User Comments - pretzellogic

Posted on: Preparing for Pain

Preparing for Pain, round 2: cuts, bruises, black and blue, scrapes, head butt, broken jaw, broken nose, tomato can.

Posted on: National Stereotypes

whoa, I didn't know there was a webpage or two dedicated to X is the Y of Z. Now what I want to know is

- Who is the Richard Pryor of Germany?

- What is the Rodney Dangerfield of the Periodic Table of the Elements?

- What's the Chicago of Russia?

Keep making up stuff until some funny combination ensues.

Posted on: National Stereotypes

actually, the explanation was that the Danes did everything better with higher quality than the Germans did. Or that the Danes outGerman'd the Germans. The German in the room at the time wasn't particularly amused.

Posted on: National Stereotypes

Just the other day, I heard from a Norwegian,  "Sweden is the South Korea of Scandinavia".  What she further explained was that the Koreans are the fashion/culture trend setters and technology first adopters of Asia.  I told that story to someone at another party, then they said that "Denmark is the Germany of Europe".  I loved that one.

Posted on: Driving in China

Not to be utterly dismissive of your point, but what Sunix should really be enlisted to do before anything else is to help create a lesson with dialogue like this:

Wang Guan: So I've installed Windows Server 2008R2 Service Pack 1 on the new IBM Bladeserver. We are going to beta Microsoft VDI suites on a couple of machines for a bit. Can you loan me one of your linux boxes so that I can have it act as client machines for the beta?

Wang Shang: No, you cannot use any of my machines, I don't have enough machines as it is.

Wang Guan: Come on, man. You've got a four-way Dell server with 16 gig of RAM. I'll just use your spare Hewlett-Packard box with HP-UX on it. You were going to blow that OS away anyway.

Wang Shang: First of all, isn't it bad enough that you're asking the Red Hat Linux guy, me, for advice on the beta for the Windows servers after I said this was probably not a good time to do it? Further, didn't we just migrate everybody off Windows XP and onto Windows 7? and now we're going to beta VDI suites?

Wang Guan: tell you what. I'll slap VMware ESX on the machine, and we'll create 20 virtual machines that we can both use. Ok? I'll use the home.com domain name to create a new set of IP addresses, then we can use our networks on different subnets.

Wang Shang: I thought that's why you were going to use Windows Server 2008R2, so you could use Hyper-V to create the virtual machines? And how are you going to manage the resulting VM sprawl? We don't have SystemCenter Virtual Machine Manager. You going to beta that too? Didn't the CIO already give us the lowdown on what it was doing to the network? We already don't have the appropriate tools to manage all this stuff.

Wang Guan: It gets better. The CEO wants us to start ensuring she can download all the company apps into her iPad so she can work from home conveniently. We need to test our apps on an iPad. I'll let you take the iPad home that we have to buy to do the testing if you let me use your Dell box.

Wang Shang: 32 or 64 gig?

Wang Guan: 64 gig of course!

Wang Shang: Deal!

Posted on: Dental Floss

Oh, because I often forget which one is the toothpick, and which one is the floss. Yaxian.... maybe if I think of the string and pulling, that might be the floss thingy.... maybe you said that in the lesson (and I didn't listen). Plus they're both close in pronunciation. Easy to confuse the two when you hear someone speaking Chinese at 800 mph.

Posted on: Driving in China

Sunix! He's in Chinespod's IT department. There was a BST (I think) interview with him earlier. I think he's from 陕西,

Posted on: Dental Floss

I can see that  牙签  yáqiān  vs 牙线  yáxiàn is going to be a problem....

Posted on: A Good Book

not that you're still looking at this post, but do you really think there is a difference between reading online material, and reading a book? Isn't the key test just literacy?

Posted on: Eating Idioms, Part 1

some really cool Chinese here.