I had it worse. I needed to book a hotel for a business trip, and they offered me two prices: Either take them cheaper, but you cannot cancel or get a refund, or you can spend a bit more, and cancel it up to one day before arrival for a “cancellation fee”, which amount was not disclosed at that moment.

I booked the latter one, and in the booking confirmation it said that the cancellation fee is exactly the same as the cost for the room!

Not only on Jerboa. Basically all titles are affected, and it is not only the ampersand which is an issue.

No, it isn’t. I have dined exceptionally well in the UK. Our Christmas dinner is based on an a recipe from an English cook. We have a Scottish cafe/diner in town which serves excellent food.

OK, I’ve dined horribly, too, but it is definitely not the norm - I made the mistake of ordering half a chicken in a fish and chips shop. My recommendation: Don’t repeat my mistake.

I once gave our telco/internet provider the permission to call me on my main number if they have an interesting update regarding our contract. That went without problems for over ten years. One or two calls a year, and usually something worth thinking about.

Then their marketing decided to pull all stops and call us, on all our numbers, not just the main one, but also the kids personal phones. And not only from their official numbers, but random numbers all over the country. We suddenly got a dozen calls a day(!) from them, offering the same two products (at least where we picked up and declined the offer) again, and again, and over again. We blocked numbers, and new ones came up. The block list went from two entries to over thirty. I had to threaten legal action got get our numbers blocked again, and get them marked as such according to our privacy laws.

Silence returned.

Ahh, the good old RFCs dated April, 1st. This one is number 1149 ( A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers), and got later updated in RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service).

Very interesting technique to get the widths of the glyphs uniform without them looking ugly in most cases. OK, one can make it look bad if you know the “pain points” of the system, but in normal flowing texts, the fonts do look good.

Well, you can say exactly the same about COBOL…

People are still using those?

Apart from Python, is anyone of the listed contenders actually still breathing?

You forgot that they have English in school, too, sometimes starting in first grade already.

Siiski on sul õigus.

Maybe you should differ between those people in active service and ex-soldiers with PTSD and mental issues that makes them hear voices…

Excerpt from the US version of the Prayer of the Lord: “… and give us today our daily bread mass shooting …”

You speak English because it is the only language you know.

I speak English because it is the only language you know.

We are not the same.

Auf jeden Fall!

Well, to be honest C is still C, but it’s children have run mad.

We did Prolog in university - actually it was one of the two languages we had to learn in CS, the other one being Pascal.

I always considered Prolog a pain in the ass and unsuitable for anything bigger than a piece of homework due to the “we don’t do loops, we have tail recursion” making the code unnecessary complex and hard to read. On a list of Write-Only languages I’d rate it a few steps below Perl.

Old enough they still know Prolog.

The ElDorado Fortress is one of the “BUT” sets. As in “this feature is good, but…”, so it is a mixed experience.

The very idea to revive an iconic set of the Pirate era is laudable. To build it with a built base instead of a raised baseplate is good, BUT it costs a load of bricks and thus drives the price of the set up in a region where it should not be: beyond €200. A price of €199 would have been acceptable.

What contributed to the high brick count was that the whole set was designed in a modular fashion, which is basically a good idea, BUT the design fell short here and it is only partly modular, i.e. the pieces only fit in a limited number of combination - the modularity is far from universal.

And so, the boat is a BUT thing, too. It is nice that they included a little sailing boat, BUT it is totally unrealistic in it’s design. The transom and rudder configuration is that of a motor boat, and the rigging is totally off with a square sail and a gaff sail on the same mast. This is as if they would sell car models with legs instead of wheels. OK, we can now discuss at length the amount of realism in a LEGO model, but this is so far off, it hurts.

The crane is a good idea and well-designed, BUT it lacks the reach to actually load and unload something from the boat.

The list goes on and on.

In the end, I decided to completely redo the model as a (large) MOC, non-modular this time. The island fortress will cover about 12 baseplates, and another 12 will be surrounding quays and docks. Luckily, I already have the polulation (20-30 blue-shirt soldiers and about 150-200 sailors - originally pirates, but they can be used as harmless laypersons, too) and about 50 guns. All collected for an abandoned project years ago.

Maybe I’ll document my work on the boat, maybe I’ll only provide it as a finished work. Don’t know.

A very little MOC. Just a starter for re-doing a set properly. The boat with the ElDorado Fortress has a completly wrong sailing configuration. For me, it looks worse than a car walking on legs. So I’m going to fix that with a proper standing and running rigging, and an adequate sail configuration for a boat of that type.

And after that, the Fortress is next.