Personal – Page 341

A Merry Little Christmas

All in all, that was a fantastic little Christmas Day – less disasters, fights, fires or cats-eating-decorations than a typical Christmas with my family, but no less fun for it.

Our landlords, who run the cafe below our flat, were kind enough to lend us use of their kitchen over the festive period (mmm… catering-grade cooking gear…), which actually enabled us to meaningfully cook a Christmas dinner – just trying to fit a joint of turkey into our (borrowed]) mini oven, here, would have been a joke, never mind the stuffing, potatoes, parsnips, and pigs in blankets (which I’ll demonstrate to Paul is a British colloquialism, not an American one, as he claimed yesterday)! The three of us – Paul, Claire and I, managed to finish all of the sherry while preparing food, and began on the strawberry wine not long thereafter… a very drunk Christmas was had by all.

Gifts were exchanged… Claire’s been spending a good deal of time playing with her new concertina and has taken a ten-minute degree. I’ve been learning how to deal with a zombie invasion and discovering the 50 crappest towns in the UK (impressively, Preston comes in at number 30 – more crap than both Bedford and Croydon). On other gift-related notes, it looks like the pair of us are going to be particularly busy next June – with Claire’s birthday on the 16th, an REM concert in Manchester (40th crappest) on the 17th, then a Green Day concert in Milton Keynes (35th crappest) on the 18th. Non-interesting factoid: I’ve just noticed that both Green Day and The Goo Goo Dolls use Slender Fungus as their web designers for their official sites.

Oh; and a special thanks to Kit and Fiona, up in Scotland – also spending their first respective Christmases “away from home” for the home-made soaps, which we’re trying to identify (mostly by smell) now. By our reckoning, mine’s mint, Claire’s is poppy-seed, and Paul’s is lime. Lucky guess?

So; despite the fact that we made enough food to be a feast for six, which made the three of us very full, and that Claire got horribly drunk on wine in the evening and didn’t even survive the entirety of our special Troma Night Christmas Edition, it was still a great day. And better yet, I’ve just noticed that there’s one caramel bell left hanging on the tree… mmm… breakfast…

Santa Hijacked By Elf Qaeda

This story just in: Santa’s sleigh has been hijacked by terrorists!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, and all that bollocks.

Sorry; just wanted to be the first person on Abnib to make a Christmas Day post.

Right… where’s the sherry?

Claire & Paul

Why do Paul and Claire find it so impossible to get along? This evening, Paul’s cooking: right now, Claire’s preparing some vegetables for him, and they’ve begun arguing. Paul wants Claire to do things a particular way, and Claire doesn’t feel that Paul is giving her enough information to justify doing it. So Paul gets defensive, which Claire doesn’t feel answers her question, so she goes on the offensive, hiding behind a veil of being reasonable while actually trying to score as many blows as possible. This sends Paul spiralling into an agressive position. “Why don’t you do it, then?” Paul shouts, visibly exasperated…

…it’s all fine: within an hour, they’re okay again, laughing and joking and smiling… but I always end up feeling like I’m in the crossfire. And somehow, I don’t seem to be all swings and roundabouts as fast as the combatants themselves.

Grr.

Tequila And Television

Claire went out on a work Christmas bash last night, so Paul and I decided to have a quiet night in with various retro TV shows (thanks UKNova) and drinks. All we had in in the latter category, however, was half a bottle of tequila, half a bottle of white rum, and a handful of other, less digestible things…

So, we thought, we’d wander out to Threshers, buy some more tequila and some orange juice and some grenadine, and have a tequila sunrise or ten. By the time we’d reached the bottom of both bottles of tequila we were feeling quite merry, but that didn’t stop us from continuing to mix drinks, substituting white rum instead. Drunk, Paul was heard to say, “Yeh… you can do a tequila sunrise with rum… they call it… <thinks> a tequila sunset…” Umm… okay.

Anyway, we watched Stressed Eric and Ban This Filth and a rental copy of Adaptation, one of my favourite films. JTA turned up with “Ruth, and were eventually followed by Ruth’s brothers, Owen and Robin, who sat and drank beer and watched bad TV with us.

Anyhow, Paul doesn’t seem so good this morning. =o)

The Story Of Apple’s Graphing Calculator

There’s a fascinating story behind Apple’s “Graphing Calculator” application. Here’s an extract:

In August 1993, the project was canceled. A year of my work evaporated, my contract ended, and I was unemployed… …I was frustrated by all the wasted effort, so I decided to uncancel my small part of the project. I had been paid to do a job, and I wanted to finish it. My electronic badge still opened Apple’s doors, so I just kept showing up… …they asked, “Who do you report to? What group are you in? Why haven’t we seen this earlier?” I explained that I had been sneaking into the building and that the project didn’t exist. They laughed, until they realized I was serious.

Go read it. It’s a great story.

Playing Lord of the Rings, in The Flat

I’ve been pulling old videos off of devices I used to use. This came from an early-2000s mobile phone, back when mobile phones were REALLY bad at video. It features Paul M, Ruth V, Matt R, JTA, and Claire M playing a single turn of the Lord of the Rings boardgame (it was a complicated turn).

I’m not sure whether they won in the end, or what the final score was, but I’m sure I’ve got it written down somewhere.

Also available on YouTube.

Geekiest Christmas Card Ever

Just recieved this e-card from my mum’s boyfriend.

Conversation Of The Day With A Client

Fictional, of course. None of our clients are actually this stupid, and I wouldn’t be silly enough to publish a real event like this on my blog, ever.

A client phones up and asks to speak to me.

Client: “I’m using the ‘Data Export’ tool in… [part of application I wrote, new version recently deployed to him] …it was my understanding that it always used to export Excel files.”
Me: “Umm. Yes. Well, actually, it exports CSV files – that’s Comma Seperated Values. Excel will open them, and if you have it installed, it becomes the default application for opening such files.”
Client: “Mm-hmm. It seems to think they’re text files.”
Me: “Text files? You mean they’re opening in Notepad?”
Client: “Yup.”
Me: “Ah; okay – well, we just have to tell it to open them in Excel, then. Right-click on the file, and select ‘Open With…’: ‘Excel’.”
Client: “It’s not there.”
Me: “Oh. That’s odd. Okay then, just open Excel from the Start Menu.”
Client: “I can’t find it.”
Me: <thinks> “Which computer are you using?”
Client: “The server.”
Me: “Do you have Excel installed on the server?”
Client: “No.”

Thanks to Task Tracker, SmartData‘s funky in-house timesheeting tool, and it’s drill-down reports, I’m able to look back over the last year and work out exactly how much more work I’d have gotten done if our clients were even slightly computer-literate and didn’t need to keep calling up for help with trivial things every ten minutes. Ah well.

GMail Invites

I’ve got nine GMail invites. Does anybody want one? Check the comments to this post to see how many have gone, and leave a comment to this post if you want one.

Statto Plays With Blacklight

Statto has an article on his blog about using his digital camera to take infared pictures which is worth a look, if you’re even vaugely interested/bored/geeky/a physicist/all of the above. He’s taken some fascinating pictures of infared remote control beams and things through filters, and provided a little bit of an informative background as to why it all looks like it does, too. Go look.

Man And The Machines

There’s a fascinating article on LegalAffairs.org (the self-styled “magazine at the intersection of law and life” on artificial intelligence and legal/ethical/socialogical considerations relating to it. Despite disagreeing with a few of it’s points, it’s well-written and excellently-presented. Go read it.

In case the site stops publishing the article, I’ve made a copy, below. Click on the ‘next page‘ link to read it here.

Pages: 1 2

Scoville Units For Dummies

For the benefit of they that asked: a Scoville Scale worth seeing. I’m impressed that I own a bottle of the hottest sauce they do that’s actually intended for consumption.

If I had £140, I still wouldn’t spend it on a bottle of Blaire’s 6A.M.… when a pepper sauce is contains three times the capsaicin level of police-grade pepper spray, it’s not designed to be used as food. I mean, really.

Bug In Internet Explorer… But How Do I Tell Anybody?

This morning, I found a bug in Internet Explorer. I wasn’t using it, of course, but I’d sent a Macromedia Flash file to a colleague by e-mail, who opened it in IE, but couldn’t.

It turns out that Internet Explorer can’t cope with opening Flash (.swf) files from the local file system, if the filename contains an apostrophe (e.g. “Dan’s Pictures.swf”). Crazy little bug, but I’ve tested it a little and it seems that this really is the case. But how do I report it?

Microsoft‘s web site, despite a redesign, is a sprawling mess. Eventually I gave up and submitted it as a ‘feature request’. I submitted PNG-support as a feature request, too, because it would be nice if sites like Abnib looked as good to the unwashed masses of IE users as it does to users of real web browsers.

Board Games Making A Comeback This Christmas

Board games are making a comeback this Christmas, reports the BBC. That’s interesting news. So go “Have Your Say” already, and tell them what your favourite Geek Night board game is!