Bits and pieces

[firstfrost]

• MH is officially unsupported now, but for the moment it still works. I still defend it, though - much like defending the virtues of zephyr to a previous uberboss who figured that preferring zephyr to jabber was just due to fear of change. (Okay, I admit, I do have a lot of resistance to change, but - class help!). As a card carrying member of the Creaky Old Mail Client Fan Club, I felt compelled to write a hack for sad Debathena RMAIL users. Which goes through MH. Hah.
• Summer is not my season, and the days that the N42 AC went on hiatus were NOT APPRECIATED. The living room at home does manage to stay cooler than outside, and I seem to be okay at a high room temperature when I can monopolize a fan, but I splatted myself in not even that much sun at Artbeat, and had to later go into emergency headache mitigation mode and punted on justom's Cyrano. (Other than that, though, yay for dim sum and script reading for desireearmfeldt's birthday, even if she had the poor judgement to be born in a stupid hot month.).
• I did finish a junior project, a string bag to be stored in my laptop bag for post-work grocery shopping: I haven't done much crochet, but I do appreciate its virtues for structural projects. Probably the thing I find most disconcerting is that my knitting instincts are to pack a project into the bag on the needles - but keeping the hook on the one lonely loop when you put it away is tough! I assume real crocheters take the hook out first - do you make the final loop bigger before packing it?
• I'm fascinated by the sentence-opener "yeah, no", and I've been trying to work out its meaning from context. Now, I *say* it, and it doesn't confuse me when people say it, but that doesn't mean I could tell you the exact difference in meaning (or, more like tone) between a sentence that starts with "yeah, no" and the same sentence without those words. I think the thing that fascinates me most is, in fact, that I am trying to figure out the meaning of something that I already seem to know - I just don't know how to articulate it. The best that I could come up with was "agreement and expansion" - that is, "I agree with that, but want to add this additional bit as well", but I'm not sure that's right. I also wondered whether it was a local idiom (like "frob" and the MIT variant of "hosed"), but now that I've Googled for it, it seems to have been noticed/analyzed in Australia first. Ooh, here is some discussion with a Professor of Linguistics, in which he says it's used in three ways: "The literal agrees before adding another point, the abstract defuses a comment and the textual lets the speaker go back to an earlier point." I am pleased that I seem to have nailed the "literal" definition, even if I missed the other two.

Comments

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

I think this is a hotter summer than usual - more familiar to me in July is hot stretches alternating with nicer days, and there have been fewer of the nicer days.

(Last year, June was in the 50s for a long time! This year, June was warm...)

Here's a widget that does comparative temperatures, including by state:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
and it confirms my feeling that this summer is hotter (well, June was hotter - July isn't done), and that last year was generally a colder summer (June and July apparently were; August not as much).

[desireearmfeldt]

Well, last summer had the June of all rain all the time that did a number on the local farms, so I readily believe it was unusually cool...