark Chest of Wonders, Wish I had an Angel, Nemo, Planet Hell, Creek Mary’s Blood, The Siren, Dead Gardens, Kuolema Tekee Taiteilijan

Now they are getting a new singer instead of Tarja… I don’t want to say they can’t find anyone this good, but at least it will be very difficult.

While my spelling is generally good (it was always easier for me to remember how words are written than how they are pronounced) I always had troubles distinguishing vowels. I mean, I usually do know which vowel there should be, but I just sometimes make the mistake of writing a different one instead. I always realize it immediately when I see the word on screen, but somehow I don’t realize it when writing. So yeah, recently I’ve written ‘rondamly’ instead of ‘randomly’ in a chat and they thought it was a good joke… well, it actually wasn’t…

Sometimes I write a whole word differently, like writing ‘hojo’ instead of ‘toho’ (happened to me the other day). I don’t know the cause, and it’s not particularly annoying, it’s just strange and surprising.

I vaguely remember experiencing something a bit similar in some high school classes – I was very tired and trying to write what the teacher was saying, and as I was falling asleep, my hand somehow continued writing, although it didn’t write letters anymore, just random something that looked a bit like letters (and of course it had nothing to do what the teacher was saying as I was asleep by that time).

So it might actually be the same… you are still writing because of momentum while your brain already has a holiday…

Has anything similar ever happened to you?

I’m changing my eating habits!

Throughout all my life I’ve eaten much more than I wanted to. What is worse – I didn’t even realize it, I got used to that uneasy feeling of having full stomach and being all tired and sleepy because of this.

When my grandma asked me whether there’s a possibility of eating at school, I truthfully answered that there’s a cheap canteen for students. However, I didn’t mention that I usually don’t go there…

I’m not changing my eating habits to be more fit, look better, spare money or whatever, I am changing them because I don’t like eating when I feel it’s too much for me.

My brand new eating rule: eat when you are hungry and eat just enough not to be hungry, not less and not more.

Hello from Edgy Eft!
Recently I got a new disk and I decided it might be a good idea to make a clean new install (I had the previous system through warty – hoary – breezy - dapper). I didn’t want to upgrade the old system to something which is still unstable and I thought it might also be good to get rid of all the trash that I don’t use anyway… (well, yeah, I copied my whole home directory with a lot of trash, but at least I got rid of the programs that I don’t use).

And the first time experience? Magnificent! I encountered no serious problems, almost everything “just worked” out of the box and the things that didn’t were pretty easy to fix.

List of “nice and surprising”:

• sounds: the default intro sound of gnome was so horrible it was almost unlistenable, the new one just rocks, gaim also has different sounds, it will take a while to get used to it but they are better I think (and now gaim also has a volume control, w00t)
• new artwork: nothing spectacular, a bit better than dapper (which was pretty good, at least compared to previous “shit brown” themes)
• firefox: 2.0beta is just better (it has one small mistake that when I search by / it doesn’t let me highlight the words, which sucks, but maybe I can set it somewhere…)
• gaim 2.0beta… it simply rulez (hey, why is everything 2.0beta?)
• a lot of things stayed the same and 95% of my ~/.something configuration files work so I don’t have to reconfigure everything.
• many problems that I expected didn’t occur at all… wifi (which was borken in the 2.6.15 kernel), nvidia, wine (particularly fonts), X server, java, etc.

But that was a clean install, I will see what an upgrade looks like when they release the official version and I will upgrade my sister’s system, but after such a pleasant experience I don’t expect any problems either.

There is something really weird about abandoned places. I personally find them very scary for several reasons. First is that they don’t necessarily have to be as abandoned as they might seem, and if someone lived there it would probably be weird enough person to kill me. The second, less childlish, is that it just seems scary to see a place that used to be full of people abandoned like this. This is also the fascinating thing about these places.

I found a few interesting sites, one with pictures (and some additional info) by a girl riding her motorbike through the Chernobyl area. One made by Polish guys is called opuszczone (click “gallery” at the bottom), it contains mostly Polish buildings, but there are photos from other places too. And I couldn’t possibly omit a great site that goes by the name abandoned places, made by a Belgian pilot who seems to spend quite a lot of free time on abandoned places; although the design is a bit, errrm, original… just click around a lot and you are bound to get to occasionally see all the great photos.

Is there any website about such places in Czechia (particularly Brno)? I couldn’t find one, and I was trying quite hard.

I went to the tearoom to play go the other day and one very talented and promising 7kyu (he’s been playing for half a year I think, that’s a very good result) asked me to play an even game with him… I offered him a handicap, and he declined, saying that he wanted to “see the gap”. It made me a bit angry… of course there’s a huge gap, duh. So I played a bit unorthodoxly to crush him as much as possible and I was winning by more than 150 when he resigned.

I also always wanted to play an even game with a strong professional playing at his full strength, to see the gap. A few times I was even quite close to asking for it but luckily I never did so. And I think I’m never going to make fool of myself in this way, now that I can imagine what it feels like. Also, I am not sure if I really want to see the gap…

Now you might think that I’m just slacking off, but actually it is not so…

I spent a busy week in Bratislava, playing two go tournaments.

The first tournament was European Team Go Championship, where the Czech team placed second, just behind the ultrastrong Romanians. Third place was taken by Hungarians, who were about same strength as us, but we got lucky and won against them. Other teams weren’t really even competing about placing in top three…

The weekend tournament was quite big (more than 100 players), my results are not so great, but I somehow got the best 4dan prize, which was definitely a neat surprise.

Concerning my games… it was just strange – I won many games that I should have lost and I failed to win some games that I should have won, but I guess that in the end it’s more or less fair anyway. :-)

As a side note, I won 500svk (~13eur) in the casino (did I mention that the tournament is played in beautiful Reduta Casino and that each participant gets a 100svk chip. You can’t cash it, you have to play it, of course. So I put it on 1/6 to win (you have to use more valuable chips for betting on more probable things like 1/3 and 1/2), exactly 31-36… and… voila… 31 fell. So I took the money and cashed it out. But they were looking a bit strangely at me cashing out this ridiculous amount of money… :P

I thought it would be fun to try to find polish words that have funny meaning for czechs. I started with writing it by hand, asking people and it took me at least an hour to find out that lists like this one already do exist and that such words are called “false friends”. Nevertheless, I think this list contains some words that no other (easily findable) false friends lists contain (at least nozki, nozyczki, plywac and prawie).

A few remarks concerning polish pronunciation ((mainly) for czech people): ć and cz – č, ó – u, ł - english w.

Feel free to write more in the comments. :-)

~~~

A side story:

Finding out how “edit html source” window in wordpress behaves
Will pressing escape close the window?
Nah, probably not…
Well, let’s try it to make sure…
@%#$^&{€¶ŧ→ø@#°’&ĐŁ

One line corresponds to aproximately one second of thinking. Of course, the table with all the words was gone. I couldn’t even believe I did something this stupid for no real reason.