Lee.org

Zimbabwe has 231,000,000% inflation.

The wikipedia article on the Zimbabwean dollar reads like a Keystone Cops comedy.

A Reuters article reads “The country’s largest bank note, a 100 billion Zimbabwe dollar bill introduced on Monday, cannot buy a loaf of bread…”

On July 24th 2008, a “Second” 100 billion ZWD note could buy 3 eggs.

Of course since then the currency was devalued by 8 decimal places. And continuing inflation has moved things along another 6 decimal places. Their currency has been devalued a couple times.

A little quick math (that’s probably wrong, I’m no wiz at such things) tells me that 1 US Dollar could buy 32,145,960,000,000,000,000,000 (yes, 3.2 x 10^24) “First” Zimbabwean dollars from back in 1983.

(that number calculated from here. Here’s the ratios: First ZWD:Second ZWD = 500,000:650. Second ZWD:Third ZWD = 758,000,000,000:1,780. Third ZWD:current US dollar = 98,300,000,000:1)

Thanks for the pointer Trav and thanks for providing my RDA of absurdism Mr. Mugabe.

update 11-2-08: Hey would you look at that. Someone on Wikipedia made a chart for the most part agreeing with my 3.2×10^24 estimate. :-)

update 11-13-08:

Take a look at this screenshot I took of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe I took today.

First, ask yourself how you would pronounce the word “Wiktionary”. Ok, now proceed.

In April I commented in the Wiktionary wiki about…. well, I’ll let you read:

(archive)

There is quite a consensus that the pronunciation for “Wiktionary” in the logo of this site is not definitive. Why then is this contentious pronunciation displayed on every page of the site? A look through the archives of the discussion rooms, FAQ and entry discussion shows that the issue appears time after time without any resolution. This has caused me to lose faith in the process Wiktionary’s Administration uses to agree on subjects. Since I cannot trust Wiktionary, I will not be using Wiktionary. For the betterment of all, I hope this issue is resolved. I will check back in 6 months. –Gadlen 22:58, 8 April 2008 (UTC)

The responses were… well, less than compelling.

Apparently everyone is perfectly happy that the logo of this wordie website is an incorrect pronunciation of the name of the site.

Feh.

Sure, encyclopedias are more exciting than dictionaries but it’s interesting to compare the popularity of the two sites…

wikipedia Active users 157,889

wiktionary Active users 995

For posterity, here is the rest of the discussion from above:

(more…)

I installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin. It is specifically compatible with the WP Super Cache plugin which has worked very well.

With this plugin, if you have posted a comment on my blog, it’ll remember you and you won’t have to see the banner ads that I put at the bottom of every post.

I just downloaded and installed the No Adverts for Friends plugin (1 file). Then put this in my comments.php:

<?php if (function_exists('is_regular_user')) { ?>
<?php if( is_regular_user() == false ) {  ?>
<center>
My Google ad here
</center>
<?php } ?>
<?php } ?>

I’ve been using PlainPaste by Skrommel for more than a year. When you’re running PlainPaste and you hit Ctrl-v, it strips out all the formatting info of whatever is in the clipboard and pastes just the text. It’s really useful when grabbing web page text and pasting it to other places.

Unfortunately, PlainPaste doesn’t always play nice with other programs. For instance, when you paste into Excel, Excel crashes :-(

So now I’m trying PureText 2.0 by Steve Miller. He also wrote the venerable Dependency Walker which bodes well :-). Puretext claims to work similar to PlainPaste. Hopefully it won’t do bad things. We’ll see! It has the added benefit of playing a fun clave sound when you paste using Window-Hot-Key-v. Of course you can turn off the sound but it made me chipper.

Silly, isn’t it?

This forklift video helped with my training. (no really, watch the video!)

On Saturday. It was great fun! I rode (well, almost) a unicycle for the first time. I learned some “claymotion” juggling moves”, and got to see some really amazing acts at the show in the evening. It felt good seeing the acts here because I knew that they knew they were “among friends”.

Take a peak at the fun sign they put on the bathroom door.

And Charlotte even won a door prize! She won a set for 35 juggling rings! And she had been mumbling about how it didn’t matter what she put in for, should doesn’t ever win anything. Well that’s not true anymore! We’ll just have to put this prize in the closet next to the Lady Ada Mini-POV kit she won at Instructables last year :-)))

Berkeley Juggling and Unicycle Festival website

The Berkeley Unicyclists

At the Saturday night show was:

Kevin Axtell - who f’ing rocked.

Baby Doll - who has a terrific act and is certainly not just another hooper. Professional, fun, good choreography and sexy too :-)

Pink Man - who is wonderfully insane

A young juggler named Noah who can juggle balls behind his back and clubs behind his back via his legs… wow! (he’d throw them down through his legs and they’d wrap and he’d catch them at his shoulders or somesuch)

John Foss -  a class act!

the Humboldt Jugglers - had such a tight act… it was beautiful seeing the four of them work together.

The Stanford Juggling Research Institute

Dan Holzman, Matt Hall, Curt Carlyle, Iman Lizarazu, and Mountain Mischief, Ashley Foster…

Oh and thanks to Marc Hertlein who invited me!

Kaiju Big Battel is coming to San Francisco November 19th!

A little east coast craziness added to this west coast insanity.

I’m not sure if I’m going. I’m miffed that the Ticketmaster service fee costs fully 40% of the ticket.

He calls over to the bartender and asks him for a beer and a mop.

:-)

until now (via slide show):

holy crap.

Spinning Wheel by Blood Sweat and Tears

What goes up must come down
spinning wheel got to go round
Talking about your troubles it’s a crying sin
Ride a painted pony
Let the spinning wheel spin

I chipped in $50 to the NIMBY Relocation Fund. Will you?

Go to the NIMBYSpace website and click on the donate link.