tintedpane.com

I meant to put this entry up along time ago but kept forgetting about it. Whenever you buy a new music CD (or any data CD, DVD) and pop it into your Windows based PC, hold down the <shift> key to bypass any autoplay program on your computer or any malicious DRM that’s on the CD. Be sure to hold it down until the drive is done spinning up; otherwise those programs will still run. You can then rip normally with your preferred rippa’.

And if you want to disable autorun permanently on your computer, try this helpful tutorial.

You gotta love it when you get corrected for your chinese. Especially by a wrong-type-of-asian.

Here’s the actual email conversation:

Andrew and Dennis send out an invite for dinner:

bq. Hey guys and girl,

bq. Dennis and I were thinking about getting dinner tonight at Ay Chong, a noodle shop next to Maxim. We’re going at 7:45 if anybody would like to join us. Let me know if you can make it. By the way, this is an open invite.

I respond:

bq. ay4 ya2. ay chong. ne4 me2 hao3 chi1 ma2?

bq. thanks for the open invite !

which loosely translated is: “Oh boy. Ay Chong [the name of the restaurant]. Is the food that good there?”

Which elicits this response from Ruban:

bq. actually, “ay ya” is ai1 ya1… we just covered that yesterday.

bq. if you’re gonna use pinyin & tones, get it right dude :-p

Here comes the fun part:
“ni3 mei2 hao3 chi1 ma?” doesn’t make sense. Translated literally, as I understand it, it means “you not good eat right?” Which I would loosely translate to something like “You have nothing good to eat?” which still doesn’t make sense in our context.

Firstly, ai ya. I’m pretty sure it’s 2nd tone. Kinda means “Damn!” No one says damn like their humming it. And secondly, if you’re gonna correct someone, at least figure out what they’re saying first.

We had a great hour of laughter at your expense on Friday, Ling2 Lu4 [Da4] Bien4. “Road side feces” (:

“If you’re gonna use pinyin & tones, get it right dude[!]”

Seriously though, we’re [semi]mighty proud of you in your progress of our secret code language. Maybe you can actually say “tsai” correctly now.

Happy Thanksgiving in China.

bq. You have a need for other people to like and admire you, and yet you tend to be critical of yourself. While you have some personality weaknesses you are generally able to compensate for them. You have considerable unused capacity that you have not turned to your advantage. Disciplined and self-controlled on the outside, you tend to be worrisome and insecure on the inside. At times you have serious doubts as to whether you have made the right decision or done the right thing. You prefer a certain amount of change and variety and become dissatisfied when hemmed in by restrictions and limitations. You also pride yourself as an independent thinker; and do not accept others’ statements without satisfactory proof. But you have found it unwise to be too frank in revealing yourself to others. At times you are extroverted, affable, and sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved. Some of your aspirations tend to be rather unrealistic.

Does that describe you? Of course it does. Some guy named Forer gave his students a personality test, threw away their responses and gave them each of them this same response and asked them to rate the response on a scale from 0 to 5. The average was 4.2. He concluded that when people are given what they think to be personalized descriptions of themselves, they tend to ascribe high marks to it, when in reality, the descriptions are vague and very general. It’s what a lot of scholars believe is the reason for widespread belief in [crap] such as astrology and horoscopes.

source

***

On an unrelated note, I was riding around last night, and the passenger seat flew off on the exit to I-90. Thought I lost it for good.

But then we drove on the highway in hopes of finding it smashed, and it wasn’t, just lying there in the shoulder. Quite lucky. Even found some of the stuff that flew out.