割 - Ge1 - Cut Off

We got one of those old fashioned reel mowers, I put it together and tried it out today. It works great! I didn’t do the whole yard yet though. We’ll see how tiring that is, maybe tomorrow. The trimmer will come later. So many new toys!

I also went to the local home store and stood dumbfounded looking at all the tools long enough for one of the people working there to come over and say “You want this” while pointing to the perfect beginner level tool set. Maybe now I won’t be made fun of for my sissy hammer.

割草 - Ge1 Cao3 - Cut Grass — Mow the Lawn

牛 - Niu2 - Cow

Yesterday was 雞 - Ji1 - Chicken, and of course you all remember the first word of the day ever, the one that started it all, 豬 - Zhu1 - Pig. So I figured I’d also give you 牛 to complete the three main meat groups.

雞 - Ji1 - Chicken

We did go to Nate’s for BBQ, as promised. The bourbon 雞 with no bourbon was excellent! Maybe we’ll have a barbecue at our new place in a while. Possibly the last weekend in September. Be on the lookout!

比 - Bi3 - Compare, Compared To

Sally’s 比 Pepe’s 好吃. This means Sally’s tastes better (好吃 - Hao3 Chi1 - Tastes Good. )

Another way to say this is Sally’s 比較好吃. 比較 - Bi3 Jiao4 means Comparitively.

And, not very coincidentally, you also use 比 to say 比薩 - Bi3 Sa4 - Pizza.

is, without question, Sally’s. Anyone who says otherwise is crazy.

慢 - Man4 - Slow

Word of the Day lives, 慢慢的 - Man4 Man4 De5 - Slowly. My DSL won’t be up for a couple of weeks, so I’m in dial-up country.

假 - Jia3 - Fake, False, Bogus

But when pronounced Jia4, 假 means Vacation, which is what Word of the Day will be on until my DSL is restored. See you then!

髒 - Zang1 - Dirty

髒髒的 is also what SBC is.

posted by word of the day robot: steve’s DSL is still down

臭 - Chou4 - Stench, Stink, Smelly

臭臭的 is what SBC is.

posted by word of the day robot: steve’s DSL is down

搬 - Ban1 - Move, Shift, Transport, Remove

Today’s the day. Time to 搬家 - Ban1 Jia1 - Move House!

I’m about to shut down the airport and unplug the DSL modem. I’m told that it’ll work at the new place. I’m told service will be activated tomorrow in an orderly fashion. We’ll see.

分 - Fen1 - Seperate, Distribute, Divide, Point, Cent, Minute

It turns out I pack the same way I program: I quickly finish the first 百分之九十 - Bai3 Fen1 Zhi1 Jiu3 Shi2 - Ninety Percent, but then have to start on the OTHER ninety percent. It never ends!

包 - Bao1 - Cover, Wrap, Hold, Embrace, Package, Container

We’re maybe half done with 包裹 - Bao1 Guo3 - Packing. We have something like 56 hours left to finish. CAN WE MAKE IT?!?!!!!??!

The best place for Nintendo sheet music is Brian’s Video Game Sheet Music. He’s got all the Mario themes, Zelda, Metroid and more. Here’s Mario:

業 - Ye4 - Business, Occupation, Study

I just talked to my advisor today, and it turns out I can 畢業 - Bi4 Ye4 - Finish Study — Graduate in two more semesters. Home stretch!

地 - Di4 - Earth, Ground, Field, Place, Land

地板 - Di4 Ban3 - Ground Board — Floor

The last step before moving in: Refinish the floor. It’s almost done, we’ll see if we can fit in three coats of polyurethane tomorrow. Then moving on Saturday!

空 - Kong1 - Empty, Hollow, Air, Sky

Yvonne is gone to New York for school and now our place feels 空.

空心菜 - Kong1 Xin1 Cai4 - Hollow Heart Vegetable. I guess this is called Water Spinach in English. It’s good! But apparently (read the link) is bad.

損 - 損 - Damage, Harm

The floor is not 損壞了 - Sun3 Huai4 Le5 - Damage Useless (past) — Ruined after all. It looks nice! Still needs maybe one more hit of stain and then polyurethane to be done.

Also we changed the locks today. Within 6 hours, I locked myself out. That was fast! I considered going back to the local home store and just buying another lock set since they all come with the same keys. But then I just got back in through a window.

Exhibit A: My post below about the nuclear wasps: jwz must be busy with the nightclub or something, so I’ll have to post this for him: I, for one, welcome our new RADIOACTIVE WASP MASTERS.

Exhibit B: jwz today: yes yes, our new nuclear wasp masters, etc etc…

He’s disabled non-LJ member posting so I can’t go over there and make fun of him for being so predicable in his old age.

完 - Wan2 - Complete, Over, Entire, Finished

Jenny and Yvonne have announced that the painting is 完成了 - Wan2 Cheng2 Le5 - Complete! It better be 完美 - Wan2 Mei3 - Finished Pretty — Perfect, or else they’re 完蛋 - Wan2 Dan4 - Finished Egg — Doomed.

Tomorrow Chris and I ruin the floors with the giant sanding machine.

jwz must be busy with the nightclub or something, so I’ll have to post this for him: I, for one, welcome our new RADIOACTIVE WASP MASTERS.

At H Reactor, these 1/2- to 3/4-inch-long wasps are picking up their mud from the complex’s contaminated spent nuclear fuel basin, Nelson said.

Bechtel workers are scraping off the nests and sending them to central Hanford’s low-level radioactive waste burial grounds.

[…]

Unfound radioactive nests will shelter larvae hibernating with their dead spiders through the fall and winter.

When spring comes, the larvae will awaken.

To pupate. To mutate. To eat.

And then break loose.

Lemmings, in DHTML and Javascript! Is that even possible?

(found at Interconnected’s mini links)

dangerousmeta! is back, and how has an RSS feed, comments, and Capital Letters.

暗 - An4 - Dark, Secret

轉 - Zhuan3 - Convey, Transfer, Turn, Shift

暗轉 - An4 Zhuan3 - Blackout! - not really - see tian’s comment below.

The (cue music) “GREAT BLACKOUT OF 2003″ sent me home from work early today. The news was doing a pretty bad job of saying exactly what areas were out of power, but I know that at least a large part of Fairfield, CT was. Boy, I sure hope they restore power soon so I can go to work tomorrow.

The strange thing is, Jenny says she’s never heard 暗轉. She says blackout is 停電 - Ting2 Dian4 - Stop Electricity. Who knows?

Google rules! Waxy.org reveals that if you search for the answer to life, the universe, and everything, you get 42!

Which led me to find this post by none other than Douglas Adams on why 42 is the answer.

公 - Gong1 - Fair, Just, Public, Metric, Grandfather

平 - Ping2 - Flat, Level, Even, Peaceful

And there’s an expression, 公平, which in my dictionary is listed as meaning “Fair” but taking into account the meanings of both words you would almost think it means “Fair & Balanced”.

亂七八糟: 公平的 - Luan4 Qi1 Ba1 Zao1: Gong1 Ping2 De5 - Messy-78: Fair & Balanced

蔥 - Cong1 - Scallion

洋蔥 - Yang2 Cong1 - Onion

Jenny tells me that to her 洋 means “western”, although my dictionary just says it means Foreign or Imported. So an Onion is a Western Scallion. 洋 also means Ocean:

大西洋 - Da4 Xi1 Yang2 - Big West Ocean — Atlantic Ocean
太平洋 - Tai4 Ping2 Yang2 - Too Peaceful Ocean — Pacific Ocean
北冰洋 - Bei3 Bing1 Yang2 - North Ice Ocean — Arctic Ocean

While I’m here I might as well also mention:

Google now knows what e^πi+1 equals.

And if you search for G it tells you the value of the Gravitaional Constant of the Universe.

It’s also happy with more mundane arithmetic problems, like 205000 * 20%.

This is great! I already use Google as my super souped up spelling checker (no other spelling checker would tell you that minutilo is misspelled, and how to spell it), now it’s my calculator too.

How much longer before Google can answer The Last Query?

黃 - Huang2 - Yellow

黃色 - Huang2 Se4 - Yellow Color. This also means Obscene, or Pornographic. I guess kind of like how in English we have “blue humor”.

黃瓜 - Huang2 Gua1 - Yellow Melon — Cucumber. But cucumbers aren’t yellow…?

蛋黃 - Dan4 Huang2 - Egg Yellow — Yolk

黃 is also a surname, and is in fact Yvonne’s name.

黃帝 - Huang2 Di4 - Yellow Emperor

I love how in this otherwise factual article about the restoration of the Yellow Emperor’s tomb, the People’s Daily manages to stick in a quick dose of propoganda:

“In addition to the monuments to the return of Hong Kong and Macao, space has been left for a monument commemorating Taiwan’s reunification with the motherland. Our nation must be reunified and no one can stop it,” Shao said.

The Java Developer’s Almanac is what The Java Cookbook should have been, except online and free. You can search for examples by package or class name, or just browse the listings.

Actually, the Java Cookbook stuff is online too, but is nowhere near as good, and doesn’t include explanations.

(via Russell Beattie Notebook)

簾 - Lian2 - Curtain

窗簾 - Chuang1 Lian2 - Window Curtain

My dictionary somehow has the simplified version of this word, 帘, which is an ancient form which means “the flag-sign of a tavern”. But Zhongwen.com says that 簾 is the right character.

蚱 - Zha4 - Grasshopper

The full word for grasshopper is 蚱蜢 - Zha4 Meng3. But I’m having a hard time looking up the individual words to see if they mean anything seperately. I think not.

Another oddity: Part of Jenny’s name is 孟 - Meng4. This character appears inside 蜢 and several other words that are pronounced Meng3.

There was a grasshopper in our house today. Alexis happened to be over so I was showing her how you can let it crawl onto your hand, and then eventually it will surprisingly jump off.

園 - Yuan2 - Garden

One of the things we’ll need to do at the new place is some 園藝 - Yuan2 Yi4 - Garden Art — Gardening. The guys started this out well by giving Jenny a nice bench and little bridge she can put out back somehow. New house means endless work!

On an unrelated note, if you are interested in web design from either the technical or creative side, check out 禪園 - Chan2 Yuan2 - Zen Garden. It’s a project by Dave Shea to show off the possibilities of XHTML/CSS based web design.

Ftrain is somehow all different now. There’s new content my aggregator didn’t pick up. It’s because his RSS feed went 404!

I heard Paul Ford (the Ftrain guy) on the radio the other day talking about pidgins, creoles, esparanto, pidgerantos, and esperidgins. I liked it, but I liked this older one about his computer better:

My computer talks to me. It makes promises. Usually this happens late at night, when the blue gleam of its screen is the only light on my block, and the clacking of my typing is the only thing in the room. In that almost silent moment, it whispers, “I can make you powerful.”

If you’ve never checked out Ftrain, go now, it’s very very good.

改 - Gai3 - Change, Alter, Transform, Improve

This is what we continue to do to the new house. The kitchen is just about done, and the crazy orange color Jenny chose (”firebush”) came out nice! On to the living room…

The number two result for “feeds” right now is Feed on Feeds.

呆 - Dai1 - Foolish, Stupid

You can describe someone as 呆呆的 - Dai1 Dai1 De5. This means stupid in a sort of naive and airheaded, almost cute way. 奔 - Ben1 means just regular plain old stupid.

Another expression is 發呆 - Fa1 Dai1 - Give Out Stupid. It means being dazed, or daydreaming, just standing there and staring off into the distance and being stupid. Yvonne saw a squirrel totally 發呆ing out at the new house today, it was staring at this tree when they got there, and standing in exactly the same place staring at the same tree when they left.

The same guy who created Porrasturvat - Stair Dismount, the famous stair-falling-down game, has now created Rekkaturvat - Truck Dismount.

The game is very simple: A truck, with a driver inside, faces a brick wall. Relaxing, trancey music plays. You adjust various sliders to position the driver inside the truck, and optionally add ramps between the truck and the wall. Then you hit “go”! The truck races towards the wall, and crashes. As the driver smashes into the windshield and around the cabin, you hear bones crunching and wails of pain. The parts of his body that are being injured light up in red, and damage points accrue. If you’re really good, he actually flies out of the cabin into the wall. If you’re really really good, you manage to get him to fall out of the cabin and be run over by the truck. If you’re really really really super good, you can get the truck to fall over on him, crushing him. The goal is to hurt the little man as much as possible. There is a web site that tracks high scores, but it is generally ruled by people who have hacked the game, and caused the driver to start out 10,000 feet above the ground, or added like 10 trucks that all run over the guy in sequence. The author, being quite an accomplished hacker himself, encourages this.

According to muxway, this game is based on the OpenDynamics articulated rigid body dynamics engine, which should make for some fun code reading someday.

By the way, if you like this game, you’ll probably love Pontifex, a bridge building game. I haven’t played the sequel, Pontifex II, but it looks even better.

自 - Zi4 - Self, Personal, Since

自己 - Zi4 Ji3 - Self, Own

The cabinets are coming out well! I’m starting to think that in our new house we can really 自己做 - Zi4 Ji3 Zuo4 - Self Do — Do It Ourselves.