2014.07.05 13:00 - An Hour's Chat

 

 

The Guardian for this meeting was Bruce Mowbray. The comments are by Bruce Mowbray.

 

 

--BELL--

 

Bruce Mowbray: Heya, Qt!

Qt Core: Hi Bruce

Bruce Mowbray: How's it going today?

Qt Core: not bad, today summer sales started and I found nothing in my size, that's good!

Bruce Mowbray: ahhh!

Bruce Mowbray: So, you're too small?

Qt Core: not... yet ;-)

Bruce Mowbray: ;-)

Bruce Mowbray: My typist has spent most of this day working on a Java program....

Bruce Mowbray: He is trying to simulate obese shoppers at Walmart . . . well, trying to stay out of their way, anyway

Qt Core: that may be both a joy and a stressful time, which was ?

Bruce Mowbray: it was both actually.

Bruce Mowbray: stressful and fun....

Bruce Mowbray: but I think I've pretty much exhausted it now.

Bruce Mowbray: also, my dog-sitting chores of the past week were finalized today,

Bruce Mowbray: when the young man who owns the dog returned from New York.

Bruce Mowbray: which was joy all the way around....

Bruce Mowbray: I could show you a couple of photos of the dog if you're interested.

Bruce Mowbray: His name is Rocco.

 

Qt Core: quite a big guy

Bruce Mowbray: he's a six-month-old Great Dane/ Pitbull mix.

Bruce Mowbray: Yes!

Bruce Mowbray: and he slept in bed with me every night for the past week.

Bruce Mowbray: what a big baby!

Bruce Mowbray: did you get the photo of him standing and looking out the window at the birds?

Qt Core: no, only the Rocco2 one

Bruce Mowbray: okay, I will try to send you the other one.

Bruce Mowbray: The dog has an amazing curiosity -- in overdrive.

Bruce Mowbray: he can wake up in about two seconds or less if there is some unusual sound.... I regard this as really remarkable actually.  (It takes me at least an hour to wake up.)

Qt Core: a lot more big dane in his face than in the rest of his body

Bruce Mowbray: unfortunately, Rocco’s reactiveness is also difficult to sleep through.

Bruce Mowbray: yes he has a lot of the great Dane in his face.

Bruce Mowbray: and in his personality, too.

Bruce Mowbray: I'm hoping that when he's finished with his doggy adolescence, he is still as friendly as he is now.

Bruce Mowbray: I fear that he will slide toward his pitbull personality.... sadly.

Bruce Mowbray: he growled at me a couple of times, actually, and I got down on my knees and stared him in the face.

Bruce Mowbray: just to let him know that I'm still bigger than he is, and that I didn't appreciate his macho behavior

Qt Core: i know very little about dogs, never had one and i'm a cat person

Bruce Mowbray: The first thing my typist remembers in his entire life was the birth of nine English setter puppies under the kitchen table.

Bruce Mowbray: one of those went with him when he (age five) moved to Iowa from Ohio, and died when he was 16 years old.

Bruce Mowbray: I think my typist would have preferred to have lost his brother than his dog.

Bruce Mowbray: but 13 years is a long life . . . especially for a pedigree dog.

Bruce Mowbray: My typist's dog Bear lived to be 14 years old.

Bruce Mowbray: sadly, my typist had to put him down last September.

Qt Core: :-(

Bruce Mowbray: I could probably find some photos of him too, Bear Dog, I mean, if you are interested.

Bruce Mowbray: Here he is in his favorite chair.

Bruce Mowbray: I took that during an ice storm --- several years ago ---- our electric power was down for five days, and Bear spent most of that in his chair.

Qt Core: nice color, very vivid brown

 

--BELL--

 

Bruce Mowbray: another shot of him in the chair.

Bruce Mowbray: Rocco and Bear were like night and day . . . so very different from each other -- personality wise and just about every other way.

Bruce Mowbray: Required my typist to do a bit of stretching...., if you know what I mean.

Bruce Mowbray: I have only had one cat in my entire life....

Bruce Mowbray: his name was Servetus.

Bruce Mowbray: he was named after a Unitarian evangelist who was burned at the stake by Calvin, in Geneva.

Qt Core: ubusuak name and more unusual origin

Bruce Mowbray: Servetus came to me covered with fleas. I gave him a bath.... with something (pine oil soap)  that cleared away the fleas..... and he stayed with me for a few years.

Bruce Mowbray: my typist used to pretend that the entire cosmos was being dreamed into existence by Servetus . . . as he slept on my typist’s chest

Qt Core: the only pet i owned was a cat (shared with my sister) when i was a kid

Bruce Mowbray: and that if anything should happen to him, we would all disappear.

Bruce Mowbray: however, one day Servetus got run over on the road. . .

Bruce Mowbray: and I was still there!

Bruce Mowbray: and so was everything else still there!

Bruce Mowbray: so it was sort of a crisis of faith, of a sort.

Bruce Mowbray: a sort of a crisis of a sort?!!!

Bruce Mowbray: how's that for an ex-English teacher?

Qt Core: did he woke up to his RL and remembered the dream, then

Bruce Mowbray: which "he" do you mean --- my typist or Servetus?

Qt Core: the cat

Bruce Mowbray: ha ha!

Bruce Mowbray: I don't know whether he woke up or not! he was pretty flat!

Bruce Mowbray: there on the road, I mean.

Bruce Mowbray: he was a good cat, though.

Bruce Mowbray: while he was around.

Bruce Mowbray: do you know the song " The Cat Came Back"?

Qt Core: no

Bruce Mowbray: I will find it for you just a sec.....

Bruce Mowbray: Here is one version....

Bruce Mowbray: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjMffHG1V_Q

Bruce Mowbray: (Don't know if you can understand the English singing......)

Qt Core: most of it

Bruce Mowbray: ;-) Great!

Bruce Mowbray: maybe the cartoons will help!

Qt Core: they sing with not much accent or at least it seems to me (i have a problem with non-British sounding accents

Bruce Mowbray: I understand.

Bruce Mowbray: apparently you've learned English from a person with a British accent....

Bruce Mowbray: understandable.

Bruce Mowbray: My typist, unfortunately, speaks only one language fluently....

Qt Core: yes, early school English is mostly British oriented

Bruce Mowbray: a little bit of Spanish and French, perhaps, but what a lack - what a deficiency!

Qt Core: formally i studied a couple school years of  French and Latin too

Bruce Mowbray: I am thinking that if one learns his English in Europe, then it would surely be with a British accent....

Qt Core: main word here "formally"

Bruce Mowbray: All of the French that my typist knows he learned from a girlfriend in California, many many years ago!

 

--BELL--

 

Bruce Mowbray: her name was Jayna Dumont, and she thought the two things ought always to be done in French....

Bruce Mowbray: drinking fine wine, and making love....

Bruce Mowbray: so my typist learned all the French that I could !

Qt Core: ;-)

Bruce Mowbray: and fast too.

Bruce Mowbray: Jayna was an excellent teacher.

Bruce Mowbray: (Knew how to inspire motivation in her student.)

Qt Core: to be honest i too have issues thinking about English as a romantic language, with all its consonants

Bruce Mowbray: to this day - - - and those experiences with Jayna were nearly 50 years ago - - my typist still remembers the French drinking songs that she taught him.

Qt Core: much more frequent than vowels than in Italian and French too

Bruce Mowbray: ponders consonants....

Bruce Mowbray: there are far more “romantic” languages than English, to be sure.

Bruce Mowbray: I think French is probably the most romantic....

Bruce Mowbray: and German may be the least.

Bruce Mowbray: there is a lot of Germanic influence in English, of course.

Bruce Mowbray: Personally, I find it amazing that we can understand each other at all!

Qt Core: yes, that silly idea of English of picking words AND spelling rules from many sources and mixing them

Bruce Mowbray: I mean language is an amazing tool....

Bruce Mowbray: English picks its rules from everywhere!

Bruce Mowbray: one comes to see that when one teaches English, as my typist did for 13 years!

Qt Core: oh yes,

Bruce Mowbray: how can you explain all of that nonsense?

Bruce Mowbray: much of it is contradictory to any rules that one might try to establish....

Bruce Mowbray: always there are exceptions - in spellings as well as grammar rules

Qt Core: when i realized that the words i misspell most are German ones spelled like French or vice versa i didn't startt to type them well, but at least i knew

Bruce Mowbray: perhaps it would be useful for you to find a voice recognition software program...

Bruce Mowbray: like Dragon NaturallySpeaking,

Bruce Mowbray: which, in fact, I am using right now.

Bruce Mowbray: there is no possible way I could type this fast without utilizing the Dragon.

Qt Core: i would lose my abilities

Bruce Mowbray: your abilities to speak English?

Bruce Mowbray: or your abilities to type?

Qt Core: at least to type it

Bruce Mowbray: yes, I understand and agree.

Bruce Mowbray: I am so reliant upon the Dragon, now, that I seldom type a letter without it.

Bruce Mowbray: it is an amazing technology, to be sure.

Qt Core: i think i've spoken (as in using the mouth) English for less than 3 hours in last 20 years

Bruce Mowbray: imagine speaking into a microphone and instantly having those sounds transformed into type!

Bruce Mowbray: Oh my!

Bruce Mowbray: Yikes!

Bruce Mowbray: well you certainly seem to be doing well with typing it!

Qt Core: my pronunciation should be horrible ;-)

Bruce Mowbray: nevertheless, you do far better with your typing English than my typist could do with his Italian . . . of which he knows nothing!

Bruce Mowbray: Yikes!

Qt Core: in my mind English is probably pretty character-based and not sound-based

Bruce Mowbray ponders "character-based"

Bruce Mowbray: so you see the letters?

Bruce Mowbray: You know, Qt, one of my great fascinations in life is compensation....

Qt Core: not anymore, but if i look at English words in my mind i see how to type them not how to say them

Bruce Mowbray: it never ceases to amaze me how deaf people learn to " hear" through other means, and how blind people learn to "see"

Qt Core: compensation ? as in growing the other senses when you lose one ?

Bruce Mowbray: I understand what you mean . . . or think that I understand.

Bruce Mowbray: compensating for our disabilities. . . whatever they are.

Bruce Mowbray: or our inabilities

Bruce Mowbray: I think everyone on the planet does this in one way or another.

Bruce Mowbray: but to me, it is a remarkable talent.... I mean, that as humans we are able to make those compensations.

Bruce Mowbray: and do so in split-second time.

Qt Core: when you only have a hammer everything is a nail

Bruce Mowbray: on multiple levels.

Bruce Mowbray: fortunately, no one has just a hammer.....

Qt Core: btw i agree about that fascination

Bruce Mowbray: everyone, it seems, has multiple means of compensating.....

Bruce Mowbray: even if disabled, and disabled in more than one area, somehow the brain finds its way through....

 

--BELL--

 

Bruce Mowbray: and to me this seems almost a miracle.

Bruce Mowbray: I am going to need to excuse myself now, Qt, because my typist has obligations in the real world. Thank you good man! May your weekend be happy and safe.

Qt Core: "-) bye Bruce, have fun!