Tatiana's letter to Onegin

The "full" post displays Nabokov's translation and the original of a passage from Evgeny Onegin that is part of the education of virtually every Russian schoolchild: Tatiana's letter.

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On the <lj-cut>...

I am not sure how useful the <lj-cut> feature is here on LJ. On the one hand, it seems to have its uses (see my previous post for a circumstance in which I think it works); on the other, the benefit you get from not having a long post show up when you click on your friends page is overcome by having to click once more to actually see the whole post.

Thus, what used to be visible after one click could conceivably now require several, with concomitant loading and reloading of pages.

FWIW, I do not plan to use the <lj-cut> feature as a matter of course, despite the fact my posts tend to be on the longer side.

Cheers...

Goin' almost Mach 1...

About 35 seconds after launch, the Shuttle "stack" passes through a region of maximum dynamic pressure ("max-Q" in engineer-speak) as the vehicle goes transonic. As this region is encountered, the engines on the Shuttle are throttled down to minimize stresses on the airframe and the stack. The buffeting lasts about 12 seconds, and a short time after that, the Shuttle commander gets a "go for throttle-up," at which point the engines are ramped up to 104% of their rated power and the whole lashup goes screaming upward into orbit.

The picture on the left (apparently taken from a "chase" plane) shows the transonic shocks beginning to form on the stack, at around Mach 0.9. I think this is just an awesome shot.

Go the the dictionary, look up the word "fast." I think this photo would look good right there on the page, no?

Cheers...

Lots of LJers in Russia...

On a lark, I decided to put some additional strain on the database and went looking for Russian LJers. When I joined back in the middle of last year, there were two users signed up from the Russian Federation, and I don't think either of them had posted in months.

Today, there are quite a few (almost 280).

Unfortunately, Cyrillic only shows up on my screen (Windows 98) if I look at someone's journal page. If I look at their posts via my friends page, or if I look at a comments page, the text is rendered as a series of mostly vowels with diacritical marks, which tells me that the original posts were not made in Unicode or UTF-8. (OTOH, when I look at the representation of the Russian I posted a bit earlier here via the Web client, I see, e.g., "&#1071;" for the letter "Я").

Maybe when all of the excitement has died down with the latest round of mods, I'll take it up with support.

Cheers...

P.S. I went and edited the style of my friends page to include a META header that declares the page's contents to use the Windows-1251 charset. It's a workaround that will work - at least on my friends page - unless I need to see diacritically marked vowels (in which case they'll show up as Cyrillic letters).

Привет новым товарищам по ЖЖ kmaka, sss, auto194419, и dolboeb.

(added at 15:43)