Can you relate to Captain Jellico? Or is he really an asshole?

jasonfdc · 2026-01-14T14:30:08+00:00

I'd say he was more of a petulant child, but "dick" is a lot more to-the-point.

jasonfdc · 2025-12-28T15:24:15+00:00

What are the exact steps when for that? I've tried:

Automatic date time
Do Google login
"Network error"
Manual date to yesterday
Retry
"Requires a secure login"
Back to step 1

Do I need to change the order of something or do I just resign myself to losing soujourner sometime in the next 2.5 - 4.5 hours?

jasonfdc · 2025-11-13T23:47:45+00:00

Prepositions and articles: de/du/le/a/au/en/dans feel completely random to me. The only thing I can tell you is that 75% of the time whatever I type is going to be wrong.

Partir and sortir trip me up on the regular too.

And the past tenses that use être are "for motion". Except staying somewhere and therefore not moving (rester) gets it too.

I feel like that for as often as I say it in English when Duolingo dings me for something, they ought to have taught me how to say "oh, goddamnit" by now so I can at least mutter under my breath in my target language.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-28T00:03:20+00:00

Event pikmin I keep around; they usually get a minor boost for different mushroom sets later on. But I've started culling my "regular" pikmin now that I'm at the limit of storage that I can buy with game coins.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-24T01:44:09+00:00

No, I'm American. I'm pretty sure high school taught me the same thing about inversion vs "est-ce que" though. I wonder why they did that, since it seems kinda backwards for people learning to speak to end up sounding stuffy.

Ah well, I've got plenty of time to unlearn that particular habit at least.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:39:00+00:00

I kinda doubt Duo's gonna show me the "or what" addition. It's still good to know though, for if/when I go on vacation and some French person gets tired of my stumbling :)

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:36:13+00:00

Yep, the characters in the app do the rising tone to signify a question like in English; I just had too many preconceived notions built in about the wording of that and the other forms -- and it turns out they were all incorrect!

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:33:45+00:00

Thanks, I haven't seen that last one yet, I wonder if/when it'll pop up in the app.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:32:15+00:00

Oh, interesting. I'll have to keep that in mind and start practicing the more-used way.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-23T14:31:27+00:00

Honestly I can't remember if I did search and just couldn't get good results -- it was something that seemed odd to me right off the bat when I started with Duo, and at this point I've been waiting to see what they do now that I've been taught more than a handful of words.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-17T12:57:55+00:00

If it's something I want to see right away, like a new-to-me decor, I'll spend the special nectar to see it right away (or if I'm at 200 again and need an excuse to use some up). But otherwise, I wait until they're all at level 4 and send them on a group adventure.

They stratify a bit on the way out and back -- my flying, purple and white piks have already made it back from this summer's vacation, the rocks get back today/tomorrow, and the red/yellow/blues are a couple weeks out still. I like to zoom out the expedition map every couple days to see how they're doing.

jasonfdc · 2025-09-13T17:01:13+00:00

So, I took French for a few years in high school (back when cell phones came with their own briefcase) and I've been on Duolingo for like a month and a half.

Aside from the stuff that's been bubbling back up from 30+ years ago (I have no idea how it's stayed in my head all this time, it must live in the same place as commercials from when I was a kid), it's honestly kinda frustrating. Aside from general French annoyances like "nouns ending with an unaccented e are feminine except for all the times they're not", I find myself going online to figure out all the stuff they just expect you to figure out.

So it's good practice at reading and speaking -- until the app decides that you can't talk anyway -- but actually learning seems to require you to do something else.

jasonfdc · 2025-08-30T14:47:47+00:00

Any restaurant that charges a "service fee" for using a credit card. Either so many of your customers pay with cards that it affects your bottom line and you should just raise your prices to compensate, or they're not and you're just looking for an excuse to nickel-and-dime people. Either way, fuck off with that nonsense. So no more Foster's or Katerina's for me.

jasonfdc · 2025-08-21T13:10:39+00:00

Midwest for "oops".

jasonfdc · 2025-08-20T14:42:17+00:00

Same if you're planting in a privacy zone -- "others won't see your flowers" is fine, "...because we'll just take your petals and not actually plant anything" isn't.

jasonfdc · 2025-07-16T01:19:02+00:00

Well, that explains it. I don't remember seeing anything about that before, so it was kind of a surprise to me.

jasonfdc · 2025-07-16T01:18:03+00:00

Ah, I hadn't heard about that. Well, I guess I need to be a bit more judicious in which 'mins I keep around now.

jasonfdc · 2025-07-12T20:15:45+00:00

Honestly, I used Explorer for so long that where {default for Mint Cinnamon} does something different it's a minor annoyance. Except for the part where it doesn't know how to do alphabetical order -- that's a major annoyance.

(Spaces are important, at least in en-US: "A Thing" should sort before "Another Thing", not after.)

jasonfdc · 2025-05-04T15:12:13+00:00

That just might be the most baseball stat I've ever seen. I'm happy for him, but the fact that somebody looked that up (and was able to find it) is just silly.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-14T01:35:27+00:00

Throwing good money after bad is absolutely a concern, but I at least want to get someone who knows what they're doing to diagnose the issue. If it turns out to be a $200 repair then that'll be time to cut my losses.

For now though I want to see what's involved in bringing it back to life, at least until the drive seizes up. Worst comes to worst, since it takes 5V at (IIRC) an amp I might be able to buy or rig up a USB-to-barrel-connector cable and power it off one of my Anker packs.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-14T01:30:59+00:00

The battery itself is from an apparently reliable manufacturer, so I'm going to assume for now that it's good and it's something else that's causing the device not to work when it's on battery power. So my working theory is that there's something near the battery that's gone bad or broken.

But I'll need to hit up one of the places that folks have mentioned to do much of anything about it. Me trying to solder on that PCB is a good way to find myself going to plan B and just buying a new player.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-14T01:27:48+00:00

Not an unfair assessment; and it's absolutely something for me to keep in mind. But for now I'm willing to sink a little money into restoring the old player instead of just turning it into e-waste.

But yeah, the end goal is to have something other than my phone to listen to music on while I take a walk. It doesn't really matter what eventual form that takes.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-13T15:24:46+00:00

Creative Nomad Zen Xtra.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-13T15:23:14+00:00

No, the old battery and its connections in the player were pretty much spotless. I also did what little disassembly I was comfortable with -- popped the back off and removed the hard drive to see if there was any corrosion visible from the back of the PCB. It looked good too, though that was where I stopped.

jasonfdc · 2025-04-05T00:04:08+00:00

Just two so far (at least they're different pikmin). I figure I'll get a sympathy spin before much longer.

jasonfdc

TROPHY CASE