Shevek

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I can't always find the link between an LJ name and a person I might have met, so if you friend me, please do introduce yourself.

If I haven't added you on LinkedIn/Dopplr/Facebook/etc, it's not personal - I haven't added anyone else either, and messages sent to me via those services are ignored. One social network is plenty, and this is it.

I have yet to read a Java vs python comparison which was written by anyone with any serious enterprise development experience.

If enterprises were all writing hello world all the time, perhaps python would be the answer.

But it isn't. We are writing serious enterprise applications which need things like the existence of a debugger, syntax checking, data validation, threading, and so forth actually matter.

Python can read a file in one line: f.read(). Java can read and VALIDATE it in two. This matters.

An error which you weren't forced to handle isn't an error which won't happen. It will happen anyway. Your program will crash.

Today I was browsing my screenshots, and I found that I had failed the UK citizenship test. I took it again, just for fun, and failed with flying colours for not knowing that the UK is 4.7% Muslim. Or was it 0.8%? But I still know what Hansard is.

Then I took the US citizenship test, an entirely lighter form of entertainment, and which I passed, despite claiming that the "Rule of Law" means that "Everybody must follow the law, except the government."

If you do the US one, I suggest selecting "50 questions" and reload it a few times, it's amusing. Here are some choice selections.

6) Why do some states have more Representatives than other states?
A. because they have more rich people

14) What is one reason colonists came to America?
B. look for the Great Canyon

16) Name one American Indian tribe in the United States.
D. Macedonian

17) Who lived in America before the Europeans arrived?
A. Deer Hunters
B. Asians
C. American Indians
D. Christians
[I won't even choose.]

25) What major event happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States?
A. American army attacked Iraq

29) What happened at the Constitutional Convention?
C. The meeting was interrupted by British Army.

34) What does the Constitution do?
A. lets women drive a car

49) What did the Declaration of Independence do?
C. announced the name of our country

Nobody in the USA has heard of Flanders and Swann. If the country had an editor, I would write to him to express my unmitigated disgust.

I was wrong about the Gideon Bible: apparently this is a high class brothel. It also supplies, according to this menu (I kid you not) the Bhagavad Gita, the Book of Mormon, Eight Noble Truths (Buddhism), the King James Bible, the Koran, the New American Bible, Tao Te Ching, the Torah, or for the particularly desperate, a copy of "What Is Scientology".

I might have to take a picture of the "Spiritual Menu" in the morning or nobody will believe me.

I am staying in a hotel which has a definite air of brothel. The heavy pink strip lighting, and black-suited bouncers in place of desk staff were the first hint, but I think it was the courtesy vibrator on the nightstand which really gave it away.

No Gideon Bible.

I'm not all that good at looking after myself. I finally got a warmer blanket and now I'm sleeping a lot better. Of course I should have done this ages ago.

In a continued attempt to reorganize my electronic life a little, I have started uplodaing my more useful projects to https://github.com/shevek

I'm still open to suggestions about social networking. I'm inclined to regard G+ as a sorry debacle and facebook as a no-go zone. I hope this isn't the modern compromise we have to make.

On my last trip to England, the substantive changes were that the pick-a-teddy machines now contain angry birds, and Sainsbury's sells newspapers in Polish. Otherwise, much the same.

If according to the BBC and/or OED, "friend has been redefined by the Facebook generation to simply mean someone you regularly interact with online" then which word can we use for the concept we used to term "friend"? Or has the concept become obsolete?