Happy things thread!

[Linguoboy]

The Washington Nationals won their first World Series ever and they did it in a way no other team has ever done it before: They lost every home game and won every away game. It was a thrilling victory, and the fact that the losing team was the Houston Astros--a team I've never liked from a city I can live without--was a bonus.

[Travis B.]

I've got an object-oriented programming layer implemented for hashforth now. It is not a very traditional OOP implementation - while it only has single inheritance, it resembles CLOS in that one defines methods in a global (or more properly, per-wordlist) fashion, and then one specifies implementations of those methods for different classes. It does have the ability to detect when a method is being called on a class that does not support it, where then it first checks to see if that class has an undefined method handler, where then it calls that instead, or otherwise it raises an exception. Overall it is pretty simple though; I am not sure what I should add right now.

[mèþru]

I'm registered for classes and will be starting college in January!

[Raphael]

Congratulations!

[dhok]

Baked a pumpkin pie for a get-together of linguists this evening--had to bring the pumpkin from home, as you can't get it canned on this side of the Atlantic (at least not in Vienna). I made a couple of modifications to the recipe:

- because you can't get packed dark brown sugar in Austria like you can in the States, you get regular brown sugar (which is more like demarara) and add a touch of molasses* (hard to find and expensive, but you only need a pinch)

- about an eighth of a teaspoon of black pepper works extremely well with the cinnamon/nutmeg/ginger/cloves without being noticeable as pepper.

* my working thesis is that you can only get molasses easily in countries that used to be involved in the slave trade--common in New England, for example, because the region made so much rum from Caribbean sugar. And I know it's commonly used in British baked goods under the name of treacle. But Portugal? Spain? France? The Netherlands?

[Ares Land]

* my working thesis is that you can only get molasses easily in countries that used to be involved in the slave trade--common in New England, for example, because the region made so much rum from Caribbean sugar. And I know it's commonly used in British baked goods under the name of treacle. But Portugal? Spain? France? The Netherlands?

I'm not sure. France was involved in the slave trade... And you can get if from beets as well, and we have no shortage of that... But yes, you'd need to check the organic stores if you wanted some -- we do produce molasses, but it's mostly used to feed cattle.

[alynnidalar]

And I know it's commonly used in British baked goods under the name of treacle.

Hold up hold up hold up.

Treacle is just molasses??

My younger self reading old British books has had her mind blown. Here I thought it was some exotic treat and it's just molasses??

(YABAFT [Yet Another British vs. American Food Thread] in 3... 2... 1...)

[Raholeun]

(YABAFT [Yet Another British vs. American Food Thread] in 3... 2... 1...)

Of all the culinary threads imaginable, the one comparing american and british cuisine is doubtlessly the least interesting.

[Salmoneus]

And I know it's commonly used in British baked goods under the name of treacle.

Hold up hold up hold up.

Treacle is just molasses??

My younger self reading old British books has had her mind blown. Here I thought it was some exotic treat and it's just molasses??

(YABAFT [Yet Another British vs. American Food Thread] in 3... 2... 1...)

Yes and no. Molasses is a type of treacle. Treacle is a spectrum, ranging from relatively light, clear, fluid all the way through to jet-black, bituminous glue (much like oil, once you've mined the treacle you boil off the lighter and increasingly heavy fractions in a fractional distiller, and molasses is what you're left with that won't boil off).

In Britain, you can get either light treacle or dark (or 'black') treacle. AIUI, American 'molasses' is more like what we call black treacle. The 'treacle' in deserts and children's books, on the other hand, is probably mostly light treacle, which for cooking (rather than serving) processes is generally marketed as "golden syrup", and is a bit more like maple syrup or honey than like treacle - it has a less distinctive taste and less bitterness. Treacle tart, for example, uses golden syrup, not molasses, and I'd expect that when Victorian children had treacle poured over a desert, it would be golden syrup, not molasses (although I know that once upon a time there used to be sweets made with black treacle). Sticky toffee pudding is also made with golden syrup. In fact, I don't think we use black treacle for much at all, at least these days. To me, "molasses" is an exotic substance used for making alcohol (though come to think of it I have heard it called 'treacle' in the context of ales).

[Travis B.]

I addition to my previously mentioned adding of (optional) preemption to my Forth, I now have added functionality by which SIGINT (i.e. ctrl-C) triggers the suspension of all tasks other than the main task and the sleep task, which is convenient when you have a task that's spewing text out onto the terminal (which makes it hard to enter text) and you want to make it shut up, and even moreso when you have a task (without preemption) which is hogging the CPU and you want it to stop. Furthermore, I added functionality to restore previously suspended tasks, which is useful. The only thing this functionality does not do is abort the main task if it is the main task itself which is sucking up cycles, even though I might add functionality to handle this case (by adding functionality to send exceptions to other tasks, so whatever task the SIGINT handler is in can send an abort exception to the mak task).

[Linguoboy]

Woke up feeling punk and almost didn't make it into work. When I did, I found on my chair a box containing a luxury tea assortment from my colleagues with their condolences on the passing of my father. I take them for granted, but they really make this a positive place to work.

[Travis B.]

I am beginning work on my next Forth implementation, zeptoforth (name chosen because that SI prefix wasn't taken for the name of a Forth), which will be a subroutine threaded-native code inlining (SRT/NCI) implementation of Forth for Cortex-M devices. Yes, I don't have to write it, as there is already a good SRT/NCI Forth for Cortex-M, namely Mecrisp-Stellaris, but I just want to write my own Forth for such devices anyway.

[hwhatting]

@linguoboy: my condolences!

[Travis B.]

My condolences as well.

[benadam]

I finally am moving to Bristol, something I've been wanting to do for months. Loads of places fell through, situations popped up that kept me in London longer than I expected, yada yada, but now, finally, I've got a place, a really nice place in fact, and am moving there in just a few hours!

I've been living with my parents in London for almost a whole year, just cos of money and London's stupid prices, so damn is it good to be leaving.

[Ares Land]

@linguoboy: my condolences too.

[Raphael]

And my condolences.

[Linguoboy]

You know, I almost posted something to the effect of "Let's not derail the Happy Things Thread with condolences!" I do appreciate them nonetheless.

My other happy thing yesterday is that I went to the clinic yesterday and they were able to give me a rapid response HIV test. I've been a bit anxious since contracting an STI a month ago and this puts my mind at ease again. Hopefully I'll take the lesson to heart and look into getting myself on PrEP.

[doctor shark]

Double happy:
1.) My thesis corrections have been handed in and my thesis is now pretty much approved. I should be getting the degree certificate quite soon, then (I hope!), and now we're working on having it properly printed by a thesis publisher. (Should have those in January-ish, I think.)
2.) My mother adopted two adorable little kittens. They're super-precious, and I'll get to see them in about 10 days.

[hwhatting]

Herzlichen Glückwunsch!