Quiet

I’ve been very quiet, feeling mostly swamped by work and multiple volunteer projects that claim my time. It gets to be too much for me, and I end up turning turtle. Something I know I do, and I know how to get out of it eventually: tackle one project at a time and let others fester – but ignore them completely.

One current project is tadpoles. You know, baby frogs. They’re interesting from a linguistic perspective because I can’t spot much commonalities in words for tadpoles across western european languages, either phonetically or semantically. Tadpole? Pollywog? Kikkervis? There’s a lot of variation. And the little creatures are cute, too, wriggling in a large glass bowl. They come from a glob of frog spawn a friend found in his pond and was going to throw out, so I kept a few for educational purposes. Eventually they’ll go back in another pond or the ditch out back of the house and we’ll see what happens.

Some fun things on the side happen; I was pointed to the NIXOS site because it has KDE 4.2 now. That’s actually a really good stress test for dependencies, given the way NIXOS builds. It enforces, if I remember correctly, an extreme separation between packages by putting each one in its own unique (hashed) prefix. KDE everywhere, eh.