Curry And Penny

Went out last night for curry and beer to celebrate Paul‘s birthday (yes, we’re all well aware that Paul’s birthday was almost a month ago, but this was the first chance we’d had to really get together and make an ocassion of it). It was great to get together with a handful of folks rarely seen in the same place outside of Troma Night – and in some cases, recently, not even then – and have a good night out.

At the end of the evening I was quite tipsy; a direct result of the fact that or a few hours before the curry I’d been “warming up” with ales in the Ship & Castle with Matt P. And, as you may have noticed by now, there’s a strong correlation between me going to bed drunk and me blogging about particularly unusual dreams. I skipped a dream that I couldn’t be arsed to blog about, near the end of last month, under similar intoxication. I’d made some notes on it, as I try to with everything I dream about, but never found time to write it up to standards of internet legibility (whatever that can be taken as meaning).

In any case, last night was a classic example of me dreaming within-a-dream, which I gather is something a lot of people haven’t experienced (for me, while not commonplace, it’s not terribly rare, either, for me to “wake up” within a dream, or to remember previous dreams as dreams within the one I’m currently ‘in’). Note the double-indentation to ease understanding of which dream I’m referring to:

I had been hosting a house party of some variety, in a somewhat larger (and significantly tidier) version of The Cottage, and it was beginning to wind up – most of the guests had gone home, except for a few small, scattered groups in different parts of the building (I mentioned that it was bigger than The Cottage usually is, right? – there are times that the word “mansion” could have come to hand). JTA, Claire and Ruth were somewhere upstairs; Bryn was talking to Andrew Rawlins (!) in a kitchen reminiscent of my dad’s house; and I was in the living room, talking to Penny.

If I remember rightly we were talking about oral sex technique. So, just a regular conversation for me, you’re probably thinking. And that’s about the time that we kissed.

We hid that we’d been kissing from Bryn and Andrew as they came through the living room, said goodbye, got their coats and left. And again, when Gareth, Penny’s partner, arrived by car to pick her up. And then I went to bed.

And then I woke up. I don’t specifically remember waking up, but I remember having a moment of realisation that everything that had just happened was a dream. It was an unusual dream, sure (although not entirely unpleasant: Penny’s pretty hot), but just a dream, and so I got on with my day. Leaving Claire in bed, I went to work, and I remember thinking about the fact that I would undoubtedly blog about the dream I’d had, and that I hoped I wouldn’t alarm or embarrass Penny by doing so!

And then I woke up. Actually, this time, and there was a moment of confusion as I remembered that it was Ruth I’d spent the night with last night, not Claire at all, and I spent the first few minutes of the morning trying to work out where the dreams began and ended. Perhaps more confusingly, I discovered when I woke up that I’d somehow, in the night, managed to cut my hand and I was bleeding all over the place. I snapped the following photo after I’d cleaned it up a bit.

Ruth theorised that she attacked me in my sleep because she was jealous that I was kissing Penny in my dreams, going on to add that she wanted to be dreaming of kissing Penny. But I’m not sure if she’d approve of me blogging that, so you should pretend that I didn’t.

Do you or anybody you know routinely dream that you are dreaming? Or wake up from a dream with an unusual injury? Or have dreams that involve your friends cheating on their partners with you?

×

Australian Pink Floyd Intermission

In the middle of their concert at the Cardiff International Arena, 3rd April 2008, The Australian Pink Floyd Show began their 20-minute intermission by projecting the “Intermission” from Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Also available on YouTube.

The Australian Pink Floyd Show

I took Claire, Ruth and JTA to see The Australian Pink Floyd Show at the Cardiff International Arena last night. Claire and I had seen them before, back in 2005, and they were as fabulous as ever: I maintain that this tribute band is the only one I’ve ever seen that, at times, can be better than the band to which it’s a tribute.

What might be slightly sadder is that for me, one of the highlights of the show was that during the intermission, the screen at the back of the stage showed a recoding of the intermission sequence from Monty Python’s Flying Circus, as shown from time to time at Troma Night by Paul. If you can’t see the recoding below, try over here.

The music was typically spectacular, as was the light and laser show that so-traditionally accompanies it, right down to the biggest glitterball I’ve ever seen lighting up the entire arena with twinkly lights during the final numbers. If only I hadn’t had to pay £3.80 per (plastic) bottle for the privilege of a warm, watery beer, it’d have been even better. Ah well.

After the show, the four of us found the most disgusting food in all of Cardiff from a take-away around the corner from the venue. While you can imagine how they fucked up my chicken burger, it’s beyond me how they could make a mess of re-heating a spring roll for JTA or even of cooking corn on the cob for Ruth, but somehow they did.

Bryn And Heather

I don’t want to stir up trouble, and I don’t have any intention to take sides. I’m going to say a couple of things, for which I fully expect to be misinterpreted and I’m all set for the barrange of comments I’ll get hereafter. But hey, that’s enough disclaimerism. On to the controversy:

In case you hadn’t heard and somehow Bryn’s blog post didn’t give anything away (in which case: what planet are you on?), Bryn and Heather split up last month. From my perspective – admittedly one skewed by being hundreds of miles away and getting most of my Bryn/Heather related news and happenings third-hand – this was pretty much inevitable by this point: it sounds as if their relationship had reached it’s expiry date.

Is it sad? Is it happy? There’s some of both of those feelings in there, I’m sure, but from where I am it’s mostly just a change, and not one that directly affects me. I hope that both of them have long and happy love lives hereafter, and that from the remains of the relationship that they have the choice to salvage or to not salvage a friendship – whichever they prefer.

That sounds cold, but I’ve had relationships that have ended with that choice available, and I’ve had relationships that have ended without that choice available. In my experience, those where my ex- and I have felt able to choose “where we go next” have been orders of magnitude easier than those in which we have not. This has been true even where the choice would ultimately be to go our separate ways, or to never talk to one another again.

But I didn’t write this entry as some kind of veiled excuse to analyse my own past love life within a conveniently post-topical context. So I’ll stop talking about myself.

Heather dropped me a message recently, and asked that it be circulated amongst the abnibbers. As she hints in it that she’d have blogged it if she had a blog, I can only assume that she’d be happy with it appearing here, on mine. Obviously I wouldn’t publish it if I felt it were blatantly offensive or trying to cause upset or harm, but as that doesn’t seem to be the case, here it is:

Subject: In response to Bryn’s non-moderation of my comment re. Sundeep’s comment on his blog.

…And also given that my blog got lost in the ‘great server crash’, and I (understandably) haven’t had it resurrected on Bryn’s site:

I’ve sent this to as many abnib readers as I can think of in my friends list. I’d be grateful if it could be passed around to anyone I don’t have or have forgotten.

This isn’t meant to be an attack on anyone in particular, more a reflection of my complete lack of any other media to communicate in.

I am aware that Sundeep’s comment wasn’t meant in this manner, however the content of it was really quite upsetting. I am still hurting more than I thought possible over this breakup, and reading about Bryn in this sort of context is quite like having something very painful twisted around in the region of my heart. I’m well aware that I cannot prescribe anybody’s behaviour, and in all likelihood, what Sundeep has said will occur, and that Bryn is entitled to dance with as many attractive women as he likes. However, things happening that I know nothing about, and cheerful messages posted in an open forum are entirely different things, and I’d very much appreciate it if, for the time being, we could all try not to rub in my face how very much Bryn is enjoying his new single life, and happy with all his friends, whilst I am at home, lonely and brokenhearted.

I’m not digging for sympathy, or trying to slander, or anything like that. But as I have been denied my most effective method of getting over things by not being able to communicate with Bryn through any method at all, it’s going to take me a good deal of time to get over this, and I’d appreciate all the help I can get.

Thanks for your time.

Before I get the obvious complaint: I fully respect Bryn’s right to censor comments on his blog: it’s his blog, after all, and it’s up to him what passes as a valid comment. Moreover, I’m of the opinion that if Heather doesn’t want to know about the good (or bad) things happening in Bryn’s life, it’s easy enough to simply not read his blog – I certainly don’t feel that blogging counts as “rubbing her face in it.”

If you still wish to complain, there’s a form below. And if you have the balls to do so non-anonymously, all the better.

My April Fools

I’ve always had a thing for big, overcomplicated April Fools’ gags. Traditionally, we’d always play pranks on Penbryn Halls at the University, but it’s not so easy these days to gain access to halls of residence, now that they’ve installed door locks that don’t open by themselves when you so much as breathe hard on them, so I thought it was time to broaden my sights.

I work for a company based in the Aberystwyth Technium on the marina. A few weeks ago, the Technium management had arranged for the installation of a new fence and automatic car park barriers, to allow the building to better control who has access to the offices’ car parking spaces (car parking spaces being a particularly valuable commodity in Aberystwyth). These barriers haven’t come online yet, but apparently they will “soon” (which is regional-government-speak for “someday, maybe”).

Car Parking Gates at the Aberystwyth Technium

Early on the morning of 1st April, I put out an e-mail to all resident companies at the Technium, spoofed so that it appeared to come from Technium management and emulating their writing style and the way that they typically send out bulk messages to the tenants.

Annwyl pawb ,

The key fobs for the new car park barrier system need to be ordered via an online application form . The application needs to be filled in as your key fobs will be uniquely linked to your vehicle.

The application form is only available online at http://www.techniumnetwork.info/aberystwyth/carparking/

Once you have applied, central office will send out the key fobs to us in a week or two. Please fill in the form as soon as possible so that the key fobs all arrive at the same time.

Diolch

Sion

Sion Meredith
Gweithredydd Technium Aberystwyth
Technium Aberystwyth Executive

<snip>

The techniumnetwork.info domain name is one that I’d picked up the day before for the best part of 49p on a special offer with a registrar – the real Technium website is at www.technium.co.uk, but I figured that people wouldn’t pay attention to the domain name: even the tenants here probably don’t spend much time, if any at all, on the Technium website. I stole the stylesheet and layout for the official website and adapted it to my purposes: there’s a mirror up now at http://techniumnetwork.scatmania.org/aberystwyth/carparking/ if you want to see for yourself.

Spoof website for the car parking key fob scam

The site begins by looking like a genuine application form, asking for all of the key details – your personal and company information, basic details of your car – and slowly starts over many, many pages of forms to ask sillier and sillier questions. “What colour is your car?” is a drop-down with “Red” and “Other” as the only options. “What noise does your car make?” is accompanied by options like “Vroom!” and “Brum-brum.” Later questions ask whether or not your car is capable of transforming into a giant robot and challenge you to correctly identify road signs that have been altered in comedic ways.

The trick worked, and many of the tenants were fooled… some of them well-past the point at which they should have thought the form was genuine; and almost all of them believed, even when they realised that the form was a joke, that it had been set up by the Technium themselves. It was only when one tenant decided to pass a copy of the e-mail on to the real Sion Meredith that the building management heard anything about it, and, sadly, put a stop to it by sending out an e-mail to say that it was all a joke, and not one by them.

After he’d worked out it was me that was behind it… I’d taken steps to make it obvious to anybody who bothered to check up on it, so as to maximise the understanding that it was, in the end, just a joke: the last thing I wanted was some humourless bureaucrat to see this gag (which did, of course, involve feigning the identity of a government employee) as a terrorist threat or something …he got his own back, though. He came up to my office at a few minutes to midday to inform me that he’s had to pass on my details to the Technium legal team, and he managed to make my heart skip a beat before I realised that he, too, was just having a joke.

A selection of feedback so far on the gag after I sent out a “gotcha” e-mail to everybody affected:

  • “Way too much time on your hands………” – Aled, thinkplay.tv
  • “You have far too much time on your hands but it was very amusing!!” – Kayt, MapAnalysis
  • “When I realised it was an April Fool I did look at the email address and questioned it but didn’t think [it could be spoofed]! Must be because I’m a technical dumb ass!” – George, MapAnalysis
  • “Dan, Sion was serious [about the legal team], when he popped his head round the door at 11.45 he had some documents in his hand.” – Nic, Angle Technology
  • “When did you find time to make this, then?” – Simon, SmartData

I had to leave the room when it first started to catch Simon out: I heard him phoning his wife to ask for a reminder of their cars’ number plates and had to excuse myself so as not to give the game away with my girlish giggling.

So, that was all good, and far more successful than my backup plan which involved passing on missed call messages to co-workers to ask them to return a call to Rory Lyons at Captive Audience on 01244 380280. The number is actually the number for Chester Zoo: I so very nearly made some of the people I work with unwittingly call up Chester Zoo on the morning of April 1st and ask, “Can I speak to Rory Lyons, please?” It’s a good prank, anyway – I’ll save it for another time: or if you want to give it a go (it doesn’t even have to be April Fools’ Day, with a great joke like that), let me know how you get on!

Google’s April Fool…

…seems to be to not text me me Google Calendar alerts this morning. So I didn’t get reminded to put the bins out, which I’ve kind-of come to rely on. Whoops!

What I’ve Been Up To This Weekend

This post should have appeared on Monday 24th March 2008, but owing to technical difficulties didn’t make it online until Thursday 27th. Sorry!

Like many others, I’ve had both Good Friday and Easter Monday off work, and as I haven’t blogged enough recently, I thought I ought to provide a quick update about the things I’ve been up to:

Aberystwyth Goes Silent

Okay, so that happens about this time every year: the last week has been the usual lull between the disappearance of the majority of the students and the appearance of the Easter weekend tourists. But this year it was particularly quiet, because even many of the people I’d sort-of expected to be around are elsewhere: Matt‘s still in Cornwall, Sarah‘s also absent, and of course Ruth and JTA are away on a skiing holiday with Gareth and Penny. So it’s been even quieter than we’re used to at this time of year.

Bedroom Tidy-Up

It’s been long overdue, but anybody who ever went into Claire and I’s bedroom at The Cottage will know that it contained bags of clothes that we’d never got around to unpacking since we moved in, over a year ago. So, I finally unpacked them: many of them right into other bags which made their way to the nearest charity shop.

Why do I share this with you? Well, because it leads to an interesting guessing game. You know how Claire pretty much never, ever wears a dress or a skirt (and makes a point of mentioning this to people). Well, having unpacked/washed/sorted/re-hung all of her clothes, take a guess at the exact number of skirts and dresses (total) that she owns. I’ll reveal the actual figure (assuming there aren’t any I’m yet to discover in the final bag) a little further down.

Troma Night Lite Ultralite

Pretty much every Saturday for about four years, we’ve held Troma Night, our film night of the best and the worst films ever made, and, over the years, it’s gathered a number of interesting traditions. One such tradition is that it only counts as a Troma Night if there are four people present. That’s fine and dandy, and there have been a number of three-man Troma Nights, which we’ve instead called Troma Lite. But this Saturday was the first ever (that I’m aware of) Troma Night with only two people present.

That’s right: only Claire and I were there. We’ve now dubbed this event Troma Ultralite – a Troma Night with only two people present. So we (re-)watched the RiffTrax‘d version of Raiders of the Lost Ark, followed by Watership Down, which I hadn’t seen since I was a small child (it gave me nightmares, I seem to remember).

(A Very Small) Geek Night

Yesterday brought us a Geek Night, of course, hosted by Rory, but only he, Claire, Paul and I were present, and Paul had to disappear before then end because unlike the rest of us, he’s still working his usual crazy number of hours this Easter weekend. Unlike last week, when I played like a complete moron, I rocked last night and thoroughly trounced everybody, which I shan’t be letting them forget for a while. Well, until next week.

Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty

I got hold of a copy of Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty, a new video game, and played through it this afternoon. In it’s favour, it’s a very clever idea for a game. Apparently, in 1931, Winston Churchill was hit by a taxi cab while in New York, which gave him a characteristic limp for the remainder of his life. In the game’s alternate-history universe, this accident killed him, and he never went on to lead Great Britain during the Second World War. In 1940, Britain surrenders and comes under the occupation of Nazi Germany, who never forge a wartime alliance with Japan against the United States, and do not turn their sights on Russia.

We’ve seen this kind of thing before, of course. The time travel of the Command & Conquer: Red Alert series of games played the idea to death (of course, they instead had a young Adolf Hitler killed, but the principle is similar). But there’s something quite well-executed about this particular alternate history. In 1953, Greater Germany and Japan launch a combined surprise attack against the United States, capture key cities on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, and force the President and Vice-President to step down so that they can replace them with a “puppet President” during the first part of the occupation.

The game plays as a first-person shooter: the player’s character is a New York construction worker who for some reason is highly proficient with a huge variety of firearms and can withstand several simultaneous bullets to the chest time and time again without dying. The game opens as bomber and paratrooper blimps, accompanied by bomber wings, attack New York, and it’s here that you really see how beautiful the game can be. The draw distance is fantastic: you can see the distant planes passing over Liberty Island as they get closer and closer until eventually they’re strafing the buildings you’re above. And so your adventure begins.

Unfortunatley, it is – at heart – a console game, for the Xbox 360, and it shows. The controls are somewhat clunky and ill-described (and why oh-why are you forbidden from using the mouse to navigate the menus?), the aim “assist” that’s so essential on most console shooters feels out-of-place when you’re playing with a nice accurate mouse, and it’s impossible to save the game except when you pass a “checkpoint.” Worse yet, these checkpoints get further and further apart as the game goes on, as if the developers couldn’t think of how to make the game challenging any more so they just made it more frustrating: here’s a clue – doing the same thing over and over isn’t challenging, but it is boring. They’ve tried to make it not feel exactly like Half-Life 2 (even some of the scenes seem to be copied directly from the game, like the Tower Bridge mission) by adding in the “plant a bomb” minigame, but this is about as challenging as picking your nose: all you have to do is press the appropriate coloured buttons in order. There isn’t even a time limit to doing so – at least not one that I ever found.

The middle of the game draws on and somehow skips over the key elements of the story, which could otherwise have been fascinating. Perhaps I’m looking at the “wrong” things, but I’d really like to have seen more of the politics, the formation of the resistance movement, and the German propoganda slowly appearing on the walls of the city. Oh, and the civilians! Where do they all disappear to? When they’re not part of the plot, they disappear after the first chapter never to be seen again.

And then the end brings it all back again – those huge draw distances, those beautiful wide fight scenes, and the (really cool) blimps (including a fucking flying aircraft carrier – how cool is that?). It’s a bit easy at the beginning but it makes up for that by being really quite hard towards the end, except for the very final scene which was a bit peasy (although I don’t think the level designers expected me to have saved myself an anti-tank rocket launcher and a dozen rockets from way earlier in the level, the use of which was my entire strategy for defeating the Third Reich).

So, in summary: it’s a good way to waste an afternoon if you “do” WWII first person shooters, and you’re interested in alternative history, AND you can put up with the fact that this is, in the end, a console shoot-em-up that’s been half-heartedly ported to the PC.

Fire! On The Beach!

Not-gay Gareth’s free tonight for the first time in ages, so he and Paul have organised that we’ll be having a fire on North Beach tonight when Ruth and JTA get back into town (or maybe starting a little before then). There’ll be a barbeque, so if you’ve got anything to grill, bring it along. It’s on Abnib Events, of course, as well (which I fixed last week and is now working properly again – sorry about that!).

So, How Many Skirts And Dresses?

And the answer to the earlier question? 24. Yes, 24 skirts and dresses are now hanging in the wardrobe of a woman who never ever wears any of them. How did this happen? I’ve known Claire for six years, and I’m not sure I can count 24 times I’ve ever seen her in a skirt, never mind some of the things in her wardrobe which I’ve never seen before in my life. How does she manage it?

A Comment From Thailand

Oh yeah, and you’ll remember a while back I blogged about a postcard from Jimmy in Thailand. Well, it turns out that somebody from Thailand (allegedly, at least) found the page and corrected his spelling of the name of the island he was on, in a comment on this blog.

Right; that was longer than it should have been. I’ll try to be less of a sloppy blogger.

Best Joke I’ve Heard This Week

Following up on Claire’s post about Easter, here’s the best joke I’ve heard all week:

What did Jesus say to his disciples as he was being nailed to the cross?

I’ll be back on Monday, so don’t you dare touch my fucking Easter eggs!

That is all.

I’ve Been Q’ing For A Year Now

Post Offices, eh? But those aside, it’s now been a year since Claire and I changed our surnames to the letter “Q”. Here’s a quick look back:

The Good Things

  • It still feels like it’s “ours,” and something that’s ours alone – a great sense of identity and togetherness that we probably wouldn’t have gotten in any other way.
  • It still makes people’s minds boggle, even after they get past the “disbelief” stage. It still baffles me how many people try to “guess what it stands for,” even after being told it doesn’t stand for anything.
  • The junk mailers still don’t seem to have caught up with my new name, which makes filtering my postal mail very easy – it’s it’s for my old name, it’s junk; if it’s for my new name, it’s not.
  • It really wasn’t very hard to do!
  • The game of “comeing up with children’s names for Claire and I” seems to have gone out of fashion at last. I still feel that the winner was “Barbie.”
  • I’m yet to find anybody with a shorter name than me, although I suspect that at least one exists (there are plenty with same length of name, including Ron Ng, Wu Man, and many other people with romanised Chinese names).

The Bad Things

  • Some companies (and, in particular, their computer systems) seem to have a great deal of difficulty with my surname. It hasn’t caused any problems as yet; just inconveniences – and I’m on several databases as “Qq”, “Qu”, or “Q[space][space][space].”
  • We spend longer at customs desks at British airports than we used to. Those guys have no sense of humour.
  • I spend longer spelling my name to people on the phone than I used to, which feels unusual considering that my old surname had at least two spellings of which mine was the least common.
  • My mobile phone contract provider still refuse to believe that my first name has changed, too. They have no problem with my last name. Weird.

So, no: I don’t regret it, it’s been fun and fabulous and it’s something special for Claire and I to share, and I fully expect to have this surname for the remainder of my life… although I am sometimes tempted by the idea of a one-letter first name, too… :-)

Edit, 22/03/2008: Fixed a spelling mistake.

Self-Harm Awareness Day

There’s a mailing list I’m on that just got a message that started as follows:

Subject: March 1st – Self-Harm Awareness Day

Just curious…

a) How many of you knew it was self-harm awareness day on March 1st and

b) Are you doing anything to mark it?
<snip>

It’s pretty bad that the first response I thought of was “Yeah, I’ll scratch that date into my arm to make sure I remember it.” Bad, but funny, in a sick and twisted way.

There’s a reason I’m a lurker.

A Postcard From Jimmy

The first postcard has arrived from Jimmy‘s world tour (right now he’s in Thailand).

Postcard front

On the front is a picture of some interestingly-shaped rocks which are apparently right outside the front door of the guesthouse where he’s staying.

He writes:

Hello everyone in Aber!

Fly to Samai in Thailand. Grab a taxi (boat or car) to Lamai beach. I’ll be in the guesthouse next to the rocks like genitalia – you can’t miss them. Bring sun cream!

Seriously, this place is amazing. Going to spend a month or so island hopping – might get used to the heat by then.

Hope everyone is well,

Jimmy

If you get internet access and read this, Jimmy: know that your postcard got here okay (and sooner than you estimated!) and that we’re all thinking of you. And if you send enough postcards, we’ll think about getting some kind of world map and sticking them to it with bits of wool and pins like something out of some crime thriller where the detectives are trying to track the villain’s movements around the globe.

Or like that scene in Heroes. That would have been shorter to type, wouldn’t it.

Best Bug Ever

On behalf of a client of a client of SmartData, I was responsible this weekend for moving a website over from one server to another. It’s a monolithic old custom-written content management system, in Perl, which over the last four or five years has been passed from developer to developer and has begun to look quite disgusting. Needless to say, we’ll be recommending refactoring.

But in the meantime, a server move was needed. No problem, I thought. Install Apache on the new server, CGI::Application, mod_include, mod_rewrite, MySQL, blah blah, all pretty standard. Copy the files over, copy the database over, hook it all up, and test it. And after a day or two of playing with it on the new server and with approval from our client, we move the DNS over to complete the operation.

Yesterday morning I get a phone call from somebody who manages the site.

Romanian Days Of The Week“All of the days of the week are in French!”

I suppose I ought to say something about this particular company. Like many companies in this part of the world, this company runs it’s website bilingually: that is, in English and Welsh. But for some reason, claimed our client’s client, their web site was now putting the days of the week in French instead of Welsh. The months of the year were still in Welsh, and the stuff that was supposed to be in English was still in English, but… well…

Further investigation showed that this report was mistaken. “I’m not sure it’s French, you know,” I replied, typically helpfully, “It’s Romanian.” I was pleased with myself right up until the point that I realised that this wasn’t actually helpful, about a second or two later.

It turns out that the site uses a Perl module called Date::Calc to display days of the week in an appropriate language, and I’d just used CPAN to do a quick-and-easy install of Date::Calc. But something was different about the old server’s copy of this module. It turns out that, not unsurprisingly, Date::Calc doesn’t naively support the Welsh language, but that some time many years ago an enterprising programmer, not wanting to go to all the effort of adding a new language to Date::Calc the proper way, simply patched the module, overwriting one of the languages already in it. He decided to replace a language that he didn’t think anybody would ever have reason to use on the server – Romanian.

The reason that the months were still in Welsh was because they used a far more standard method of translation. So I simply wrote a couple of regular expressions that changed the old, Date::Calc-translator code into a more common approach, and that fixed it. Somebody had even already defined me an array with the Welsh weekdays in (it looks like this change was planned at some point in this huge, horrible codebase, but never actually happened).

Not sure I’ll ever find out who was responsible for the atrocious bit of coding that caused this particular website to turn Romanian for a few hours, but if I do, I’ll be sure to tell them about this, the most amusing bug I’ve seen in a long, long time.