When one is met with the sentence “I love you”, the proper response (if applicable) is “I love you too”. I, of course, don’t reply this. I reply either “And I love you” or “I love you” with an emphasis on “you”.
So, why do I do that? Because I find the “too” confusing. A proper use of “I love you too” would instead be “I love the smell of grass in the morning… I love you too” (caricatured, of course). Adding “too” means you’re chaining together, so this would be proper use.
I have started a new site, called simply Jonathan. You should check it out.
The technical parts of this does not apply anymore. On 5 March 2008 I merged this site with some of my other entities.
This is simply Jonathan, a new blog. By no means a new type of blog, so don’t get your hopes up.
However, there’s something new. I have, for quite a while now, been writing a blog called holst.notes. Yet, I found that I needed to create another type of blog. holst.notes is, as the name sort of implies, supposed to be a collection of small notes, but I also wanted a place to write longer, thought-through essays, which didn’t seem to fit the format of holst.notes.
So I created simply Jonathan, supposed to be that center of essays by me.
simply Jonathan is not here to take over holst.notes, it’s rather here to compliment it. I have not defined rules for what goes where, but I think that quick ideas, etc. I get, go into holst.notes, while ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time, go here.
As is quite well-known, thoughts evolve. Thus, a note I think about for a second might linger in my brain for a while, eventually turning into full-fleshed essay material.
Being neither British nor American, my English is neither. Thus, I might end up mixing colour and color, and other differences the two variants have. I beg you to bear with me.
One of the primary things I find separates simply Jonathan from a regular blog is my explicit desire to only show one entry per page. This serves the idea of essays and allows me to show a full entry even at the front page.
Comments. It has been said on many occasions that for a blog to be a blog, it has to have comments, and that the comments are in fact the most important fact, as discussion is good. I don’t believe this to be true; discussion is good, but blog comments aren’t. I’ll elaborate on this later on.
Mike Lee, a Mac programmer, recently started a blog, and the first entry stated, that the date was not important, and that he would go back and change the content, if his opinion on the matter changed.
I considered this approach, but came to the conclusion that it was bullshit. There is a saying that goes “every text is a product of the time in which is was written”. I believe this to be true, so I decided the date should be displayed, and that in fact both the published and last edited date should be shown. Whether you go by this “I’ll go back and edit it” route, don’t make the mistake of thinking that the initial time of writing (nor the time of editing) doesn’t matter.
I also decided to adopt John Gruber’s footnotes. I’m not sure how much I’ll use it, but should it be necessary, I found it most appropriate to adopt the best way I’ve seen this done online.
Table of contents. This was mostly implemented for kicks, but I considered, that if I really am going to write lengthy essays, a TOC might come in handy.
The topic of a writing is always important. However, given that I am one with quite a lot of interests, there might very well be quite a lot topics appearing here. I’ll probably talk most about the following, though:
This section can be skipped, if programming and the likes does not interest you.
This site is powered by my own Django-based CMS. I considered some of the available systems out there, but found that none of them were really geared towards the sort of writing I intend here. Plus, doing it yourself can be quite fun. The site is written using standards compliant HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. The entries are written using John Gruber and Aaron Swartz’ Markdown.
The hosting is powered by GMTA ApS.
This is simply Jonathan. Enjoy.
Do me a favour, and break my nose
Do me a favour, and tell me to go away
Do me a favour, and stop asking questions.
In English, it’s quite popular to talk about another person’s mother. And there are especially two insults regarding mothers, that I want to talk about.
The first one is “son of a bitch”. This is used to insult not the mother, but the son, which doesn’t really make sense, given that the son is merely being mentioned, but not with offending terms. In my opinion, it’s like insulting one’s sister — okay, insult, but why not say something about me?
The other one is “motherfucker”. There is no doubt who this is directed at, but I’m questioning the insulting effect in this. Given that there seems to be a sort of achievement in doing another one’s mother, I don’t see how “motherfucker” can be insulting. Plus, all fathers in the world are per def motherfuckers?
Per cent means “per hundred”. As such, 100 % is “it all”. When talking about growth, more than a 100 % makes sense, meaning that the total is bigger than before, thus the comparison might include a value higher than 100. So far, so good.
However, and this has been going on for quite a while, there is a tendency to say a value, higher than 100, although not talking about growth. Often, it’s to describe certainty or performance. I believe it was started in the sports world, where a player might say, “We need to go out, and give 110 %!”. Giving more than you have is, by definition, not possible. Sure, there are concepts such as “over perform”, but apparently it is within this player’s reach to perform this. Thus, not more than a 100 %. You can’t be 110 % sure, because 100 % is sure, you can’t be more than that.
I have noticed that many software developers, in tweaking or porting their software, choose a name that’s similar to the original, albeit with a slight twist, often related to the change. The most relevant I can think of, is Beautiful Soup that got Rubyful Soup as its ported name.
I love ties, and wear them whenever I can get the chance to it — I really find them quite elegant. The sad thing is, however, that most ties are absolutely hideous to look at; patterns, drawings, and what have you.
I’ll just take a one colored tie, please.
“Junior” is such a degrading appendix to a name. I don’t know anyone by the name, so this isn’t a personal grief, but I find that it removes the person’s justification, making him a mere “version 2”.
It’s strange, that it’s convention to describe a smart person as “an Einstein”, when you take into consideration, that Einstein was terrible at everything but math and physics.
This is Simply Jonathan, a blog written by Jonathan Holst. It's mostly about technical topics (and mainly the Web at that), but an occasional post on clothing, sports, and general personal life topics can be found.
Jonathan Holst is a programmer, language enthusiast, sports fan, and appreciator of good design, living in Copenhagen, Denmark, Europe. He is also someone pretentious enough to call himself the 'author' of a blog. And talk about himself in the third person.