I forgot to mention, Carol’s failure to go to her exam was a complete wind up: she went and did well… O and the tractor thing turned out to be an orchestrated wind up too, which I sussed when the THIRD package arrived containing a video about tractors, this time from my Mum.
Well, I’ve just had my second computer virus infection in a month. It’s incredible that there are STILL security flaws in IE after all this time! I fail to see why Microsoft should be incapable of creating an overflow-proof library for linking against. There are arguments against bounds-checking all your copy operations: it’s far less efficient. But then when did MS ever make a choice based on the efficiency of their software?
Forgot to blog yesterday… well I remembered a bunch of times, but I was at work and thought I’d wait till I was home. Then I forgot. Pity really because I’m sure I had something to write about while I was at work, whereas it’s all a blank now. So I’m going to complain about blogger. But first a bit of techy background.
One of the areas where Microsoft Windows has ALWAYS done well is that it’s provided a keyboard-only way to do just about everything. You can choose a different window with Alt-Tab and Alt-escape, you can open menus by pressing Alt and seeing what letter is underlined, and you can move between edit fields and buttons by hitting tab and shift-tab. This gave you completely mouse-free way to do most tasks - useful if you didn’t have a mouse, can’t operate regular input devices, or like me, spend most of your time at the keyboard typing things into one window or another.
But you can’t on blogger because their new “improved” site design doesn’t show the unsightly (and vital) dotted box around the currently-selected button or item >:-( It’s like taking the handles off the doors of a road car because they spoil the lines of it, forcing you to get in through the tailgate.
I have a non-geeky story.
I’ve been coaching Carol (from Salsa, not Carol of Thinging fame) in her GCSE maths. She’s recently made a change after many years selling clothes and managing a shop to being an assistant at an opticians. So she wants to bone up on her sums. Carol’s got a similar mathematical brain to mine, too quick, a bit blurry in the middle, and right often enough to be statistically significant. This of course is no good whatsoever for a GCSE exam, since they want to see your WORKING. It took me till degree level computer science to really see the value in putting down your working… up until then it’d been an encumbrance. Nowadays I’m far more methodical. It means I can put stuff down and pick it up again more or less in the same place after… well, say writing a blog entry for example.
I digress. We’d figured out cumulative frequencies, she’s a demon at trig, we’d cracked algebra, got a tenuous grip on simultaneous equations, were scratching our heads a bit about graphs, and were generally doing OK in the past papers with her slight cheating nicely balanced by my slightly harsh marking. The exam was on Tuesday. Kate and I were out for a pub lunch in the spitty, and Kate texted to ask how she was. We got a text reply:
“it’s becca [Carol's daughter]. mum’s locked herself in her room and says she won’t go to the exam”
I grabbed the phone of kate and txted
“tell her to get off her ducking[kate's predictive text dictionary didn't contain the desired word and I declined to enter it] arse and get to that exam or I’ll never speak to her again!”
It went a bit quiet after that. When I got home I found a missed call from Carol from just before the exam… I returned it but just got her answerphone.
I wish I could blog like Henners. But on reflection, I’m happy that Henners blogs like Henners and that I’ve got relatively little to write about.
That said, starting today I will attempt a full month of daily bloggage. At least that way I can Thing it when the thinging page gets fixed.
Today I will avoid mentioning UML and the fact that I currently have three versions of it at my disposal: the version as taught by SAMS Teach Yourself UML in 24 hours (Thanks MMM), the version as dryly exposed in Hans-Erik Eriksson and Magnus Penker’s “UML Toolkit” and the stuff in the spec I’m working to, which seems to be assorted ad-hoc diagrams created using all the same symbols and terms as in UML but actually not really meaning anything in UML at all.
Because geeky blogs are NOT cool.
I guess this is the danger of trying to write the first thing that comes into your head, when you’re a professional Geek.