Lugudunon
1 Celtic place name “fort of Lugus”
This is the basis of the present-day place names in Continental Europe, via the Latin form Lugudunum / Lugdunum:
(1) Lyons (south-eastern France) (2) Laon (3) Loudon (4) Laudun (5) Montlezun (6) Montlauzun (7) Leiden
In Wales there is an example with the elements reversed – Dinas Dinlleu ‘hillfort of Dinlleu’ (locally pronounced Dinas Dinlla).
Dinlleu = Celtic dun- (= fort) + Lug- (= Lugus, name of a God)
It was good to get back into the field today, after having been crippled (almost quite literally) by the lack of a vehicle for over two weeks.
For those who haven’t heard, my old black truck chewed through its second clutch — I actually had the first inkling when returning from Rayne one day, but the old truck did us the favor of dying in the driveway. Our mechanic towed it to his shop and a few days later we learned it was going to cost roughly half what the truck was worth to repair it. ($850 for those who have to know.)
For a while now, Yung has not been happy with the reliability of the truck when I took it out for fieldwork. I thought nothing of it, but she has some sixth sense about certain things (and people) that has for a time now made her unhappy about the truck’s advanced years. It was eleven years old last year, and we’ve owned it for nine. It was a good truck, though I was never crazy about it and it never had enough room in its cab. (I tried a truck box for a while, but I foolishly bought a plastic one which never sealed tight against the rain, and in Louisiana that pretty much makes any kind of box next to useless.)
So, we decided it was time to get a new truck. I briefly thought about trading down to a car, but Yung wanted to keep a truck in the family because we do haul things on a regular basis. And I realized that the kinds of roads I drive on would simply tear the bottom out of most cars, especially the small ones I was looking at.
I had long had my eye on Toyota’s Tacoma line of trucks — and had long wished that that was what we had bought instead of the Isuzu-made-in-Chevy-plant Hombre. So on the freakishly cold weekend after the Isuzu had died, we found ourselves in the Lafayette Toyota dealer’s lot, looking at new Tacomas. (I had spent some time pricing used Tacomas and had discovered that they weren’t any cheaper and sometimes they were more expensive than new — trust me, this didn’t make any sense to me either.) I had imagined that our willingness to spend money would stop at an extended cab version. Yung took one look at how little room there was back there for Lily and said, “Forget it. Let’s just get the double cab.”
And that’s what we did — though I should note that we did not buy from the Lafayette dealer but from Courvelle Toyota up in Opelousas and we could not be happier with how we were treated.
The result is the first vehicle since my 1986 Isuzu Trooper that I think I really love:
“Sweet Silver”
So everyone remembers mickelebah? What about derflar and its plural form, derflarmo? (The latter gave Lily’s made-up language an official designation: bwob.) It turns out that there is more to say in bwob: lelah asoz means “I want to pick some flowers.” Asoz actually means anything that is pickable: so flowers as well as wheat and rice are all technically asoz.
Sometimes when doing development work, or for some other particular workflows, I like to be able to set up web pages/sites/whatever in the Sitesfolder on my Mac. Accessing that material becomes as easy as typing http://localhost/whatever/ into my browser. Making material in the ~/Sites viewable is as easy as navigating to System Preferences and turning on Web Sharing, which starts up apached. But what if you don’t want everyone to share your web? Here’s the file I created in /etc/apache2/users as userhome.conf:
<Directory "/Users/userhome/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
# Order allow,deny
# Allow from all
Allow from 10.0.1.195
</Directory>Obviously userhome is the short name that you use that is also the name of your home directory — often called $HOME by better geeks than me, but I was afraid if I typed that above, someone would actually use it.
A tip of the cap to Apple for making it so easy to do by following this knowledge base article.
Tonight we asked Lily to take a shower: things were running a bit late and it just seemed an easier solution, especially since I wanted to shower, too. Yung-Hsing popped her in just as I was finishing up, and after I washed her hair, I explained she would have five minutes to play in the shower. (Lily resists getting into the bath or the shower, but then she resists getting out of it. We have never discerned the root of the paradox.)
“Okay,” she said.
“Now do you want me to count the minutes down or just tell you when you have one minute left?” I asked.
“Just tell me when I have one minute left.”
“Okay.”
“But, daddy, what happens if I’m not finished?”
“Well, one minute should be plenty of time to finish.”
“What if I’m already finishing when you tell me?”
…
“Should I just finish some more?”
Most people I know are content to use the fonts that came with their computer, and thus the ubiquity of Times and Verdana. Occasionally you come across a Mac user who cannot let go of Palatino. There are people, like me, who can’t quite seem to give up Helvetica, which I use on this blog if only because one can be fairly certain that almost every computer in the world has it or the Microsoft equivalent, Arial.
Most Macs also come with a few nice looking faces like Gil Sans, Hoefler, and Garamond. Over the years, I have also invested in a few faces that I regard as basic: Adobe’s Minion Pro, for a change of serif face, and Myriad Pro, because it is a nice sans serif alternative to Helvetica and is in widespread use on signs and diagrams: people respond to it well.
Too many people I know take type faces for granted or, perhaps worse, don’t realize that type faces are not necessarily to be shared liberally. There is a way around this: acquire and use quality free type faces. And since you asked, I do have some recommendations:
Gentium is an open source font — using something called the SIL license — that allows for a wide range of uses, including commercial applications, that comes in both a a face that contains a full range of glyphs as well as Gentium Basic which has the most commonly used glyphs found in Western European alphabets. There is also a slightly heavier version of the latter, Gentium Basic Book. Download it. Use it.
Another open source font collection is Bitstream’s Vera. It comes with a full range of faces, including a monospaced face that I use on my Macs while working in Textmate. Here’s the Bitstream sampler graphic:
Bitstream’s Sampler of the Open Source Vera Type Face
In addition to these, what I could consider core, faces, I also recommend checking out the following sites or pages:
And, of course, you can always make your own free font.
As I begin to write longer pieces again, after too long a hiatus, I find myself again not wanting to trust my work entirely to Word. I am not a knee-jerk Microsoft hater, or even one to complain about the bloat in Word. Word is great for any number of things, but it’s not so great at keeping things simple and it’s not so great at being able to have multiple outputs from a single file.
Working with a text editor like Textmate has shown me how working with plain text formatted using something like Fletcher Penney’s Multimarkdown means I can not only output to HTML, RTF, DOC, and even PDF, but that I can do so using my own style sheets. (And, yes, I fiddled a bit over the last day or two with going through LaTeX, which produces beautiful output but is far too complicated for me.) The ability to produce PDF output is especially welcome, and the fact that I finally got not only an install of PrinceXML working but I also got a working adaptation of a Textmate command to automate the process is a huge step forward for me.
Again with thanks to Fletcher Penney, I adapted the syntax for the convert to Word DOC:
# Process the MultiMarkdowndocument and convert to PDF using PrinceXML
# first figure out a name for the result
NAME="${TM_FILENAME:-untitled}"
BASENAME="${NAME%.*}"
DST="/tmp/$BASENAME"
#cd "${TM_MULTIMARKDOWN_PATH:-~/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown}"
cd "${TM_MULTIMARKDOWN_PATH:-$HOME/Library/Application Support/MultiMarkdown}"
cd bin
./multimarkdown2XHTML.pl > "$DST.html"
# Get all this to Prince
require_cmd prince
prince "$DST.html"
open "$DST.pdf"