English-based Creoles, Esperanto, and the Quest for the “Perfect” Bridge Language

Meet Mom and Dad

See the man at the bottom with the jet-black hair? The lady in the chair to his right? The bundle of joy in her arm? Those are respectively my father, my mother, and myself. Both my parents sadly passed, but their story is remarkable. He was Italian, she was German. The official story is that they met on the freeway, passing each other repeatedly over hundred miles. It was, by all accounts, love at first sight.

CyberSecurity Done Right

I received an email. It came from TaskRabbit, a company about whom I don’t know much. I used them to get moving help when my containers were delivered and had a really strongly positive impression. Also, they had some heavy-handed product placement in Unbreakable – Kimmy Schmidt, which still was endearing.

While I know little about the company, I know something about their handling of a cybersecurity incident. Here is what they had to say:

FAQ: Did Jesus Really Save a Gay Couple?

Spring Has Sprung! Or Has It? The Math Behind Seasons

Yawn! That’s not my reaction to the title, but to the sleepiness that comes from giving up Lent, eating chocolate (provided at half price by Safeway on Easter Monday), and sleeping in after a sugar rush. Easter, is a Spring holiday – not by chance, but by design: Spring officially starts on the Spring equinox, and Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox (unless bla bla). Since there is one full moon in every 29-something days, you are guaranteed to see Easter happen soon after the official start of Spring.

My Private Keystone

The previous post I spent dissing the EPIC Pass, but praising its mountains. Vail will always be one of my favorite places on Earth, despite being sick of high prices and breaking-down lifts. Breckenridge will always be my go-to place for a party (waiting for the Plunge!), but I’ll never reveal my secret stashes there, not even if you tortured me with a ski stick (yes, that’s what they were originally called!).

Good-bye RMSP, Welcome IKON!

Last year I decided to splurge and buy both major season passes available in Colorado: EPIC, which is Vail’s offering and includes access of some kind to A-Basin, Keystone, Breckenridge, Vail, and Beaver Creek; and Rocky Mountain SuperPass (RMSP), which is good at Eldora, Winter Park, Copper Mountain, Steamboat, and Crested Butte.

Of course, just as I decide to do that, we get one of the worst snow seasons on record. We are worried about water supply in the summer, as the snow melt is going to be insufficient, but right now I am more concerned about the tree stumps that are not covered and the runs that didn’t open until well into February.

Crested Butte Weekend

It’s been a tough year for travel. I had to deal with a lot of work, and if I found the time to snowboard, I rather shot up I-70 to my favorite haunts than drive for hours and days just to slide down a mountain I didn’t know. I mean, I am some 75 minutes from some of the finest resorts in the world, do I really have to fly to marginally better or really just different mountains?

Long Time No Read!

The spiders are busy deciding what happened to the old links on this site, while humans find the content just fine using the Search feature. But what happened? In short, we switched from Joomla to WordPress. It’s been a painful process, but one that couldn’t be postponed.

What was wrong with Joomla? Nothing major, really. Joomla is a fine piece of software, despite not being as popular or as beloved by the geeky masses. The crown of the former Kingdom belongs to WordPress, while the one of the other probably to Drupal, as far as PHP is concerned. But I grew increasingly frustrated with the direction Joomla was taking, and the camel’s back broke when I tried to get an Esperanto version of the software. I spent weeks translating and translating, the most boring and redundant strings, only to have the translation administrator disappear, then reappear, then declare he was going to take care of translating from then on, and then disappear again.

2017

Installing Dual-boot Linux on Asus Chromebook Flip C302

[YO! In case you didn’t know, installing a new OS on any computer is always risky. You are likely to lose all your data, brick your Flip, and suffer grievous injury if you follow the steps below.]

I’ve been a big fan of the Flip line of Chromebooks from Asus. It started with the absolutely fun 10.1″, which was a goddess-send on cramped flights (hello, Spirit?). I moved on to the C301, a plasticky thing that was all standard Chromebook and not as much fun. But once I saw the almost identically named C302. an all-aluminum unibody beauty, I knew I needed one.