Something rather bizarre happened today. But first some backstory:
My site used to be called Blank Slate, and it lived at blankslate.net. In 2008 I consolidated it and my other blogs into bencrowder.net, which is where I’ve been since then. I maintained the old blankslate.net domain for a while, with a redirect pointing to bencrowder.net, but several months ago I decided to let the domain go. And I did.
Fast forward to today. I was thinking about my old sites and figured I’d see what now lives at blankslate.net. Imagine my surprise when I pulled it open in my browser and saw this:
What the heck? If someone bought the domain (and according to Whois it belongs to a Grygorii Naumov in the Ukraine who runs siteforge.biz), you’d expect either a squatter page or something else entirely, right? Not my own site.
And not just that — it’s not the last incarnation of Blank Slate (which you might expect if this is some crazy four-year-old caching issue). No, it’s the page from when I was on my mission. Ten years ago exactly. (Well, from summer 2002 to summer 2004.) Here’s what my site looked like right before I left for Thailand:
So it’s the same (minus some textual changes once I actually left on my mission), except the current site doesn’t have any images, and all of the links just go to stub pages.
I emailed Grygorii to see if he can shed any light on the matter. I have no idea why someone would buy a domain, go to the Wayback Machine (presumably) and copy the site’s home page from ten years ago. Seems almost more likely that some kind of portal in spacetime just opened up and it’s connected to 2002, depositing artifacts from that year into 2012. Or maybe Grygorii himself lives in 2002 and this is like The Lake House or something. (Shudder.) I asked Grygorii what year it is where he is, and who won the World Series.
I’ll update this post when I either figure out what happened or make contact with my 2002 self. Hopefully the universe doesn’t explode.
Joseph Fielding Smith’s 1922 book Essentials in Church History is now available in EPUB and Kindle. It’s a long book, which is part of the reason it’s taken so long. But it’s quite good and I think you’ll enjoy it.
A side announcement: starting now, all new MTP releases will use Kindle Format 8 (KF8) instead of the original Kindle Mobipocket format. (Older Kindles will still be able to read the books, but they won’t look as nice.) The reason for the switch is primarily economy of time — KF8 is very similar to EPUB and requires hardly any tweaks. The original Kindle format, on the other hand, is different enough that it takes a big chunk of time to make each Kindle edition. I’d rather spend that time releasing new books.
First off, Waelisc (“Welsh”) is the Anglo-Saxon word for those pesky Roman and British foreigners. Wales (the country) has the same root, meaning “the foreigners’ land.”
As it turns out, the “wal” in walnut is from that same root, making it the “foreign nut.” Or the Roman nut, more specifically. Down in Rome, they used the generic word for nut (nux) to refer to the walnut. (Other nuts got qualifiers — nux amara meant bitter almond, for example.)
Another reason for adding the wal- prefix was to distinguish the foreign walnut from England’s native hazelnut.
otter
According to the OED, otter (the animal) is “a suffixed form of the Indo-European base of water.” The sound similarity is not just a coincidence.
bread
A Germanic word that originally meant “bit, piece, or morsel.” The word loaf (Old English hlaf) was the word for bread, but over time it came to take on its modern meaning (“a portion of bread baked in one mass”), and bread changed to mean the food itself, rather than just a piece of it.
sauce
From the French word sauce, which comes from the Latin word salsa, “salted.” (Yes, this is the salsa of chips and salsa.) And salsa comes from the Latin sal, “salt.”
Our word salad also comes from sal, via the Latin infinitive salare (“to salt”) and then the past participle salata (“having been salted”), through Old French salade.
Salami also comes from Latin salare. The definition: “An Italian variety of sausage, highly salted and flavoured.”
And sausage itself is yet another descendant of this prolific root word. It comes from Old Northern French saussiche, from Latin salsicia, from salsus (also “salted,” same word as salsa but with a different ending).
There’s more, and this word nowadays has nothing to do with food (beyond putting it on the table). Salary comes from Latin salarium, “originally money allowed to Roman soldiers for the purchase of salt.”
cabinet
A “little cabin” or “small room,” which evolved into the sense of a place to store things. “Small room” also meant “private room,” as in a place for advisors to discuss matters, and then the meaning shifted to its current political meaning of referring to the group of advisors themselves.
biscuit
From Latin biscoctum, meaning “twice baked.” (The “coctum” part is the perfect passive participle of Latin coquo, “to cook.” And yes, that’s where our word “cook” comes from.)
Incidentally, from the 1500s to the 1700s biscuit was spelled “bisket” in English, but apparently the French spelling was more alluring and eventually took over.
cloud
From clod. No, really. Someone looked up and thought the clouds looked an awful lot like rocks in the sky, and started calling them clods. A vowel shift later and you have our modern “cloud.”
As I’m doing more research on my family lines from Morrone del Sannio (a town in Italy), I’ve put together a quick index by year to the various microfilms for each type of record (click for the full PDF):
Since August last year I’ve been keeping track of my reading via Bookkeeper, as I’ve mentioned before. It wasn’t till the other day, though, that I realized I could pull stats on how many pages I’m reading each day.
For curiosity’s sake, then, here are the charts. I wrote a Python script to get the data from Bookkeeper and then charted it all in Numbers. You can click on any month to get a bigger image. X axis is day of month, Y axis is number of pages.
Also: Those two crazy 600-page days in December and April were awesome, but man, they make everything else look small. Oh well.
This one started out as some playing around with subsurface scattering in Blender (using the internal renderer, which I’ve hardly used since Cycles came out).
Vim has a steep learning curve, but it’s worth it. Here’s a cheat sheet of sorts showing some of the more useful commands (I put it together for a presentation at work):
There’s still a lot more to Vim, of course. And by a lot I mean a huge, massive mountain of things. Our goal here was to introduce some of the basics of Vim and provide a foundation for learning more. :help is your friend.
