I was listening to Darwin’s account of his trip to Tahiti and heard about a visit from the Queen of the same. I had to laugh as my minds eye painted this picture!
The Queen is an awkquard large woman, without any beauty, gracefulness or dignity of manners. — She appears to have only one royal attribute, viz a perfect immoveability of expression (& that generally rather a sulky one) under all circumstances.
off with his head!
I’ve got a Thing at the moment about loving our regular ingredients. British food is generally rubbish and Italian, French, American, Spanish, South American, African, Chinese, Thai, and Indian food are all great. Well I decided it probably wasn’t the ingredients. I decided it was probably the Brits’ attitude to food. I started thinking “what would an italian do with a turnip?” and so on. So when I stumbled upon this Recipe for Roast Sprouts I jumped at the chance to give the little blighters another shot.
Tossed in garlic and salt, roast in the oven for over half an hour, mixed with a rich sweet mushroomy sauce, and garnished with crisp, sweet shallot rings,
they tasted like sprouts.
Recently signs have proliferated on wash basins in public bathrooms declaiming “Caution! Very Hot Water!”
First: If the water is THAT HOT in a device designed for me to put my hands in: TURN THE TEMPERATURE DOWN.
Second: If I obey the sign, where do I get to wash my hands?
Third: If I learn that it is actually perfectly fine to wash my hands under taps labeled “Caution! Very Hot Water!” then is it not also perfectly reasonable to wash my hands under the tap of the tea urn? Or the water-mounted boiler for beverages?
Fourth: If it’s not reasonable for someone to wash their hands under the tap to the tea urn, WHAT SIGN DO YOU PUT ON THE TEA URN?
As time passes, unknown agents in our society are causing more and more unuseful signs to be placed wherever ou unsuspecting eyes may fall. All circumstances are labeled as exceptional circumstances and, hey presto, we start ignoring the signs.
You know those parents? The ones we see out and about who anxiously tell little Johnny off for jumping down a bit too quickly from the chair or for looking a bit like he was possibly about to walk near the kerb. Little Johnny very quickly learns to filter out the parent’s bleatings as background noise, and little Johnny is not listening when the parents tell him useful things like “those pills look like smarties but they will kill you”.
The application of a little Human Factors and some common sense shows us that overuse of safety notices is not increasing safety. It is training the British public to IGNORE SIGNS.
Today I caught sight of the last bottle of wine in my wine rack on the way out of the door, and nearly stayed at home to drink it in front of the telly. I arrived at work starving hungry after listening to Radio4’s book of the week: “Sound Bites: Eating on Tour with Franz Ferdinand” all about fragrant curry…
At lunchtime I went to look at bathrooms in B&Q but had to leave because I REALLY needed the toilet all of a sudden…
If you are trying to make your windows XP box talk wirelessly with a DG834G router, or a Mac, and your passphrase works fine with your Palm but your XP boxes are saying ‘little or no connectivity’ what it really means is that when XP converts a passphrase into a network key it does it differently to all these other machines. The KEY is the important part, not the passphrase, so write down that 26-digit hex number and type it painstakingly into all the XP machines you want on the network.
These days we see more and more websites with full video adverts on them. If I’m googling for something I’ll often middle-click all the likely looking pages to open them in new tabs. Often one or more of these contains a movie with sound. My headphones start to burble about rightsizing my corporate IT infrastructure or some nonsense, backed with strident music. My colleagues look up, or check their bags to see if their phones are ringing.
My preference is to ban them of course, but perhaps a better answer is to put a volume control on the web browser. GAK how that would be implemented though. I imagine video/audio plugins do not ask the browser to play their audio streams but talk directly to the O/S audio services.
Yay! SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) are neato! Look what you can do just by typing stuff into notepad then opening it in FireFox:
This (FINALLY) opens up a path to easy webserver-generated graphs and diagrams. Hoorah!
Presumably.