A Blog-like Entity

21 nov 06

whats masterbation?

you'll have to ask rahul -- he's the one who asked the questions featuring that misspelling, months ago (rahul is my featured celebrity reader). at least that's what i assume you meant by your question. now that i think of it, it's possible that you're misspelling "masturbation" too, and are literally asking me what it is. in either case, i'll provide an answer: 1) "masterbation" is a misspelling of the word "masturbation". 2) masterbation is against god's law.

i plugged a second monitor into my laptop and have my 21st century digital workstation all set up like a pro here, but for some reason it's depressing me. i think it's a combination of feeling enclosed by screens and the flicker-rate of the CRT, which i notice when it sits next to the laptop's LCD.

ok, enough. i was thinking of drastically revamping my format, and presenting my text on a single, increasingly huge html document. i don't know exactly how big it would get, and how soon, and what the ramifications of that extreme bigness would be.

so, i decided to put a lot of text in a single html doc, and see how a browser dealt with it. problem is i went a little bit overboard. do you know about lorem ipsum? "lorem ipsum" refers filler-text in pseudo-latin, and it's been around anywhere from 500 to 40 years, depending whom you ask and what the parameters of your question are. for example, an art director might say "fill up the page with lorem ipsum, and see how it looks". the words "lorem" and "ipsum" are the first two of the first paragraph of the lorem ipsum. here's a site where you can generate it.

so, i got a good five paragraphs of this, and pasted it into a text document. then, i copied what i had, and pasted it onto itself a few times. then, i selected all, copied that, and pasted that onto itself a few times. etc. as i said, i went a little overboard, and ended up with 50MB of lorem ipsum (exponential curves ascend quickly). my computer was left processing the job (trying to copy 83476398498 characters and then paste them down again) when i left the house at 1pm (don't remember why), and wasn't finished when i got back at 5pm or so.

i tend to blame the problem on crimson editor, my trusty text editor, but i really don't know. at any rate, future problems of that ilk will be reduced in frequency and magnititude, because i bought a 1GB stick of RAM from some online seller. i had this wonderful experience with tech support the other night, whom i called to find out the exact type of RAM i needed. i called the emachines tech support number, as it was listed right on my "system properites" utility, and wasn't put on hold for more than one minute. but the best part, the odd part, was that i wasn't routed to some call center hut in mumbai -- i spoke to a bored, nerdy, 20-something american kid named "andrew". of course, the call centers in mumbai give their employees anglo-names, but it's not all that believable when you hear "convenience store apu" tell you that his name is "steve". yeah right, deepinder.

i used to talk to someone online from india, actually, who became employed at such a call center. he told me that they not only assigned him an english name, but gave him training on how to minimize his accent. weird, and pathetic, and yet i suppose there's nothing inherently wrong with it.

accents are a topic of great sensitivity. everyone knows what they're supposed to sound like, from watching television. apparently, there's something called "network standard", which is a style of american english originating in the northeast, in pennsylvannia, or the midwest, according to different sources; i guess it stands to reason it's an amalgam of these. imagine the sound of a CNN anchorman, or the way most hollywood celebrities talk. at any rate, that's the standard of american english, and it is to what you should shamefully aspire.

this project (english accent archive) is interesting, because the subjects, for the most part, don't sound as "strange" as i'd expect them to sound. my guess is that they're toning it down for the camera, so to speak. if someone sticks a microphone in your face and says "demonstrate your filthy little ethnicity for me", then that demonstration is going to be made as whitebread as possible. brooklyn, boston, fairfax (20 minutes from me!), and edinburgh are notable exceptions, but for the most part the accents on that page are dissappointingly weak.

if you snuck a microphone into someone's breakfast cereal and recorded what they said to their family in the morning, then you'd get some nice accents. franck, the parisian (born in normandy, actually) who was my mother's and my border for a few months, told me that when my mother or i was speaking directly to him, he had no trouble understanding. however, when he overheard the two of us talking, he was completely in the dark. so, that's my ethnic dialect -- how i sound when i'm talking to my mom.