Planet chuffed

I'm still stumbling along a bit in my weblogging journey (just over one month now), but I've been gratified by the great feedback, and Copia has garnered a burst of attention in the past few days.

First of all, Copia is now a province on three planets that I know of:

The first two are topic-specific feeds, which is as I think it should be. I write on a very broad range of topics, and I have plenty on Python and XML alone, so there's no need to bombard the planets with masses of off-topic posts. I'm in great company on all three feeds.

But perhaps most pleasing has been a very kind comment from Bill de hÓra, someone's whose thinking and writing I respect a lot.

I think I've figured out a time management scheme that allows for posting to Copia without sacrificing the time I used to spend on so much other work that continues to pile up.

Now all I have to do is convince Chime to post more (he's never been as talkative as I am, to his credit).

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia

To die for every day

The other day a friend who happened to check out Copia told me "I really liked that quote-to-die bit". It took me a moment to realize she really meant "Quotidie". Her pronunciation had never even occurred to me (I guess I lack imagination).

"Quotidie" is, of course, Latin for "daily". There is meant to be a pun on the fact that a quote heads each entry ("Quote-a-day")., but this is a bit incidental. I certainly pronounce the o as in "ought", the "tid" as in "teed off", and the ending almost to rhyme with in "dee-jay" (much less emphasis on the "dee"). I'm too lazy to bust out the proper IPA for it.

Anyway, in hopes that it will prevent any misunderstanding, I'll use the syllable length markers in the title from now, with macrons over the first i and the e ("Quotīdiē").

I guess as Michael Kaplan would say:

This post brought to you by the letters "ī" (U +012B, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER I WITH MACRON) and "ē" (U +012B, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH MACRON)

[Uche Ogbuji]

via Copia