Content of Michael Kaplan's personal blog not approved by Microsoft (see disclaimer)! Regular readers should keep in mind that all I said in The End? still applies; the allusion to the X-Files continues for people who understand such references.... Over in the Suggestion Box, Bruce Rusk asked: To keep a long story long: I have an application that I need to use--it's a Chinese dictionary that I use daily and would be seriously bummed to live without. It's a badly-designed Foxpro application, targeted to Traditional Chinese ... lire la suite
Lien du post: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2008/04/23/8415969.aspx
So how many of you watched Lipstick Jungle last night on NBC...
Melanie Brown showed up last night at the Mobo Awards (huh?) in London, England, in a rather interesting outfit. What do you think?
“Sleep eight hours for two weeks, then start eliminating ‘white’ foods,” Paltrow quotes NYC-based cardiologist Dr. Alejandro Junger. “After two weeks of sleeping and eating better, you’ll have the energy to exercise. Begin as you like. “If you are totally out of shape,” Dr. Junger advises, “start by walking 15 minutes a day and add a minute every day for the first month. “At the end of a month, you’ll be up to 45 minutes a day, which should make you ready for whatever more strenuous form of exercise you want to try,” Dr. Junger says. “Experiment with them all to see what works best for you and stick with it.”
When I read who this was - I was like “wow, are you serious?”
Just curious which way you’re going to vote. Will you vote for Barack Obama, or John McCain?
Oh, what's that? I didn't here what you said. Hey check this out (3:30)... [Colbert Nation]
Kim du Toit, for those of you fortunate enough not to have made his acquaintance, is the author of what I declared on November 3, 2003 to be the worst thing I had ever read, a distinction it holds to this very day. That essay, "The Pussification of the Western Male," was the apotheosis of the MRA screed. I can't possibly summarize all its complete stupidity. Suffice to say that du Toit defended men who rape, praised George W. Bush for being all manly and stuff, got bitterly angry about a commercial for Cheerios, and basically acted like the douchiest douche on the planet. Not for nothing did L,G&M declare du Toit "America's Wost Blogger." Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is indeed as bad as you think it's going to be. Du Toit begins by linking approvingly back to Dr. Mrs. Wingnutty Perfesser, just in case you didn't get the memo that she's a deep misogynist. And then he says something just bone-jarringly stupid. I think women don’t understand how clinical men can be when it comes to analyzing a relationship. (Note: just because we don’t talk about our relationship with you, doesn’t mean we don’t analyze it.)I think somebody's confusing "himself" with "men." Seriously -- yes, men think about their relationships. But we don't analyze them clinically. At least, most of us don't. For most of us, marriage has an emotional component to it. We, you know, love our spouses. Love can't be weighed or measured, and doesn't fit neatly into a category. At least for most humans. Isn't he a romantic, ladies? Don't you just wish you were married to someone who believes that if he adds up everything in tabular form and finds out that this week debits exceed credits, he'll "quit the relationship—I mean, just bail out of the whole thing—and usually with a swiftness and finality which confounds women"? Doesn't that sound like true love to you? As you know, I'm divorced. It was her decision, not mine, though I gave her every reason to pull the trigger. It was probably the best thing for us both, all in all. But I can tell you that even as I knew our relationship was spiraling, I didn't ever start adding things up, consciously or subconsciously, to determine the value of the relationship. My marriage had value, and always will have value to me. It's funny. There are many things I miss about being married. And while sex is on the list, it's not in my top ten. No, the thing I miss about being married is having an emotional bond with someone, being on the same team as them, as it were, in life. Looking over at someone and thinking that you really do want to wake up next to them every day for the rest of your life. I miss being in love, and not just the brief infatuation of an early relationship, but the deeper feeling of being with someone you've grown to know intimately, and grown to care for immensely, someone you want to be happy, someone whose feelings you care about. But wait -- it gets dumber. You mean, if a man and a woman have sex, and she has kids, then she can get child support from him? The outrage! How dare men be required to take care of children they father? Next, he'll be saying we can't hit our spouses -- oh, snap, and there he goes! And he's declaring that "most" women are vengeful in divorce, which will totally be news to most people who've been through divorce. And he's saying that if a woman alleges violence you're permanently screwed, even if she's lying, because, of course, no court ever considers actual evidence before putting you in jail! But a funny thing happened -- I recognized this. I didn't fight the divorce. My ex -- an attorney who had clerked in a county child support office, mind you -- and I worked out the initial visitation and support agreement together, and since then we've pretty much chucked the whole thing and gone by what we feel is best for my daughter. That's why I've got her the next three days, and why she stays with my ex on school nights, and why this summer I'll take her most days and have reduced child support for doing so -- because we work together for our daughter's best interests. Am I "clinical" about this responsibility? Hell, no! I feel it in my gut, feel it in my soul. You could come to me with tables and graphs showing me that I'm not getting "enough," and that I should just quit the game -- withhold support, ignore my daughter, be "clinical" about things, and look out for myself. To hell with all that. I have a soul, and the love of the best five-and-a-half-year-old on the planet. That's more valuable than life itself. Yeah, womenz! You think that you're having sex with men who love you, or at least don't despise you. And that's just playing right into their hands, because they get sex, and then they don't marry you! And you end up not married to some MRA douchebag who would mistreat you and compare you to a cow. You know the song "Nookie" by Limp Bizkit? Sure you do. It's an ironic breakup song, with a central storyline about a guy dumped by a girl, muttering bitterly that he "did it all for the nookie." And yet a cursory overview of the lyrics tells you that the main character didn't do it all for the nookie. Indeed, his "heart will ache." Why do I go to lousy power rock to make this point? Well, like sex, bad music is very popular with people between 19 and 27. And that's exactly the segment of the population this song was aimed at. Yet -- funny -- the nookie doesn't seem to be what Limp Bizkit thinks that this guy was really in the relationship for. Indeed, he seems to have...I don't know if du Toit knows this word...but he seems to have feelings for this ex of his. He seems...how do you say it? Ah, yes...to have actually been in love. So ladies, if you want to get married to a shallow, self-centered jerk, I think du Toit has some good advice. 25-year-old proto-MRAs might not be interested in marrying a woman with a "career" and "a rich inner life" and "the ability to be happy alone." If, however, you're looking for an actual human being who appreciates you for you, then yes, there are probably men over the age of 27 willing to marry you. And if there aren't -- well, for cripe's sake, do you actually want to marry someone who doesn't want you to have a career and be personally fulfilled? Do you actually want to marry someone who settles for you because you put out semi-regularly, and...uh...what's your name again? Fuck, no! I'm not a woman (though I am a mangina), but I think that I'm sane enough to know that the "men" du Toit describes are little more than overgrown boys, incapable of love and respect for their partners. You can buy a vibrator in Texas now, ladies; there's no emotional connection there, either, and you don't have to put up with it being angry that you ask something -- anything -- of it. There. Is. NO. FUCKING. LEDGER. YOU GODDAMN ASSHOLE PUNK. None of this, incidentally, applies to the lucky men and women who found their soulmates—but I have to tell you, life isn’t much like the deliriously-happy couples on eHarmony.com. For every blissful couple in the ads, there are literally millions for whom a relationship is not a joy, but a wearisome chore. I've never been in a relationship that took no work. That relationship doesn't exist. Relations that matter should matter enough for you to talk, listen, and learn. Or -- here's a thought -- men could treat women like human beings. Not men, not women, but humans. You know, humans? Part of the ape family, one of the hominids? Homo sapiens? Social animals, pretty smart, mastered fire and the internets? Those creatures? Yeah. You know, it's funny, but H. sapiens has male and female members of the species, and they're all a part of the same species. I'm just saying, you could treat your partner like, I don't know, an equal or something. Like you'd treat any other human being. Well, no, just as women should not be shocked by an article telling them that the Sun is made out of baked potatoes. When you read something that's completely wrong and batshit crazy, to boot, the normal reaction is not to be shocked. It's to point, laugh, and back away slowly. The saddest part of this is that all things being equal, most men actually enjoy being married, and look forward to it. It’s nice to have someone to come home to, someone with whom you can just be yourself, and someone to share the wonderful joys of having kids. And don’t kid yourselves, the sex is great. A buddy of mine, married to his childhood sweetheart for over twenty years, put it to me this way: “A lot of the time, the sex [between longtime marrieds] is fine, or just so-so. But every once in a while, it’s fantastic, tremendous, brilliant, and better than you could ever ever get from a stranger.” Because that's not coming from feminists, bub. It's coming from MRAs like du Toit, male chauvinist douchebags of the first order, men who can't understand how you could look at a woman and see anything more than a few holes to stick your dick into -- and men who would call you a pussy for actually noticing the human being that possesses those holes.
Here’s Agence France-Presse reporting on a rally for Sen. Barack Obama at the University of Maryland on Feb. 11: “He did not flinch when women screamed as he was in mid-sentence, and even broke off once to answer a female’s cry of ‘I love you, Obama!’ with a reassuring ‘I love you back.’ ” Women screamed? What was this, the Beatles tour of 1964? And when they weren’t screaming, the fair-sex Obama fans who dominated the rally of 16,000 were saying things like: “Every time I hear him speak, I become more hopeful.” Huh? Your husband pulls down the blinds out of his caveman instinctive fear of danger from other aggressive men? Really? Perhaps you should be writing an op/ed about how insanely stupid individuals gravitate towards each other and proceed to use evolutionary psychology to explain their remarkable stupidity. Then there’s the chick doctor television show “Grey’s Anatomy” (reportedly one of Hillary Clinton’s favorites). Want to be a surgeon? Here’s what your life will be like at the hospital, according to “Grey’s”: sex in the linen-supply room, catfights with your sister in front of the patients, sex in the on-call room, a “prom” in the recovery room so you can wear your strapless evening gown to work, and sex with the married attending physician in an office. Oh, and some surgery. When was the last time you were in a hospital and spotted two doctors going at it in an empty bed? You know Allen is reaching when the best thing she can come up with to prove female inferiority is “Women are crappy drivers.” And she can’t even prove that very well, since men are more likely to be recklessly bad drivers. Although my favorite line is this one: “A study published in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine and public health revealed that women clocked 5.7 auto accidents per million miles driven, in contrast to men’s 5.1, even though men drive about 74 percent more miles a year than women.” Except that the study evaluated the accident rate by millions of miles, so it doesn’t matter how many more miles per year men drive. And they big, misogynist results? A difference of .6 accidents per million miles. Someone repeal the 19th amendment, stat. The theory that women are the dumber sex — or at least the sex that gets into more car accidents — is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence. Men’s and women’s brains not only look different, but men’s brains are bigger than women’s (even adjusting for men’s generally bigger body size). The important difference is in the parietal cortex, which is associated with space perception. Visuospatial skills, the capacity to rotate three-dimensional objects in the mind, at which men tend to excel over women, are in turn related to a capacity for abstract thinking and reasoning, the grounding for mathematics, science and philosophy. While the two sexes seem to have the same IQ on average (although even here, at least one recent study gives males a slight edge), there are proportionally more men than women at the extremes of very, very smart and very, very stupid. Shocking that an excellent memory and superior verbal skills would help you out in academia.
The rickety train should keep muddling along, especially with either the use of AppLocale (though be sure to read the blog I wrote entitled The version of App Locale that runs on Vista? so you know how to get AppLocale on Vista!), or by changing the default system locale to a Traditional Chinese locale -- either way, this non-Unicode application will process the text. But in the end all hope is not lost and you have two easy workarounds that requires no changes to applications and no external code to be written: · You can change the default system locale to one of those code page 950-using locales, or · You can run both your Dictionary application and the other applications under AppLocale using the same locale. The former will simply work everywhere, and the latter will work between your Dictionary application and any application you set up to work with it.... This blog brought to you by អ (U+17a2, aka KHMER LETTER QA)