Eliot, sort of...

"We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

I am under a great temptation to respond to this with Bah! Humbug!—but this is the wrong time of year for that kind of thinking.

The long and the short of it is that, as a result of an ill-remembered dream I had last night, I used a wireless signal strength Android app this morning to get the straight skinny on just how much better the signal in the living room was with our router over in the laundry room, as opposed to being where it was in the first place, in the closet next to my office.

It turns out—between moving the wireless duties from the TwoWire router to my trusty Linksys with the outsized wifi antennas and changing the channel over which my router links to the world to one that is not being used by seemingly every other router in the neighborhood (something I determined using the same Android app a while back)—there would appear to be absolutely no upside to keeping the router in the laundry room.

So, the upshot of the past few days has been the following:

(1) My experiment with ownCloud came to an unsuccessful conclusion.
(2) My experiment with BitTorrent Sync came to an unsuccessful conclusion.
(3) All of the "fun" I had relocating the router to the laundry room was a waste of time.

That said, the eternal optimist in me takes a page from Edison and writes, in large, burning red letters: Well, I now know three things that I didn't know before.

Perhaps more to the point, at least now my Raspberry Pi is free to just address my limited inside-the-house web server needs... once I de-configure a few things. :)

* * *This week's LJ Idol prompt—"jayus," a supposedly untranslatable Indonesian word that means "a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but to laugh"—is not so much a challenge as a specimen.

That it is not so much a challenge is pretty much given, as evidenced by just how easy it is to write something that will satisfy the rather elastic requirements of addressing an LJ Idol prompt, as in the following opening lines:

"Jayus," said the stranger sitting on the rickety stool.

"I'm sorry," said the bartender, absent-mindedly swiping his rag over the bar before him. "What did you say?"

The stranger shrugged. "Never mind," he said, and pulled out a gun. He started to sob.

...

You can take it from there, pard. It sounds like a doozy!

However, as a specimen, the question is: A specimen of just what might "jayus" be?

If a "jayus" is "a joke so poorly told and so unfunny that one cannot help but to laugh," then... buy gum, it's not really "untranslatable," is it? It's more a concept that cannot be succinctly expressed, like quantum theory or the Big Bang. To be untranslatable, the word's gotta wear a few more layers of clothing (along the lines of announcing to someone—in Russian—that you're prepared "to show them Kuzma's mother!"... Now, that's untranslatable... just ask the interpreter who was there! And yes, it's not quite in the same class, being an idiomatic expression, but I digress...).

Then again, a little Web research hints that, maybe, "jayus" is not amenable to translation, after all. For example the Urban Dictionary suggests the word is "Indonesian slang for someone who tells a joke so unfunny you can't help laughing," whereas another source (with an inactive link) describes "jayus" as "the word for that joke you attempted to tell but messed up the punchline." Three sources, three definitions, roughly the same ballpark. It is a pretty thin survey,

I could find no credible instances of the word's use in an English sentence (which is not surprising, as it's an Indonesian word), but I get the distinct impression this word's entire usefulness in any language is as a curiosity. It'd be like making a big deal over a word in some language whose "untranslatable" meaning is something like "left-handed, herniated ne'er-do-well skilled at chucking rocks at rabbits." There's no English equivalent, but nobody uses the word in the foreign language, either.

(That this exercise is not leading to anything productive is not the point. Doing it is the point, grasshopper.)

Enough for now. An idea is coming together.

Oohrah!