Outpost.com: Free delivery. Overnight.

I worked there for two years, from the time when shooting gerbils out of cannons and losing money on every order (but making it up on volume!) seemed like a good idea, to the time when being able to pay the electric bill was considered a luxury. I got out just before the buyout by these Fry’s folks, who seem to have been pretty much igoring the web site. I’m amazed it’s still up and running and being updated after all this time.

逝 - Shi4 - Depart, Die

The Departed: Good! Liked it more than the original, and thanks to my terrible memory, the suspense was not ruined.

刷 - Shua1 - Scrub, Brush, Swipe, Select

刷卡 - Shua1 Ka3 - Swipe Card — Use Credit Card

霹 - Pi1 - Clap Of Thunder

牧 - Mu4 - Shepherd

綜 - Zong1 - Sum Up

綜合 - Zong1 He2 - Sum Join — Integrate

You know how sometimes you get some furniture that you have to assemble yourself, and the instructions have been Very Poorly translated from some asian languange? And you want to tear your hair out? I’m doing that right now at work, except instead of furniture, it’s some computer code, and instead of my hair, it’s the veins from my wrists.

The best part about it is that the code I’m trying to integrate is open source, which generally doesn’t have the most comprehensive documentation, and I have to live on the subset that they translated, badly. And normally this isn’t as much of a problem, because even if the documentation isn’t available, you can juse Use The Source™, right? Well, it’s a lot harder when the comments are in Japanese.

罕 - Han3 - Rare

Jenny reports: Zinc is good! The overall quality of the food more than made up for the disappointment in finding out that they do not actually use that much Zinc in the cooking.

蠻 - Man2 - Barbarian, Bullying, Very, Quite, Rough, Reckless

中文.com says this one really means “Barbarians to the South”… prompting the obvious question. And here’s the answer:

狄 - Di2 - Barbarians (to the North)

夷 - Yi2 - Barbarians (to the East)

But I can’t find the word for “Barbarians to the West”!

I was horrified today to see that the famous picture of Taiwan Girls has dropped out of Google’s image search results! So here’s a new one, taken of the same four just today:

鋅 - Xin1 - Zinc

Remind me to ask Jenny what she thinks of zinc tomorrow.

蜿 - Wan1 - Slither

Eat like snake.

篇 - Pian1 - Sheet, Piece Of Writing, Chapter

玲 - Ling2 - Sound of Tinkling Jade

Also 瓏 - Long2 - Sound of Tinkling Jade

玲瓏 - Ling2 Long2 - Lovely

撞 - Zhuang4 - Hit, Strike, Bump Into

Things that go 撞 in the night?

棄 - Qi4 - Abandon, Relinquish, Discard, Throw Away

互 - Hu4 - Mutual

槍 - Qiang1 - Gun, Spear

I wonder if there is an interesting story behind this one. Why the same word for Gun and Spear?