Stephanie Booth's online ramblings
A vendre: catamaran French Cat (1987) de 7m10 par 3m50, peu utilisé, démontable, habitable (4 lits dans les coques). A vendre en l’état — il a passé une bonne dizaine d’années sur sa remorque derrière la maison de mon père. (Il faudra abattre la haie pour le sortir, mais ce n’est pas grave et on s’en occupe.) Prix à discuter.
Mise à jour: vendu depuis belle lurette!
– Well, I don’t need this. Why should I bother? I can do without it very well.
– If you strip everything you don’t need out of your life, it ends up being pretty bare. What makes life worthwhile is precisely all these things you can do without: a warm bubble bath, gloves in winter, an umbrella when it is raining, food served on a pretty table…
C’est la deuxième fois que je le croise dans le train. Au lieu de se contenter de tirer son chariot à boissons sans un mot comme ses collègues, il interpelle les passagers: “Café, Mesdames et Messieurs? Bonjour, un p’tit café? Madame, vous prenez un café?”
Regards surpris, un peu heurtés par ce rayon de soleil à la peau noire, si peu helvétique, un poil intrusif à notre goût parce que l’on n’en a pas l’habitude, mais qui tout compte fait est d’une politesse exquise et ne se montre jamais insistant. Un petit choc des cultures bienvenu dans le train Lausanne-Bienne du matin; un sourire pour commencer la journée.
I’ve lately come to realize that I have a much more creative mind than I was aware of. Maybe not creative in the sense of artistic, but I do tend to come up with lots of ideas. Come to think of it, a lot of the writing on this site is an outlet for them.
Along the lines of my “great ideas” concerning speech technologies (many of which incidentally are already technologically possible but rarely used), here is something which I have put on my “technological wishlist” and which I am sharing with you today.
I’d like to see a digital camera which records time and place with the photograph taken, and allows for dictating the caption just after taking the photo. The camera would have an embedded speech engine which would convert the dictation into written text (just like Dragon does). The file name could also be dictated, if desired.
This means that from the user point of view, you take a snap, dictate a caption, and when you download the pics to your computer they already have all this meta-data attached to them.
Neat, huh? Well, in any case, I think it is. 🙂
Beside write up my Christmas list (and I have desires for Christmas this year, for a change), I need to:
Avec comme d’habitude mes félicitations à la rédaction, j’ai le plaisir de vous annoncer la sortie du Pompage de décembre: Clarence le poney.
Cessez de tourner en rond, et filez lire cet excellent article!
La bataille fut dure, mais je l’ai gagnée. SpiroLattic et PIM sont de nouveau sur pied. Les liens fonctionnent, allez vous régaler.
Par contre, la fonctionnalité d’édition est toujours cassée; c’est la prochaine bataille.
L’essentiel reste cependant que les pages soient accessibles!
Once upon a time there was a camel, who lived in the dry, scorching desert. Long ago, he had drunk poisonous water out of an oasis, and it had made him very, very sick. What a bitter experience! He had very nearly died.
So this camel had become a very cautious camel: he avoided water so that he wouldn’t be sick again. He was thirsty, of course, but he preferred that to risking death again. He would wander around and go past the oases without so much as touching their water. He was a very thirsty camel.
Once in a while, however, he would reach an oasis where other camels were drinking. When that happened, he would start drinking there too, as the water was obviously safe. But this camel was so thirsty that once he started, he would drink up the whole oasis, leaving nothing behind him but a dry patch of mud.
But, will you ask, how did we get to know about this camel and his strange behaviour? Actually, the answer is pretty simple (aside from the dried-up oases, of course). You see, as this camel drank only so very rarely, and so much at a time, he had developed no less than twenty-seven humps on his back, attracting the attention of all the camel-watchers in the desert.
Parable told by J.-F. H.
Back from seeing Elephant with a knot in my stomach and a sick feeling inside.
The cat is asleep in my clean laundry. I pick him up and hold him close. He presses his head against my neck and purrs right through my chest.