Why I love my wife - and other everyday funny stories

Heh, some blog posts out there are mighty funny in an everyday sort of way (unlike mine which has nothing funny or everyday about it). Consider this quote from a post at ultramicroscopic -

Wife stood in the Barnes and Noble music section wearing the headphones and listening to nothing. A few yards away Son Three (four years old) was also wearing headphones but grooving to cds with brightly colored covers. After a minute or two of fidgeting with the kiosk, she asked Son Three how to make the music play. He waved a cd under the upc scanner and continued to rock out. Wife told him he was silly. She asked him again and he showed her again, she dismissed his naivety. Frustrated she called over a clerk. The clerk took the cd and did exactly what Son Three had demonstrated. The music played but she was too confused to enjoy it.

When she got home she asked me how the device sucks the music off the cd through the packaging.

Ha ha ha ha!

Reminds me of the time when this friend of mine asked a shopkeeper for a "CD" (this was when floppy disks were the norm) and the shopkeeper replied with "Of course! Wooden or Aluminium"!

Note :- If you don't speak Hindi, this anecdote will not make any sense to you. But I won't explain it because it's really not that funny when narrated (it is funny when it actually happens to you).

Using Aptana for Ruby on Rails development on (K)Ubuntu 9.04 - "Rails not found"

Try using Aptana IDE on (K)Ubuntu 9.04 for developing rails apps and you would run into this problem pretty quickly. Somehow on Ubuntu, the executable "rails" is not installed in the standard /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. Instead it is only present in /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/. This means that Aptana cannot find rails even though it was installed using the standard distribution specific package manager.

The fix though is simple - Either create a symlink to rails by doing

sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails /usr/bin/rails
sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rake /usr/bin/rake

Or even better - do what this post suggests -

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ruby ruby
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/ri ri
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/rdoc rdoc
sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails rails
sudo ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rake rake

I broke the translation party!

Translation party is a fun little tool based on Google translate. Ever played "Chinese whispers"? Think of this as playing it with a schizophrenic Chinese guy halfway across the world! It really is quite a time killer! Google translation is quite good so not all results will be funny, but keep at it, and you will hit upon translation gems quite easily.

For example, "You can't teach an old woman to suck eggs." (A variation of a saying I heard recently on a UK trip) is translated as "Eggs can not teach a woman to smoke." and then to "Egg women smoke, please do not tell." and then to the really bizzarre "Please tell us the city regiment of women Purizupurizumi eggs.", "Purizupurizumi Please tell me, please send a regiment of women in urban eggs.", and "Please send Purizupurizumi. Please educate the women of the regiment. Eggs please contact me.", before finally settling on "Please. Please Purizupurizumi please. Women's education, please contact me. Send a regiment of the egg."!!!!

God knows what a Purizupurizumi is. My guess is it's Chinese for either a type of chicken, or some high ranking military designation. Either way, it seems highly revered. :)

I found it intriguing that every sentence seemed to have an equilibrium point, until I chanced upon the simple 2 word sentence, pictured above, that seems to throw Google translate into a tizzy! Since then I have found many more such examples (there are really a lot of them so they are easy to find).

Fun!

http://translationparty.com