Download the Download Monitor PL - Spolszczenie do wtyczki Download Monitor

1. Install Download Monitor plugin
2. download the pl_PL locale files
3. unzip both files (.po and .mo) to /wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/languages
4. reload your page and that’s it, you’re ready to go

If you liked my work you can get me a coffee

Powiązane notki:

1. WP-PostViews in Polish
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
3. Limited vocabulary

WP-PostViews pl_PL - Polska wersja językowa wtyczki WP-PostViews

Installation:
1. download the package
2. unzip
3. upload the files to <your wordpress dir>/wp-content/plugins/wp-postviews
4. that’s it, you’re ready to go

If you liked my work you can get me a coffee

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
3. The Morning After – localization, anyone?

Forty years ago it was the angels to bring Christmas presents to my dad. That was a tradition to believe in – and he did believe, very much. On the other hand it was Santa Claus to bring pre-sents to my mum. Santa Claus was also giving presents to me and he will be bringing them to my children as well.

Commercial Saint
Rumour has it that the American (and nowadays pretty much univer-sal) Santa Claus was invented for an advertisement of Coca Cola in the 1930’s. Rubbish! Actually there are two Santa Clauses. One of them is Nicholas, the Greek Or-thodox bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. He was supposed to give gold to the poor children in 4th century AD. But the other Santa Claus has long life story as well. In England, Father Christmas was somewhat of a symbol of good Christmas spirit at least since 17th century. Although the old man did not bring presents to anyone, he had a more difficult task to achieve. He defended the Christ-mas against the Puritans, who wanted to ban Christmas alto-gether. Oh, by the way, Father Christmas wore furred gown and a cap. Sounds familiar?

Santa

Even older is Dutch Sinterklaas, who used to bring presents to chil-dren every year since at least 16th century. His Dutch name is the basis for the North American fig-ure of Santa Claus. While directly related to Saint Nicholas the bishop, he also has some connec-tions to the Germanic god Odin. This god of war, poetry, good winds and wisdom used to fly above the Norse and German set-tlements on winter nights. If the kids had left some candies next to the chimney for his flying horse Sleipnir, they could have expected him to leave some presents in ex-change. Yup, the Santa used to bring gifts and happiness to the kids long before he appeared in mid-19th century advertisements for the first time (long before Coca Cola was even invented). And the presents were never free of charge, the children had to pay for them with forage or good behaviour.

Nowadays many of organizations want to remove Santa Claus from supermarkets, schools or kinder-gartens. This historical Nicholas from Myra is, according to them, the real one, a symbol of love and justice. At the same time the only purpose of the American one, they say, is to increase the profits of shopping malls. It is said that over a million Germans are al-ready supporting the Weihnachts-mannfreie Zone action (Santa Claus-free Zone) and believe the Santa is a symbol of commercialism. Simi-lar campaigns are being organised in Switzerland, Denmark, France, Italy and countries of Latin Amer-ica. They do not want to wait for the Santa to visit them – fine with me. But banning him from visiting kids is a completely different mat-ter. Besides, if Agios Nikolaos replaces Santa, would parents spend less money on presents?

Not so humble Santa
The Santa I believe in is somehow similar to me. He is overweight, eats unhealthy food. On Christmas Eve he delivers the presents, for the rest of the year he works in the media & marketing industry. No problem with that, a plethora of great actors work in commercials as well. He is a chain pipe smoker. He does not excuse bad kids by politically-correct rubbish, he just brings them a lump of coal or a cane. Sure, the presents from him are not cheap, but nothing is free these days. Instead of jogging or nordic walk-ing, or whatever is trendy at the mo-ment he puts his fat ass to the sleds drawn by Rudolf the red-nose rein-deer (Humane Society anyone?). He does not avoid shopping malls, but do not tell me you do not go there as well. In Polish language there is no way to differentiate between saint Nicholas the bishop, and the guy in red hat. Polish Wikipedia calls the latter ―Saint Nicholas (pop culture). So what, this is also my culture.

My grandfather used to say that every-thing is for people, but not everything is for everyone. For some the best Saint Nicholas is actually Santa Claus, but for others the best one is bishop of Myra, patron saint of pawn shops. The earlier wears a silly red gown and a pom-pon cap, the other wears a pur-ple mitre and a crosier. Both of them are real (―yes, Virginia), there are kids out there waiting for both of them. I am waiting for the one from Coca Cola commercials. Any problems with that?

-transl. by Anna Kiedrzyńska and yours truly

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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Linking my new TV (Samsung LE40A656) and my computer (homebrew with Nvidia 9600 GT) seemed easy. But as we all know appearances might be deceptive. What follows is an instruction on how to spend three months trying to make the two work together. I promise, there’s space for some tits in this post as well.

HDMI male connector (fot. D-Kuru/CC-by-SA-3.0)

So, according to the TVs instruction (ca. 1000 pages) one should simply connect the computer with a DVI-HDMI cable. Easy, huh? So I spent several days (and a considerable sum of money) trying to find a decent cable long enough to connect the two. Finally I found one, got back home, connected the set and… there was no sound. The video card transmitted the graphics just fine, but there was no sound whatsoever.

Walking a cable

Silly me, I thought, HDMI cable transmits sound just fine, but my card has DVI slots and these don’t (well, actually they do, but it’s a completely different story). So I started to harass my IT guys asking what to do. It turned out that the best idea would be to buy an additional cable, to transmit sound. The easiest solution to my problems (and the most often suggested) was a simple jack-2xcinch cable. Old as the hills, the jack plugs have been in use for “at least 100 years”. They patented it in 19th century as a connector for telephone operators. Same for cinch connector, it was patented in 1940s for use with turntables.

Simple, huh? Errr… WRONG! Both formats are now being phased out and buying a 10 metres long jack-cinch cable is almost impossible.It seems there’s not even a single electric strore in Warsaw able to make such a cable. So, I was left with only the expensive options (supermarkets, electronic stores, the internet). But what the heck, if you can afford a cow, you can also afford a chain for it, as my grandma used to say. So I bought such a cable. It didn’t work.

So I started calling Samsung’s helpdesk. After umpteenth call (“Sir, it has to work”, “did you plug your TV set in?”, “Are you sure your computer is turned on?”), one of the guys on the other side of the line told me that “Oh you know, there’s a mistake in the instruction, what you need is a simple jack-jack cable, that’s all”. Now that was infuriating. But I thanked the guy and bought a 10 metre long jack-to-jack cable.I plugged it in and – you guessed it. No sound.

Anyway, I lost heart now and I’m too tired to translate the entire post to English, so I’ll simply jump to the tits part. At first I wanted my TV to do wonders. Then I simply wanted it to work. It’s pretty much like in that old joke. It’s long, but has lots of zen wisdom inside.

When I was 14, I hoped that one day I would have a girlfriend. When I was 16 I got a girlfriend, but there was no passion. So I decided I needed a passionate girl with a zest for life. In college I dated a passionate girl, but she was too emotional. Everything was an emergency; she was a drama queen, cried all the time and threatened suicide. So I decided I needed a girl with stability.

When I was 25 I found a very stable girl but she was boring. She was totally predictable and never got excited about anything. Life became so dull that I decided that I needed a girl with some excitement.

When I was 28 I found an exciting girl, but I couldn’t keep up with her. She rushed from one thing to another, never settling on anything. She did mad impetuous things and made me miserable as often as happy. She was great fun initially and very energetic, but directionless. So I decided to find a girl with some real ambition.

When I turned 31, I found a smart ambitious girl with her feet planted firmly on the ground and married her. She was so ambitious that she divorced me and took everything I owned. I am now 40 and am looking for a girl with huge tits.

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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It's not Rodin, it's Rheinhold

Introduction of the concept of quarks or the relativity theory did not falsify the laws of gravity or chemical formulas. Should a medic spend a year in coma, his knowledge of the most recent trends will surely be crippled. However, he could still prescribe aspirin – and it will work.

On the contrary, humanities tend to cut themselves from their roots almost every day. Take a day off – and your knowledge is outdated. Instead of current political situation in Morocco you’ll be speaking of a situation years or ages ago – no difference here. Strange, isn’t it.

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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You know the type, the narrator explaining the future fate of the main protagonists, off-screen comments and so on. And now the funny part: one of the protagonists became a detective. She is shown doing some research in NYC, opposite Manhattan. Besides her is a huge graffiti with four simple letters: HWDP.

brygada ratunkowa, seria 6, odcinek 22

The abbreviation is commonly found on the walls of Polish houses and could roughly be translated as “Cock up the ass of the police”. Or, alternatively, “Glory to you, oh brave policemen”. Guess which explanation is more accurate. Nice text for the last scene of a series on policemen, don’t you think?

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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Lavinator na 2008-09-01 07:24 CET: All I need is the last episode where Caesar gets killed… can anyone seed it please?

Delt_A828 na 2008-09-01 22:05 CET: Lavinator: Dont spoil it for everyone else!

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
3. The Morning After – localization, anyone?

Recently I found a 1863 litograph by Felicien Rops. Its’ title (L’ordre règne à Varsovie) could be roughly translated as “All quiet in Warsaw”. Eighty years after Ross created it the same silence fell upon Warsaw.

Same old story, it happens every several dozen years. Stakes, baricades, graves, mass executions, pits filled with dead bodies. And all over it streets and houses, rebuilt every now and then from the ashes. Living in a cemetery is a terrible thing.

L'ordre règne à Varsovie

(***)

It has been happening for more than 20 years. On August the 1st the academies, conferences and public speeches start. The vets, a group of increasingly old gentlemen, with every year find it more and more difficult to make their voices heard through the mumbo-jumbo of politicians who praise the “national upheaval”. Every anniversary of the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising looks the same way.

Soon after the show starts, the TV starts airing short documentaries, the chronicle of the Warsaw Uprising. Day after day, each of them informing that “on this day the Royal Castle was destroyed” or “hospital at Bracka street bombed” or “120 people murdered in the Old Town”.

Every August I happen to watch an episode or two. As horrible as it is, the documentary ends and I get back to normal life. I go on vacations, I get back, I get to work, do the shopping, go to pubs, I live. And then the end of September comes and – every year the same thing – I turn on the TV and find yet another episode of the chronicle of the Uprising. “God, the Uprising still goes on” I realize. Always that way, present tense, as if it was going on over and over again.

(***)

Felicien Rops was a painter, Baudelaire’s friend, a pornographer, and anticlerical iconoclast. At the same time he was also one of the precursors to art nouveau and a popular book illustrator. His “All quiet in Warsaw” is much less known than, say, “Temptation of Saint Anthony” or “Don Juan’s Beauty“, not to mention the “Ecstasy of Saint Theresa“. No wonder, Rops is best known for being crazy about the women. In modern times his passion for under-aged models would most probably make him end up in jail. For mocking the Catholic Saints he’d spend some more years behind the bars.

(***)

Bombs. Have you ever heard of any other capital city in Europe, where nobody cares about a live aerial bomb found somewhere? Some time ago I was rushing for a meeting somewhere in southern downtown area of Warsaw. I was almost there, when a policeman stopped me. “Where to”, he asked. “To a cafe, sir” I replied politely. “Not now” he said. “Now” I replied, “I have a meeting in a matter of minutes”. “Well, young man, you’ll have to wait, they found a bomb” the officer said calmly.

So I spent some minutes waiting for the military to pick the bomb and transport it to some training ground outside of town. The following day I bought all daily newspapers published in Warsaw. Half-a-ton of TNT was mentioned in only two of them, far from the front page, somewhere between invitations to a pensioneers’ party and articles on a festival of Bulgarian folk songs. Only two newspapers found the bomb interesting, the rest did not mention it at all.

Only once did the press find such findings interesting: when they found a huge mortar round in the ceiling of Prime Ministers’ Chancellery. Just try to imagine this most of the times a huge bomb found in the centre of the largest city in Poland is not interesting to anyone. No news in that.

Powstanie warszawskie

(***)

At Krakow’s borough of Kazimierz there’s a place, where a street runs over what used to be a part of a Jewish cemetery. There’s a singn there warning the Cohanim to avoid that side of the street, as the religion forbids them from entering cemeteries. In Warsaw such tablets should be placed on every enterance to the city.

(***)

Take the newly-built National Stadium, for instance. It’s being built on top of the old 10th Anniversary Stadiu, which in turn was built on top of a huge pile of rubble. Quite precisely so: after 1945 the remnants of what used to be Warsaw were shipped to the other side of the Vistula river and piled up just across the bridge. With time benches were added to this volcano-shaped mound and city’s ashes became a stadium.

When the construction of the new stadium started, the Polish press was puzzled whether the works will proceed as planned, as there’s lots of bodies buried there together with the bricks. Hold on a second, think of it for a while. Imagine respected western journals, say, the Times or Le Monde, discussing such issues in a neutral tone.

A couple of years ago some moron wanted to build a supermarket in a place that used to be a Nazi execution site at Auschwitz. The public opinion all around the world was outraged. Luckily for us here nobody cares for Warsaw. Where would we live if every single war cemetery was declared a national memorial site?

Thanks to the powers that occupied Poland in late 18th century, all smaller cemeteries in Warsaw were moved out from within the city to Powązki. However, during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 the frontline passed right through the Powązki cemetery complex (military cemetery, one Catholic, one Jewish, two Protestant). Because of that the victims of the German war machine had to be buried in the streets of Warsaw, in the squares and courtyards – or under the piles of rubble. So what now, should we erect a fence surrounding the entire city and put a sign on it “Here used to be Warsaw”?

(***)

I had a friend once, let’s call her H. H’s grandmother spent her childhood here, in Warsaw’s downtown. What she remembers the best from the Uprising of 1944 was her home’s courtyard. In a house next door there used to be a military hospital, two houses away used to be a Polish barricade defending the Polish-held part of the city. After every skirmish dozens of dead Germans were brought to her courtyard. Gentlemen in Feldgrau were lined up nicely on the ground, row after row. Polish soldiers were stacked up in the courtyard right across the street, apparently nobody believed that God will know his own. What did the 8-years old girls do? They invented a new sports discipline: whichever could jump across more dead Germans won. Polish people love all kinds of sports, you know.

(***)

I’m 27. Why the hell do I know all of this? What did I do to anyone that I remember of all the street graves, know the addresses of now non-existent barricades, the destroyed houses and murdered streets?

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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In short – it was my first LC concert. The last time he was in Warsaw I was four and the ticket price was more or less my dad’s monthly salary. Anyway, at that time I was already listening to Cohen’s songs thanks to my parents. What’s more, I knew his songs perfectly well even in the times when the only English words I understood were “dog” and “wardrobe” (don’t ask).

Leonard Cohen w 1988

I was waiting for him to come to Poland for most of my life. I know all of his poems, have read all of the books he published, his music accompanied many of the most important moments in my life. And now he was going to perform a concert right here, in downtown Warsaw. Anyway, I was pretty anxious. We all know the feeling I guess. I was afraid he’s going to be old, lose his voice, do a concert 9 to 5 way, just for money…

Nyah, all of my doubts just disappeared the moment Cohen entered the stage.

Sure, the concert was completely different from the ones I heard on bootleg tapes. Absolutely no new songs, only his good-olds, from the very first song on his very first album to “In my secret life” from Dear Heather. In contrast with his previous concert in Warsaw back in 1985, this time Cohen did not tell many stories. Most of the time he was simply thanking the audience or presenting the musicians – several times. BTW, he recalled the previous concert in Warsaw saying that he was 60 years old back then, which means he was but a kid . Sure, it was sad he had nothing new to tell, but… did it matter much to us? Nyah.

As to the songs… the concert lasted almost 3 hours. I got an impression that the encores were actually longer than the second part, but I couldn’t confirm that (I had better things to do than care for my watch). I don’t remember the first part at all, I was too astonished. I mean it. Then my mind woke up – and I realised that this very concert was one of the most important moments in my life. Sorry for the pathos, but that’s precisely how I felt. With my beloved one at my side (and her mother, who paid for the tickets), with all the songs in my head, with LC on the stage…

“Famous blue raincoat”. The performance was so good I didn’t blink once. I guess it’s too personal a story to tell (there’s always some personal story, right?). After yet another standing ovation the band started “If it be your will”. It was a spoken poem, followed by the actual song sung by the Webb Sisters. Boy, they are great. I didn’t come to see them, but after the concert I started wondering if there’s any record of them available in Poland.

Anyway, it was already the encore time and after each and every song Cohen was leaving the stage, but the audience brought him back in with the applause. He tried to fend us off singing the “Closing time” and looking at us meaningly from below his hat (or was it only my impression?), but it didn’t work. When we brought him back on stage, he took his guitar and started a calm, “cameral” version of “I tried to leave you”. We were laughing our heads off, really, it felt like a conversation with LC.

When he returned back to stage for the final time, the band remained silent and they performed “Whither thou goest”, almost a capella… It felt much more sad than the version with Anjani from the previous concert in Warsaw. Another almost metaphysical experience, I tell you. The concert ended late (roughly 11 pm), and LC told us to “drive carefully home and don’t catch a cold” (another classic).  And that was it. A concert I waited for half of my life was complete.

I tried to express my feelings at the www.leonardcohenforum.com, but I failed. No way I could express my speechlesness. Sure, Leonard Cohen was great, the band was great, the Webb Sisters were marvellous, but the true meaning of the concert is somewhere behind those words, behind what could be described in a simple newspaper report. It is going to stay somewhere inside, I know it.

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
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1. Firefox, best browser under the sun. Over the sun as well, afaict. Firefox plugins are a different matter.
2. GIMP. The GIMP. Raster graphics editor. As good as PS, better than PSP, free of charge… With time I even accustomed myself to the strange interface.
   

   Firefox, the best browser out there

3. Notepad++ Text editor. Text-like files editor. Pretty much a version of MS Notepad, but much better.
4. 7-zip. Compression utility. When I pack my bags, I’m pretty quick. I expect nothing less of a packing software.
5. Inkscape. Vector gfx editor. It works. Need anything more than that?
6. Picasa. Picture management, basic improvement, upload, gallery creation…
7. Mobipocket. E-book creator and reader, both for PCs and cell phones.
8. GCstar. Personal collections manager. Works well with books, but also with games, films, cds, post stamps, anything). See?
9. Foobar2000. It plays music. Any.
10. Audacity. Sound editing software. Makes my dictation machine files audible.
11. MusicBrainz Picard. Great for tagging music files. Sadly, it’s incompatible with Windows Media Player.
12. FileZilla. Best ftp client out there.
13. Peer Guardian. Great add-on to uTorrent, soulseek and such.

Powiązane notki:

1. Download Monitor – Polish localisation
2. Third Watch: homeys across the Pond
3. The Morning After – localization, anyone?