28th of May, 2003 POST·MERIDIEM 03:56

I’ve some more plaudits for ER on my hard disk at home, but I’m in the middle of moving to UFS2^[1] and the FFS partition isn’t trivially accessible. Anyway.

On another subject: I have to say, if George Berkeley is unreadable, it’s not because his English is archaic—it’s more a question of if you can’t read George Berkeley, you should learn how, or reconsider studying philosophy. Cf footnote ^[2] below. And if “undergraduates should not be expected to read 17th or 18th-century British philosophers in the original English,” that is more symptomatic of a cancer in the pre-tertiary education system than anything else. Link from http://​www.​polyglut.​net/​.​

Jamie Zawinski’s exchange with some Debian weenie over at his Live Journal is pretty funny. Of course, the bit about ... But see, the point is, it's not like this guy is unique in this respect, or even unusual. I'm just using him as an example. He's more the rule than the exception in this pathetic little world of which I can't seem to finally-and-truly wash my hands.  is pretty depressing, and I’m not convinced of the truth of it either. People working hard for no money have a tendency to be crazy and pathetic more than the norm, admittedly; but of the people getting paid for this sort of thing, I think they’re in the main pretty sane.

I wonder if there’s going to be a Carolingian in the Matrix III? And, if someone could point me towards a source that gave a reasonable argument for the Merovingians preferring either of Vulgar Latin (uh, proto-French) or Germanic (uh, proto-Dutch) over the other, I’d be fascinated.

Argh, I still have to do my German homework. Und wie ist Ihr Traumhaus, anyway?

Addendum; Time to move to Germany. But then it always was, wasn’t it? http://​www.​rte.​ie/​news/​2003/​0527/​alcohol.​html

[1] http://​mail-index.​netbsd.​org/​current-users/​2003/​04/​02/​0005.​html

[2] http://​ftp.​mirror.​ac.​uk/​sites/​metalab.​unc.​edu/​pub/​docs/​books/​gutenberg/​etext03/​prhkn10.​txt