I’ve been a “netizen” for over a decade, and I’ve seen some pretty grim things in those years. But today I probably saw the horriblest page on the whole net.
This morning I had a disappointment when I looked in the mirror. Even more so than usual. You see, it turns out that I dreamed that I shaved, so was somewhat surprised at my hirsutitude*. Considering anything at all can happen in your dreams, I can’t help think that I’m wasting valuable sleeptime on mundane activities like shaving. Where are the having sex whilst skydiving dreams? Where are the piloting a spaceship through an asteroid belt dreams? I’d like re-runs of some of the ace ones I had as a kid like the one where I was walking home from school and it was raining hard so I swam up into the air and flew home doing breast stroke. THAT is a dream worth having.
* yes, that IS not a word.
I woke early this morning with the idea that there’d been a knock at the door. I had been having an ace dream, involving timbales, a lathe, and possibly other exciting elements. I dunno, I was asleep. But then I wasn’t asleep, I was blearily peering out of my upstairs window to find who had knocked at my door.
Nobody. I went back to bed.
Later I rose at a more respectable hour, though still before my alarm, and dreamily schemed about breakfast and dressing … but the bathroom light didn’t. Light, that is. I tried the landing light, the bedroom light… nothing. I checked the fusebox and the master switch was on. I checked the meter and there was a “DO NOT TAMPER” seal stuck across it. I didn’t know whether it had always been there or whether I’d been cut off. I dimly recalled getting a lot of documents from London Energy that seemed a bit complicated so got put on piles, then the piles got tidied away etc…
I was proud of myself for realising it would be best to find the papers while it was still light. I was still going through paperwork when I remembered the 9:30 telephone meeting at work so I packed my shampoo and a towel and dashed to the office. Fortunately I managed to shower before the phonecall as I think they might have smelled me even from India.
After the phone call I found the London Energy documents on my desk. There was a bill addressed to “the occupier” and dated March. I phoned the number and said cryptic things to the robot at the other end until it passed me to a human, a good-humoured Geordie or Mackam (sorry I really can’t tell the difference by accent) who seemed genuinely embarrassed to have to read out the boilerplate script parts of the conversation. He said no they haven’t cut me off, they don’t generally do that sort of thing. I said while I was there on the phone I might at well pay the bill and set up direct debits.
I said I’d seen some guys with a digger on the street corner and they might have put a spade through the wire, and at least it had given me a wakeup call to phone them! He said he should suggest that to the bosses, send round a guy to “accidentally” cut the wire. Maybe he’d get a prize…
So the long and short of it is, yes I owed the electric money, no they hadn’t cut me off, but I still don’t know whether I have got electricity. The hot water is on Gas but depends somewhat on the electricity to light it.
The Z-order, also known as the stacking order, is how windows keeps track of which window is on top of which. When you click a window it comes to the front of the z-order. If you hold ALT and tap TAB, then before you let go of TAB ALT you see the z-order of the windows on your desktop. The icons nearest the top left are the windows nearest the top.
If you minimize Word, Notepad, Internet Explorer, Lotus Notes, just about any windows application, then hold ALT and tap TAB, you will see that they have gone to the back of the z-order. Seems reasonable enough: when you minimize something it means you’re done with it. Another way to send something to the back is ALT-ESC. ALT-ESC is a bit of a stretch so I’m in the habit of ALT-SPACE, N to minimise and send-to-back the window I’m working in.
Now try it with Firefox, Thunderbird, or iTunes… they don’t go to the back, they stay at the top of the stacking order even though they’re not even on the screen! This is really annoying, not least because it means when the boss comes past and I minimize hottubbingteens.com, er, my webmail, then when I nonchalantly ALT-TAB to get from the editor to the commandline I get hottubbingteens.com back again! I mean my webmail!
I can only assume all three programs are using the same GUI support library and that it has a bug in it. I don’t hold out much hope of figuring out what library and actually getting to report the bug though…
that 5-a-day thing is rubbish. I had 5 portions of fruit cobbler yesterday and I feel like crap this morning.
There’s a road marking near my work that I think is dangerous, or rather, its presence mixed with British road users puts me in a safety-related quandary daily.
As you exit this roundabout onto a dual carriageway there’s an area in the left lane that is chevronned off - though it is surrounded by a dashed line. The interpretation is “please don’t drive on this bit of road, though it’s not actually illegal”.
It’s there because there’s a petrol station right by the roundabout, so you can give the people coming out of the petrol station a fighting chance to get out.
BUT YOU DON’T HAVE TO.
My usual routine is to use the right lane, then as soon as I’m past the chevrons, pull left. I’m usually doing the speed limit or more, and AFAIK it’s still illegal to overtake on the left, but I still check my left mirror before pulling in.
Today I checked, and saw one or two cars and a motorbike. As I started to pull in, the motorbike screamed, pulled up onto its rear wheel, and came past me on the inside doing something like 70mph. On its back wheel.
Fortunately, I resisted the urge to “teach him a lesson” and only hooted at the moron rather than finishing my manoevre. He looked at me all put out that I sounded my horn so dangerously in the middle of a stunt manoevre of his.
I was too stunned to even take his number plate.
I hope when he dies he does it with an inanimate object not with another vehicle as the other person in the crash may feel guilty, never knowing what a public service they have done putting this idiot off the road for good.
When I went to America I had to do some mysterious work on a piece of software. Mysterious because all I knew about the software was what it was going to be a FLIBBLE which was specified by the WIBBLE organisation. At first I didn’t even know whether the FLIBBLE was a piece of software or hardware. I was given many hundreds of pages of specifications. My boss was learning UML and trying to figure out the various UML tools. I boned up on UML and thought a lot of the diagrams were talking rubbish, but thought it must just be that it had been a while since University and I hadn’t touched UML since, and maybe UML had changed in that time.
The contract, the team, and presumably the project all kinda fell apart during and after my visit.
Here I am, two years later, and I’m now employed building a FLIBBLE again. This time we have a working FLIBBLE v0.1 to go from, and tests, and examples. This time I understand that the WIBBLE organization is in fact fallible. And the FLIBBLE specification is pretty bad! So I now feel a whole lot better about not being able to do it before - the fatal flaw had been assuming these people knew what they were on about!