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I haven’t posted for far too long.  For now, three things:

1. There is a friendly cat who rejoices in the name of Mr Cat.  He has moved in with my friends Amy and John in Maryland, not far from Baltimore and DC, but John is allergic to him.  They have neutered him and given him his shots and he is in good health.  All the no-kill shelters are full and he’s too old (four-ish) to stand much of a chance at a shelter where he might be euthanised.  Do you know anyone local who can find him a home?
2. It looks as though I’ll be in the area of the original Cambridge the week after next, in case pubmeets might be happening. :)
3. The fifth sentence of the 56th page of the closest book to me is: Bydd y llyffaint yn amadael â thi a’th dai, ac â’th weision a’th bobl, ac ni cheir hwy yn unman ond yn y Neil. The frogs will leave you and your houses and your servants and your people and will not remain(?) in any place but in the Nile.

I keep hearing people say, “If you don’t vote you have no right to complain.”

This is, of course, nonsense.  Your right to complain is inalienable, and should be exercised.  Myself, I can’t vote, being an alien, and yet I complain all the time.  Complain away.

Everyone else is going to remind you to vote if you can, I’m sure, so I presumably don’t need to.  But I do want to tell you that voting is the least you can do.  Feeding one bit of information every four years into the political machine is something, but hardly anything.  The people at Peterloo died asking for even that basic minimum, and I believe you should honour them not just by voting but by going beyond it.

I’ve been very impressed by the way Obama’s campaign have used slogans like “Yes we can”, rather than something easier like “Yes, Obama can”. Unfortunately, people seem to be reading “Yes we can” as “Yes we can… elect Barack Obama, who will then take over from us, and we can sit back and let other people run our lives from then on.”  I was disappointed that when this video says “Did you do enough?”, it means “Did you do enough to get Obama elected?” and not “Did you do enough of the sort of thing we’re actually here to do, did you feed the hungry, did you help oppressed folk find a voice, did you join a union to let your voice be heard, did you give time and resources to Habitat for Humanity or the ACLU, did you work to bring about social justice?” And I worry people have stopped seeing the election as a means to such things and just think that when their chosen candidate’s in power everything will be lovely and they can go back to sleep. However good a person he is– and I believe he is a good, even a great person– he’s not a cross between King Arthur, Jesus Christ, a Jack Kirby superhero and the mythologised version of Abe Lincoln.  If you believe he is, you will be disappointed.  One person can make mistakes: put not your trust in princes.  But you— what will you do?

I can’t vote, being an alien, even though I live here– so make sure you go in my place and the place of millions more who will be affected by this election but have no voice in it.  But more importantly, find other ways to make a change over the next four years.  Be involved.  Complain.  Make a difference.  It’s not about them, it’s about you.

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Update: Join us on #potus on irc.netgoth.org.uk.

Blessed Samhain to those who keep Samhain, and happy Halloween to those who keep Halloween.

Shortly after I made the first cup of tea of the morning, O’Keeffe presented me with a very dead mouse. It’s a clear sign of the start of winter when mice start hiding in places she can find them. I thanked her courteously and tied it up in a plastic bag to throw it away.

Later we went to the YMCA, where I had my first turn on a treadmill; I seem to have reasonable endurance but not much strength. Tomorrow they’ll be showing me how to work the weights machines and so on.

This evening Fin made chicken curry for dinner. I went out trick-or-treating with Rio. So many of the houses had signs saying to vote for one candidate or another that I said to her, “I wonder they don’t have special Barack Obama sweets.” She told me they should be called Yes We Candy. (Google tells me someone got there already, though I’m sure she didn’t know it.)

And I’m looking for translators for the new version of Joule, which might be 3.1 or 4.0. There’s not much to translate and you get your name in the footer for pages served in that language. Interested?

Yesterday was an awfully rainy and blustery day, reminiscent of the one that sent Owl to live in Piglet’s house. When I woke up there was no milk and I had to go out and get some; then I went to the Y for the first time, but I couldn’t think what to do other than track, so I did that for a mile. (Today, my legs ache, which means I should do it more often.)

Later, my body kept wishing it was back in bed and my mind wouldn’t co-operate in sympathy. But after a while suddenly things came together beautifully. In the evening Fin and Alex went instead, but when Fin and Alex left Rio in the childcare room which was always free before, the childcare people sent her away to look for them because apparently there’d been a charge of $1/hr imposed. Rio turned up crying. I am not impressed.

And I also wrote Fin a triolet:

As the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds,
some enchantment just fell,
as the drawing shall tell…
in a paper for spell
with your pencils as wands,
as the drawing shall tell
and the paper responds.

Fin made chilli for dinner. (I’ve always seen chilli in the UK and chili in the US. Isn’t it a Spanish word? Is one of them more like the Spanish?)

Someone told me I should record my day posts and post the audio file along with the text post. Maybe I should.

There will be a post about last weekend soon.

There is now a mailing list for the GNOME Latin translation. Please join it if you’re interested.

There has been a fairly impressive amount of work done already. One school has contacted the team about translating applications as a co-operation between their Latin and CS departments, so the students get to discover the details of the localisation process and sharpen their Latin skills at the same time. I’d like to see more of this kind of thing.

I know almost nothing about how KDE runs things, but their Latin translation page contains the strange note “Last update : 2004-02-27 23:40:37– Active Team.” It might be worthwhile using one team to work on both.

On Monday evening we went to the YMCA and signed up. We haven’t actually done anything there yet, but it does mean I can go swimming again. (I used to swim like a fish and I had a lifesaving qualification, but I’ve hardly been in water in five years.) To the right is the photo they took of me for my ID card. I think the moral is that I need to lose the beard after Halloween.

Later we went to the diner. Fin asked for soup. The soup had a maggot in it. The manager told her it was just a piece of cracker. This is the same diner which once served one of our party a plate of stir-fry with a fly half-fried in and struggling to get free. I think we should stop going to that diner.

O’Keeffe and Rothko have disappeared twice since I last wrote, and both times we found them hidden in a different part of the house, once under the bed in the spare room, once under a chest of drawers. Apparently this is a cat thing to move your nest every so often in case of predators, but I was really rather worried when I couldn’t find Rothko anywhere around. He’s walking around independently now, but he’s not weaned yet.

The Metacity blog is now appearing on news.gnome.org, a planet for projects. (I know some of you are going to comment saying you want it on p.g.o, but it’s not up to me.)

And I’ve saved the most interesting piece of news for last: three pieces of Fin’s art are going to be in a show between noon and 5 p.m. this coming Saturday in the Director’s Conference Room in the Luce Foundation Center at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 8th and F Streets NW, Washington, D.C. 20004. Fin will be there, and so will the rest of us, so drop by and say hello.

Someone was asking how Rothko the kitten (Rio: “roth like how English people say wrath, and ko like company”) was doing. Here are some photos of him taken by Alex.

Rothko likes to sit in Fin’s arms

but he also likes to explore

and attempt to make blog posts.

His mother O’Keeffe watches warily.

My partner Firinel is an artist who works in watercolour, among other mediums. I thought I’d show you some of the things she’s been working on recently. You can see these and many more of them, thumbnailed and fullsize, at her art journal (which contains painted nudes, so may not be worksafe).

Katie

Shay

Barack Obama

Paul Norton has asked on the i18n list about translation of GNOME into Latin. I think this is an interesting idea, and raises a number of good questions about neoLatin vocabulary.

For example, has anyone ever discussed XML in Latin before? Surely they must have; then how do you say tag and element and attribute? I can more readily imagine that nobody’s ever had to discuss X in Latin; there are many good words in neoLatin vocabularies for screen (scrinium or quadrum or album or even monitorium have all been suggested), but nobody may have had to make the technical distinction between a screen and a display before now.  (Someone has suggested that the concept of a display, with its multiple separated viewing-places, could be suggested by a colonnade; this would allow us to use the obscure but beautifully appropriate noun xystus.)  How about workspaces?  There is no prior art in the lexicons.  From the classical period I could suggest tablinum, an office, or from the Middle Ages we could go for cella, a monk’s cell.  Either seems appropriate.  The desktop itself is clearly a tabula, and it made me very happy to discover that compositor is an attested Latin noun, in Cicero no less, meaning “one who arranges”.

But I’m no classicist, and I’m very glad that other people who know much more than I do are wanting to get involved.  Helping out in translations in other languages has taught me a lot about how to write for translators as a programmer, and has helped me recently in making Metacity more translator-friendly.  (I’ll be posting about that in a few days over on the Metacity blog.)  Anyway, in the meantime I’d like to do what I can as a facilitator.  Here’s a Wiki page if you want to help, and if not, and you know any free software classicists, point them over here.

(Adaptation of GNOME logo by me, and used by permission. Title correction from Rafael– thank you.)

For those of you who don’t read news.gnome.org, here’s a new Metacity post: should double-clicking the menu button close the window?

Rio’s teacher claimed, when she spelt a word with a “zed”, that “zed” wasn’t “proper English” (though it wasn’t unreasonable to ask her to use the same terminology as the other kids) and when Rio apologised but said she’d been brought up speaking British English, her teacher told her she wasn’t British.  She was a bit upset about that, so we went over.  Her teacher said that she’d never noticed that I was British, and that she loved my accent and that I look like Paul McCartney.  I wonder whether she thinks all British people look like Paul McCartney.

I went to the bank.  They claimed that SWIFT is only a European thing and that they had no SWIFT number.  This is obviously untrue, since I’d sent money from England to that very branch myself.  I think I may find another bank.

Rio says there should be a Barbie doll which says “Calculus is fun!  Let’s go shopping!”