Tag: aargh

MS Word will break your links!

I was pleased to see that my nerrrdy Bourgoin mini-zine got cited in an art workbook for schools: Islamic mosaics activity (Patterning) from MathWeave. Yay!

But the link in the workbook doesn’t work! I mean, it looks right:

While the real link is:

Only when you copy the bad URL do you see the problem:

http://scruss.com/blog/2016/07/21/nerrrdy%E2%80%90bourgoin%E2%80%90mini%E2%80%90zine/

Word has changed the pasted ‘-’s to ‘‐’s: that’s from U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS to U+2010 HYPHEN. You’d have thought that software that was smart enough to recognize an URL would also be smart enough not to do any messing with the characters in it …

aagh! brainscrub required!!

So I was idly picking away on the mandolin sort of playing scales when this song from my childhood starts playing itself. It’s the Uist Tramping Song, and has ultra-cheesy lyrics:

Come along, come along, let us foot it out together,
Come along, come along, be it fair or stormy weather,
With the hills of home before us and the purple of the heather,
Let us sing in happy chorus, come along, come along.

No, really. I always thought that footing it out would involve a lot of squelching, this being Scotland. Must’ve learnt it when I was 8 or so; our headmaster was a teuchter, so my head is filled with Gaelic-ish things still. One of the pieces I recently heard Rhiannon Giddens perform with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, so they’re not all bad.

Anyway, to share the brainmelt, here it is in all its awfulness:

Plus the score, if you care to: Uist Tramping Song [pdf].

dino out

Aargh, I hate finishing an Eric Garcia Rex book. I don’t get lost in too many books, but Eric’s ones do that for me. I’d finished Hot & Sweaty Rex, then re-read Anonymous Rex ‘cos I couldn’t get enough of that dino-noir (dinoir?)

Garcia’s books are clearly works of fiction. I mean, to say that 5% of the population are dinosaurs in heavy disguise — the real number’s much higher …

sleep-in friday

Aargh. Catherine woke me up with, “Did you mean to sleep in until 6:30?”

The answer to that one’s no. I mean, I now know I can get out the house in less than half the time I usually do, but that’s not to say I enjoyed it.

‘s no’ fair

We got 25cm of snow dumped on us last night — just after I’d cleared the paltry 3cm we got yesterday. Aargh!