I like squirrels. Apparently, there’s a SquirrelOS. It’s a small hobby OS learning project from five years ago, developed by Immanuel Daviel A. Garcia.
A simple DOS like OS made in Assembly and C with a ported version of Stephen Brennan’s Shell.
↫ SquirrelOS GitHub page
Why do I like squirrels? I don’t know man, they’re just cute.
@Thom,
See, we have so many things in common. I love squirrels and I host plenty of them on my land. Every morning they migrate from their nesting tree to the neighbors garden, jumping from tree to tree. And in the evening, the same route back. They are eating all my coconuts and bananas. They also eat the sweet tamarind. But I don’t care, because they are cute. Btw, squirrels here are white when in the trees and brown when living on the ground.
Hell, yeah. They are cute and I have a very soft spot for them in my heart. Cheers man and thank you for this smile!
By the way, there was SquirrelSQL too: http://www.squirrelsql.org and I have been using this for quite some time before writing my own SQL Client more fitting my needs.
Andreas Reichel,
Squirrels bring us closer to nature, but sometimes they’re pests. It’s no surprise that they will eat any and all produce from a garden, but that comes with the terriroty. However it’s when they start destroying property that they force humans to act. A couple years ago they managed to shred their way into the car. This year we heard them in the attic after they chewed their way in. We had to catch them and relocate them. They’re not cute when they get aggressive like this, but fortunately this behavior just seems to be a few bad apples and not the population at large.
I won’t make a joke on this. I won’t make a joke on this. I won’t make a joke on this.
Don’t you mean “I won’t make a joke in this”?
@Alfman,
unfortunately, unless you have learned the language as a child from native speakers, you will never know for sure. My daughter is native-fluent in Thai, German and English and she refuses to speak English with me outright, saying it was just cringe.
Andreas Reichel,
It is tough. My first language was french, but because I didn’t attend a french grade school my grammar is quite poor despite having learned it first. I’m not usually one to judge others, however I would have said “joke about this”.
Language isn’t necessarily consistent even among “natives”. Some of the regional dialects in the US are pretty atrocious. Obviously there are differences across the ocean as well. If not for the internet and hollywood, I suspect the divergence would be far greater.
I love that we’re all reminiscing about squirrels (although it does make me feel a bit sad for SquirrelOS’ author that nobody’s talking about it )
I have a fondness for squirrels too. I once adopted a baby squirrel whose mother had been killed by a cat. He was such a horrible little beast — woke me up at 5 in the morning chewing on my feet, and attacked strangers and stored seeds all over the house — but I loved him .
This past month I’ve been watching invasive gray squirrels steal all the walnuts from our tree. They look so happy carting off these gigantic nuts; I hate to scare them away. My father-in-law, on the other hand is very scared that they’ll chew through a wire or brake line on one of our cars, which is fair.
Hopefully it can run Chipmunk Basic : https://www.nicholson.com/rhn/basic/
I live in a squirrel battleground. Our native red squirrels are now at serious risk from squirrel pox spread by the thuggish southern invaders: grey squirrels.
https://scottishsquirrels.org.uk
I was living in an isolated house a way up a track in Galloway until a copule of weeks ago, and a couple of reds used to come and tuck into our bird feeder, not more than 3m from our kitchen window. They were delightful to watch.
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I heard about this a lot recently. In Berlin, they even won the state elections!
Mate, serious question from a not native speaker struggling with prepositions: Why are you using “in” and not “on” in this case? Is this there a rule behind it or is this another “because that’s why” thing?
I’m not a native speaker, but as I understand it, you would generally use ‘in’ when referring to a large geographical area: continent, country, city, village, or neighbourhood. You would also use ‘in’ when you are referring to the character of the neighbourhood literally or metaphorically: “I live in a posh neighbourhood”, “I live in a combat zone”, “I live in a desolate wasteland without a single pub”.
You would typically use ‘on’ when:
(a) referring to the character of the actual physical surface on which your house is located: “I live on a rocky hillside”, “I live on the site of an Iron Age battlefield”, “I live on a floodplain”. A rule of thumb is whether you can replace “I live on…” with “My house is built on…”
(b) referring to the street or road where you live by name or description: “I live on West Road”, “I live on the road with the cherry trees”. There are some added complexities in British English, where you will sometimes say ‘in’ instead of ‘on’, but my experience has been that this varies by regional dialect so saying ‘on’ doesn’t tend to raise eyebrows. However, you should not say “I live on the street” as that means that you’re homeless.
In this case, AlistairH was metaphorically describing the character of the neighbourhood rather than the physical surface, so it is ‘in’ rather than ‘on’. If, however, the house was on the site of an ancient battle between squirrels, it would have been ‘on’.
Yes, oskeladden, that is a very good analysis. I spent a career writing English as accurately as possible, and I could not have put it better.
There are nouns in English such as “battleground” that look like compoud words, but really are not. Splitting “battle” from “ground” is misleading, since it would suggest an actual piece of ground on which a battle is taking place. What the word actually means is a space within which a battle is (or was) taking place. It probably started out as a metaphor, but has long since become a word with its own meaning.
With streets, it gets really confusing. “I live on the street” is a very specific usage which means, as oskeladden pointed out, being homeless, because, in that phase, “the street” does not indicate a particular street, indcates the generic concept of streets in general (like “a disease of the liver” refers to livers in general and not a specific one). However, if you say “I live on the next street down” or (while pointing at a map) you say “I live on that street”, it will be understood that you have a house there.
I’m not a native “King’s English” speaker. My language is Scottish English (not Scots, which I can speak only poorly). I code-switch between being fairly strongly Scottsh at home and being much nearer “King’s English” when Down South (which is what we call England) or when taking someone who might struggle with my Scottish ways. However, my accent is immediately obvious to anyone born in the UK.
Sorry, Thom. I will stop these off-topic asides. I thought that they might be of some interest to you, as a linguist.