Ever have one of those days when you have one thing to do but end up dealing with a hundred unexpected ones instead? That’s the day I’m having now. Nearly over, but I can now start on what I was going to do this morning.
And randomly, weewar looks good.
Add commentNovember 21st, 2007
There’s only one thing worse than having a cold, and that’s being surrounded by other people who have colds. You can try to avoid it, but sooner or later you just know that the germs are going to get you.
Right now there’s only one person in my office sensible enough to have stayed at home. Two people in close proximity are looking miserable and periodically coughing or blowing their noses. If I need to go to the toilet, my only route takes me straight though a patch of air with a high probability of being a cloud of germs.
Blokes tend to get a bad rep when it comes to being ill. ‘Man flu’ they call it. A woman carries on regardless while a man is completely incapacitated by the sniffles - that’s the stereotype. I don’t think I fit that description though. If I have a cold I don’t really complain much more than the missus does. What I am bad for though, is a complete lack of sympathy. For the past few days I have lived my life in a different room to her as much as it’s physically possible to do so. I want clean air. I do not want a cold.
In retaliation, she taunts me with her germs by telling me she sneezed whilst making one of the two cups of tea, and can’t remember which one she was making at the time. She hides snot-laden tissues under cushions. For fucks sake.
Last night I went to bed much later than her meaning that she was asleep when I got there. She had managed to sprawl immovably acroll the whole matress meaning that it was impossible for me to sleep in a physically separate area of the bed. She was even breathing on my pillow.
Today, I hope to buy some vitamin C. The big 1000mg tablets you get in the long tube that look like they’re meant for horses.
I will not catch this cold.
I will NOT catch this cold.
Add commentNovember 20th, 2007
The missus has been getting into mystery shopping. Generally you go into a shop to try on some clothes, ask for a different size and then return the clothes a little later. For that, you collect about a tenner and get to feel like a secret agent.
Yesterday though was a good one. She had to drop into a show-home on a new housing development and pretend to be in the market for a £430,000 house. So we all went and pretended to be rich folk. I wanted to wear an Asda uniform with a ‘part time’ badge just for a laugh but I didn’t have one so our little lad was buttoned into a shirt and wooly tank-top and ordered not to dribble down it. Gotta look the part.
First we saw the £425k show-home and I have to be honest I wasn’t very impressed. For 425 I was expecting to see a marble fountain in the hallway but instead there was a large number of disappointingly small looking rooms. So we expressed our disappointment through the medium of our acting talent. Also known as lying for money.
This allowed the nice lady to convince us to take a look at the £450,000 one along the street. I gotta say - I want that house. For an extra 25, you get a whole lotta extra home. Oh, how the other half live.
The problem with all this though is that by the end of it we’d actually convinced ourselves that we were going to buy the thing. Never mind that the mortgage payments would eclipse my monthly wages before you’d even mentioned council tax. We were in the car planning what to do with the top floor and where the TV should go. It was only when we got back home to our own little castle that we fully realised that it was just pretend and that we were probably going to have to cancel the second visit that we probably shouldn’t have arranged with the nice lady, who we now felt sorry for (She was excited by our enthusiasm to buy).
Oh well. At least we get to decide what to spend our tenner on.
1 commentNovember 19th, 2007
So the missus decided to buy a pair of pedometers, one for each of us. This is good because I’m incredibly unhealthy. It’s also good because we’re quite competitive which means we now compete for dog-walking rights instead of trying to avoid it.
Anything that stops me being a lazy bugger has to be a good thing.
The pedometer itself is quite a neat wee thing. It seems surprisingly cheat-resistant. You can shake it all you like and it just kinda knows that you’re cheating. Walk around though and it becomes spookily accurate, and proclaims me half as fit as I should be at the end of each day.
Well, I say ’spookily accurate’ but it does tend to miss some things. For example it doesn’t tell
if I’m carrying shopping, or have a two-year-old child sitting on my shoulders, upping my calorie count.
Another thing it can’t tell is that I’ve just got out of bed, or am on my way to bed because it’s not attached to me at that point. That’s a good 30 steps going unrecorded right there. In fact, I left the heating on last night and got up again to put it off - that’s easily 100 unrecorded steps reflecting badly on my health.
And then there are the calories used by exercise such as breathing and pumping blood about with your heart. Or eating chips.
Ha. Stupid pedometer. I am the fittest.
Add commentNovember 13th, 2007
I’ve lost track of the number of times this blog has been restarted. It’s very old anyway. I have an enormous SQL dump of the oldest posts and a blogger account with some more.
One day, perhaps I’ll integrate them into this new version.
Anyway - new hosting, new blogging software, ah let’s just call it a new blog, eh?
3 commentsNovember 13th, 2007
Acer, the PC manufacturer that made my laptop, officially suck.
A short while ago, my 6 month old laptop blue-screened out of the blue. It would then refuse to even switch on most of the time - totally screwed.
Some panic-striken switching on and off managed to get it to boot up, but it wouldn’t stay on for long before the dreaded blue-screen reared its ugly head and the whole thing died.
I wasn’t so worried about the laptop (To be honest, I was secretly glad because I’ve never quite fell in love with the weird screen that you need to look dead on at in order to see), but I was worried about the videos I had on it of my son growing up - the first 2 years of his life.
My photos were backed up, and it had taken ages. Videos were next and I didn’t quite make it in time.
Fortunately I managed to boot it up long enough to save videos up to 2003 (But none from after Ben was born unfortunately).
So anyway, I phoned Acer and told them the problem. “Fine” they said, “we’ll send DHL round to collect it and get it fixed under warranty”
Cool.
“What about the data on the hard drive?” I asked.
“Any faults and we’ll replace it, sir”
“Well I have valuable data, I’d quite like to know I’m not going to lose it before I send my laptop away”
“We’re not liable for any loss of data I’m afraid”
“Hmm…”
So I popped off to PC world to get a hard-drive USB enclosure so that I could get the data off it. Of course the enclosure had the wrong type of IDE connector, so back it went and time was pressing on.
So anyway, my experience of being able to sometimes use the laptop had convinced me that the disk was not the problem, and I decided that it should be ok to send it back.
A week later (Yesterday) my laptop arrived.
Attached was a note that simply read
“Hard drive replaced. Re-installed from server. Tested ok”
At which point, I was thinking “AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!”
Immediately the phone was being dialled and Acer were on the line.
“Can I have my hard disk back? The broken one?”
“No. Sorry sir, but it will have been destroyed”
“Destroyed?”
“Yes, because it’s a warranty replacement the old drive becomes our property, and we have to destroy it”
“What?? Well can you check?”
“It was a week ago sir, it will definitely have been destroyed.”
“But there were 3 years worth of videos on that hard drive. There was the first 2 years of my son’s life. I could have tried to get the data from it if you’d have sent it back”.
“That would have cost £160 sir”
“?!…”
“We can recover the data, but it costs £160. Unfortunately you didn’t take that option”
“I wasn’t offered that option! You mean I’d have to pay you £160 to prevent you from destroying my data?”
“Yes sir, we need to destroy them immediately for data protection”
“YOU DIDN’T DO A VERY GOOD JOB OF PROTECTING IT, DID YOU??”
And that was that.
I feel like my data has been kidnapped and a £160 ransom demand was made. Except it wasn’t made, because the blackmailing ransomer forgot to make that phone call, so they dragged my hard drive into the woods and put a bullet through the back of its head anyway.
Is this legal?? It’s not like replacing a spark plug - I don’t care if the garage throws away my broken spark plugs because that doesn’t contain valuable data on it. And how can they say that it ‘belongs to them’.
I presume it’s because they’d be giving me a £160 hard drive replacement for a drive that they’d be destroying anyway, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
I can imagine that somewhere in Acer HQ they had some big meeting where they decided the processes and procedures and decided that destroying the drive would make their customer’s happy.
As for data protection - it’s my data. Surely the best thing to do to protect it would be to send it back to its owner. Now I only have their word that it’s destroyed. For all I know one of their staff could have taken it home to scan for credit card numbers.
All those videos, needlessly destroyed. I feel absolutely sick.
All I can do now is write a letter of disgust demanding proof that it was destroyed.
Add commentSeptember 4th, 2007
Now here’s a puzzle for you…
In a strangely non-wifelike impulse, Tracy went out today and bought a Nintendo Wii. She reasoned that playing a Wii is easier than going to the gym and less expensive in the long-run. To justify the sudden expense to me she buys a selection of games that she hopes I like.
Included in this is ‘Transformers - the game’ from the soon-to-be-released movie.
Now… what do you do? Do you play the game because dammit, you’ve just got a new Wii? Or do you put off playing that game and play Wii sports instead because you don’t want the game to ruin the story?
It’s a tough one alright.
Ah bugger it… who am I kidding? I won’t go to see the film for plot; I’ll go to see it for giant robots beating each other up for my entertainment.
Add commentJuly 23rd, 2007
So it would seem that my stint of book reading is to come to an end. The reason is that my stint as a user of public transport is coming to an end. We usher in a new stint of being a two-car family.
In a characteristic impulse way, we bought a new car at the weekend. The bus I get into work is quite unreliable. It’s also the only bus I can get, and is changing it’s timetable for minimum usefulness as of today. This means that getting a second car now looks like a good idea.
It’s only a little one. I did look at a Matiz (900cc engine) but it failed to meet one of our three criteria for a new car - I didn’t fit into it. We plumped for a 5 year old Vauxhall Corsa, with a 1.0 engine. In the test drive the accelerator didn’t seem to do very much but it did fulfill the other two criteria, namely that it will get from A to B, and back from B to A, and that it is cheap to run.
The biggest problem with this is that our carbon footprint has just gone up to ‘outsize shoes’ level. I’m probably not concerned enough about this, but it’s the bus’s fault. When the day comes that I come home to graffiti scrawled across my door with the words “Anti-Earth Eco-fucker” in red spray paint then I’ll know that society has tipped over the edge into demonising such iresponsible petrol-burning behaviour.
In the meantime, I’ll have to content myself with zooming my little puddle-jumper to and from work.
Ooh, and it means I can go to the gym in the mornings too. I just hope I get to finish my book now though, it was rather good.
Add commentJuly 2nd, 2007
I came across a piece of Java code so confusing today that I almost submitted it to the Daily WTF. It looked something like this (Variable names are changed to protect innocent trade-marks):
if(fileLoaded ? fileIsTypeA : file.typeA)
refresh();
else
enqueueRefresh();
I’m still not entirely sure what it does. My mind was mangled by the logic. I posted it to an internal newsgroup for the amusement of others, pondering who would have allowed such an abomination into the code-base.
Luckily CVS had the answer: It was me. I have no recollection of it, and have no idea what I was thinking or intending at the time. I don’t even know if it works.
Luckier still that I didn’t submit it to the Daily WTF.
Add commentJune 21st, 2007
I’ve been reading a lot of books lately.
Mostly it’s been non-fiction but the last few books have included a couple of non-fictions which I’ve enjoyed a lot. It’s strange, but I always look forward to reading a good non-fiction book but see fiction as a potential chore, even though I usually end up enjoying them more.
Anyway, I can recommend “The Coma” by Alex Garland, even though it’s so short that it can be read in a little more than an hour. Should have been longer.
I can recommend even more “The Raw Shark Texts” by Steven Hall. It’s kinda like the matrix with a shark as the bad guy. Actually, with the concept of a shark as the bad guy. Just read it… then I’ll make sense.
I need more book recommendations though. I’ve just bought “Calculus for Dummies” which is a sure indication that I desperately need more non-fiction on my to-read pile.
Add commentJune 20th, 2007