mikegriff

That's pretty much what is happening now in Ireland. Irish Water is asking for PPS numbers for all the children in a household and for the main householder. PPS numbers are similar to Social Security numbers in the US.

At the moment Irish Water is a semi state body, but there are large fears that it will be sold off to a private company in a few years, along with the PPS numbers and details of everyone in Ireland.

There was a large demonstration against it last weekend [1]

[1] http://www.thejournal.ie/water-charge-protest-in-dublin-1718...

That looks pretty good. Is there a way to filter by language, or can you just order by language?

And it'd be good if he got rid of the greengrocer's apostrophes[1].

[1] http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/greengrocer%27s_apostrophe

It was the first one I installed myself. I spent a long time trying to download all the floppy disk images for A and X over dial up. Trying to do it while on work experience on the only PC that had an internet connection made it all the more fun.

And now it's back working. Some more info here, but it's not much: https://status.github.com/messages

That seems to be the more used phrase. Maybe it's an Irish thing, we like to be a bit different too :)

"Some of the goals that Brazil keeper Julio Cesar conceded were unavoidable, but he was not exactly Tim Howard in goal." (elsewhere)

There's another plural/singular one. It would more likely be 'in goals', or more colloquially, 'in sticks'.

the use of "tie" instead of "draw"

That reminds me of another one, how the score is communicated. Americans say something like 'Germany won seven to one', I'd say 'Germany won seven one'. This then gets quite confusing for Gaelic football where we say things like 'Mayo won three twelve to one seven' (3 goals and 12 points to 1 goal and seven points)

Almost, I'm from Ireland.

I hadn't noticed the wider use of singular groups previously, but that does make sense when you point it out. I suppose it was just more obvious because we rarely see american analysis of football outside of the world cup.

Reading this article (and lots more around world cup time) written about football by North Americans, I've noticed that there's a different way of thing about teams and countries than in Europe (or the English speaking part at least).

The biggest one that jumps out at me is using single person to describe the teams. We generally describe a team as 'they' rather than 'it'. So we are more likely to see 'Germany’s win will also affect their odds in the World Cup final' than the way it's written in the article.

Has anyone else found any other Americanisms?

Send me a mail, I have a couple of invites available.

Only messing. I just couldn't resist bringing up the great editor debate :)

No problems, I can see one or two bits that I think could do with clarifying (not least to get rid of emacs :P ). I'll have a go at it this evening and take notes.

I didn't mean to belittle it all, I'm well impressed with it. Nicely explained for the most part and I saw afterwards that it's up on github too so it's easy to send in corrections for it.

I had to look up Friendica and Movim to see what they were (I'd never heard of them before), it'd be nice to have links to the respective homepages, so off I'll go and add them in.

That's a good little installation document. I'm going to give that a go with a raspberry pi when I get home.

How up to date are the instructions?

Hmm, Ireland doesn't exist. I guess they don't want me to get one, or find out about it.

There doesn't seem to be anything that jumps out as a reason to use aptitude over apt-get there. It mentions that the defaults for upgrading the distro are better for aptitude but doesn't say why or what differences there are.

I can see the search being useful though.

Seeing as my muscle memory is set at apt-get, i'll stick with it for the moment.

Why is it better to use aptitude on debian?

I've been using debian for years and always just used apt-get.

That was my reaction as well. Clicked the back button straight away and went looking in the comments to find out what was said in the article.

Gah! Another site that throws up an overlay to get yout email address when you're trying to read the article. It made me leave straight away without finishing it.

Why do that? Does it really have that good a return?

Really enjoyable article. I especially like the analogy of maps and how only using a map can distort reality.

Here's a longer write up on the hardware involved and thinking behind it. It's linked from the article but I thought this explained it better.

http://blog.nytlabs.com/2013/11/05/diff-a-live-comparator-fo...

Nice, I like that one. I've been in that situation before, standing on my own and seeing others standing on their own too. But I never thought of just going up and being the person to introduce them to others.

I'll have to try that out.

I'm not sure. Sometimes I find that when I'm working on something, I get ideas on what to write about. Admittedly, most of my blog posts tend to be reminders to myself on how to fix certain problems I come across as opposed to long form essays.

Thanks for the heads up on this. I thought I had read something about that in the past, but I couldn't remember what it was exactly.

Going to go have a look at disconnect.me now.

I've been getting that too on a number of sites. After reading the replies to this, I see it's ghostery being a bit too eager.

I'm going to give disconnect.me a try and see how that works out.

I just get a "Ghostery blocked comments powered by Disqus." when I go to that page. Why does it seem like the whole article is wrapped up in Disqus?

Ah yeah, that'll happen. :)

Have you tried running with a club?

There's usually someone there who takes it upon themselves to rein in the speed on longer runs.

I think that's something that most beginner runners don't think of. Endurance base is so important but also the one that is neglected a lot of the time.

It's easy to think "I want to run fast so I have to train fast" but it's harder to get into a mindset of "I want to run fast so I better not tire out as quickly". Long steady runs are the best way to build this up (long being relative to your level, of course)

I agree with this, along with sites that throw up a questionnaire as soon as you load up a page. No, I will not fill in your questionnaire before I have looked at the page that might or might not have the information I want!

That's a good way to show standing waves, but did they understand what they were looking at, or did they just think it was some sort of a trick?