A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, #3)
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Review:A definite change of pace compared to the letdown of #2. Killer twist at the end. |
The Golden Ring
When I was in Paris, it happened to me ten times or more. Walking on a public place, a man or a woman would pop out of nowhere, golden ring in hand, and say "hey, mister, is this yours?"
It's a well known scam. You get to keep the ring, and the ring bearer will ask you for some compensation. It will turn out the ring is worthless, so you will be out a couple of euros or so.
It's interesting in some ways, though.
It relies on the victim being dishonest, since the ring is not theirs.
The amount of money gained by the scammer is at the victim's discretion.
If you don't give the scammer anything, he will, at most, yell at you for being a cheap bastard, and it's done in very public places, so the danger of violence is negligible.
Since the victim is also doing something morally reprehensive, and lying, the risk of the scammer being charged with anything is negligible.
It's almost like some sort of weird sale:
"Here's something of no value that looks valuable! Is it yours? (I know it isn't)" "I will bet on it being valuable and pretend it's mine!" "So, how much is appeasing your remorse about scamming me out of a probably worthless ring worth?" "I'd say 3 euros, my good man!" "Deal!"
How can it be worth their while to do this? I would guess their success rate at perhaps 5% and they probably don't make more than 5 euros on a successful transaction
All in all, it seems fairly harmless, just annoying, and french people have actually chased me down the street to return me something I forgot in a bar. Then again, I also was peed on a foot by a badly burn-disfigured guy in a wheelchair, on Champs Elysees, so YMMV.
2012
Así que esto es 2013. Si me decías que era 2012 te creía. ¿Cómo me fue con mis resoluciones para el año?
Dije que trataría de escribir todos los días. Eso serían 366 posts, y fallé miserablemente. Posteé 215 igual, que es un montón.
Quería mejorar en mi trabajo. Creo que lo hice buena parte del año, aunque el último mes e cansancio me jugó en contra. Me doy un aprobado.
La salud mejoró. Perdí peso (aunque recuperé una parte) y la presión viene bien. Los niveles de energia mejoraron mucho.
Mi matrimonio va mejor. Creo que el año más feliz desde 2008.
No me arreglé los dientes por una cosa de prepagas. Debería estar bien para marzo.
Bonus:
Llevé a mi mamá a París.
Hice algunas movidas para lograr una seguridad financiera a largo plazo.
Di la charla de cierre en PyconAr
Resucité bastante mis proyectos de software libre.
Así que ... ¡No muy mal!
Para el 2013:
Volvemos a lo de arreglarme la boca.
Voy a tratar de bajar mucho más de peso.
Apuntemos a 200 posts.
Voy a tratar de escribir un libro entero.
Me voy a operar los ojos para dejar de usar anteojos.
Veremos como sale.
Client-rendered, one-URL, dynamic, static site.
My vacations end tomorrow. So, the time to spend hacking fun, personal, free stuff is going to be limited because of the time spent coding fun, free stuff for money. So, I decided to finish with a bit of whimsy.
I implemented a completely client-rendered, one-URL, dynamic blog. Which is actually totally static.
In fact, that blog is this blog, just with a twist. If you go to this URL you will see what's basically this very site, with comments and everything as usual. But if you click on "Previous Post" ... well, it stays in the same page, even though it displays a different post :-)
The magic is the new, experimental, dynamic task_mustache plugin for my static site generator, Nikola. which does the following:
Renders post data as JSON files instead of HTML
Creates a HTML file that is really a mustache.js template
Creates a HTML file with some bits of Javascript that loads the template and the newest post's data.
If you access that mustache.html with a fragment, it uses that to fetch JSON data and rewrite itself.
And that's it. It actually loads fast, and regenerates very fast, since it does much less than the real site. There are a bunch of things that will dump you out of the "dynamic" site, like tag links, and whatever, but it works surprisingly well (and if you want to theme it, it's just one template).
This is the first of a new kind of thing for Nikola, the "extra plugins". Basically, stuff
that is too weird, specific or useless for the general distro, will go there, and to use those
plugins, you have to create a plugins/ folder in your site and add it there manually.
Enjoy!
Nikola 5.1 released.
I just uploaded version 5.1 of Nikola , my static blog/site generator. Details, changelog, etc, at Nikola's site