All of sunday was computer-free, except when we had a disagreement over what the lyrics were to “I used to love her” by Guns ‘n Roses (and wasn’t there a similar song by the Stones?) and what the exact role of Ken Saro Wiwa in Nigerian history. New Year’s Eve discussions with wine and oliebollen are a good source of eclecticism. We discovered a YouTube meme about putting Berk and Ernie sketches to music in order to show how the timing of popular songs and those sketches coincides. Aside from the flagrant copyright violations (no, I don’t think that taking an entire Bert and Ernie sketch plus Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” and mixing the two soundtracks is fair use of any sort – though one might argue that the copyright term on the 1969 sketches ought to be over) most of these videos just plain sucked. As in, I liked watching Bert and Ernie (in English, instead of Dutch for once) but theso-called timing coincidences are very weak.

New Year’s, an educational time.

It’s also a productive time, since Thomas Zander sent in a new Krazy check for superfluous semicolons in class headers – so we may threaten Ariya’s spotless KOffice record with that. That’s the thing to look out for when using this kind of tools: just because the tool says “0 defects” it does not mean that there are really no defects, just none that the tool can find anymore – and the tools tend to be kind of simplistic. I’d be much more interested in the kind of advanced problems that coders and users and usability people can find with the applications. And that’s also the point of these tools: make the simple stuff easy to find and fix so that people, real intelligent people like KDE contributors, can deal with the hard stuff. So thanks, Thomas, for adding to our arsenal of automatic improvements.

Let me round up with “kids say the darndest things” (wasn’t that one of those lame Reader’s Digest columns?) with Amiel’s “i’m tired. can i go to bed?” (he’s two) as most remarkable utterance of December and a conversation between Mira (three-and-a-half) and Merijn (ditto): “i have an itchy back. i often have an itchy back.” “is it mosquitoes?” “no, mosquitoes live in Canada.”