Mongers’ challenge is to see how high up the ordinal numbers you can get using titles of films you have seen - not including the “part II” suffixes. I used IMDB for research purposes, but only listed films I have seen.
- One flew over the cuckoo’s nest
- Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
- The three musketeers
- The four musketers
- The fifth element
- Sixth sense, but I have to see this
and this now. - Seven samurai
- cheat: I once saw the end of 8-mile. But need to see this
- plan 9 from outer space
- Ten things I hate about you
- ocean’s 11
- Twelve Monkeys
- Assault on precinct 13
- 14 carrot rabbit
- *bzzt*
- sixteen candles
- *bzzt* *bzzt*
- 28 days later
- ** is hooked by a comedy shepherd’s crook and dragged offstage **
EditPadPro is a text editor I bought years ago for about £30. If you are editing a document and you go File->Open… then it opens the file dialog box pointing to the directory of the file you were just editing. This means that if your text files are all in My Documents, it always opens in My Documents, whereas if your text files are somewhere else, it opens there. It seems bloody obvious to me that this is how applications should work.
- Microsoft Word does not do this
- Microsoft Excel does not do this
- Adobe Acrobat Reader does not do this
In EditPadPro, if I open a document that is marked on disk as read-only, the words “read only” appear in the statusbar, and when I try to type in the document, nothing happens.
Word prints “(read only)” in the title bar, then - when I close the document, because it had some macros in it, asks me if I want to save changes! Even if I didn’t make any changes! Which it would let me do anyway!
In EditPadPro, if I open a read-only document, then realise that I wanted to edit it, I can change the properties of the file using windows explorer, then hit refresh in EditPadPro, and hey presto, it’s no longer read-only! In Word, I have to close the document and re-open it!
In EditPadPro, if I have two files, e.g. “Accounts\ToApril05\cashbook.txt” and “Accounts\ToApril06\cashbook.txt”, I can open both and they show up in two tabs which I can easily switch between to copy changes across. Microsoft Excel WON’T EVEN LET ME OPEN TWO FILES WITH THE SAME NAME!!!
As Nick at work said, if he was writing a spreadsheet program, he would have to spend extra effort to make it refuse to open files with the same name…
Since my Motherboard overheated I replaced it, but I didn’t replace the power supply. Although I read that a 350W PSU should be sufficient for the system I have, maybe the PSU also overheated and is running unreliably. Today I took delivery of the least spectacular modular power supply I could find. It has two huge fans and a billion braided cables, and a super futuristic case design. In fact if I took a picture of this PSU you would probably say it was a computer generated image, and a bad one at that, since the surface reflects light in impossible ways.
It was actually difficult to find a powerful PSU that did NOT have blue go-faster LEDs on it.
Now I have the torture of not having time to fit it for a few days…
This is just a rant and not interesting at all. Be warned.
My PC is rubbish! The Hard Drive failed, I replaced it with a SATA drive, which meant I had to get a SATA card, then I got a new monitor that the video card wouldn’t drive, so I got a new video card and then the motherboard overheated, so I bought a new motherboard, CPU heatsink fan and memory, and this has never worked right for more than a month. I’ve been getting blue screens of death and loss of everything, the net has been almost useless because web searches only turn up hearsay from other people who have seen your same problem, not authoritative information on the actual bugs you are seeing. So I stripped out loads of hardware and pared it right back, cleaned all the contacts for the memory and video card, reassembled the system, and got a functioning PC back. It installed about 9 updates, which caused it to reboot 4 times, then last night I turned it on and it told me there was a fault on the disk and it wouldn’t boot.
This means that in the last 18 months the bloody thing hasn’t been working long enough to back up all my data from it!
I decided to have lemon and ginger tea instead of decaff coffee for my teabreak, but couldn’t because there were no cups the right shape.
I also found it hard to write the title of this, on account of Aspergers looking a lot like it’s Dutch for “belonging to the guy who grows asparagus”. It should be Aspergers? Ik?
If you want to know about aging, you only have to look at trees. As the Taoist text goes, Green plants are tender and filled with sap, withered and dry after death. This philosophy finds its way into most Chinese martial arts and, somewhat paraphrased, says “If I’m gonna be hit by a big hammer, I’d rather be a cushion than a breezeblock”.
But, as with all Chinese images, it can be read many ways. We can also see that the mind is soft when we are young, susceptible to the suggestions of our peers, and hard when we are older. The 30-something, having decided on his own preferred way of folding t-shirts, whether or not to iron underpants, and whether to put knives in the drainer blade up or down, finds himself able to be irritated by more and more small details. These are like the small twigs on a mature tree - they are small but hard, and can easily be snapped.
To my mind, young idealism comes from a process of communicating with your peers and achieving a consensus while at the same time being removed from the responsibilities (read: limitations) of having to be completely self-sustaining on a practical level.
Many people, on making the slightly bumpy transition out of childhood, find themselves forced to behave in ways that don’t click with their youthful ideals. For many, this results in resentment, guilt, and anger. However, it is the young idealist within who is guilty and angry, not the adult, who can see the necessity and inevitability of the change. People who fight growing up will lose - that’s not to say you shouldn’t fight, only that you shouldn’t beat yourself up when you end up growing up despite yourself.
The root of the conflict is this: do not confuse adult behavior patterns with the death of youth.
The way to stay young is not to stay acting childish, it is to maintain your softness and flexibility . Accept the evidence of the world around you and make decisions based on the practical consequences. Maintain your ideals but allow them to be bent. If they are rigid then, like the hammer and breezeblock, something will give. Keep the young mind within you young, accepting, adaptable.
If you try to stay young by constantly pruning away adult behavior, you will end up as a bonsai … hard, brittle branched, constrained, limited, and unable to survive without constant maintenance.
People should not be kept in pots!
Yesterday afo was another go at making convincing Latin noises. This time we had bass, keys, bongo and timbales, and it was sounding good! Need at least one, maybe two, more percussionists, and a couple of brass players / violin / flute and we’ll have a band! It was really starting to flow yesterday, though we have yet to converge on a particular style.
At present exactly half the band are dancers rather than musicians, and the other half are completely not dancers. It will be interesting to see if we can come up with stuff that is interesting enough for the musicians while still being danceable… Or whether the more I learn about the music, the more I’ll think that actually the dancers need to learn to dance to a wider variety of rhythms!
This morning I had two novel-but-ultimately-not-really-worth-blogging-about experiences.
First, putting £2.03 worth of petrol in the car. The reason, as I explained to the cashier, being that I need to dismantle bits of the fuel tank tomorrow and thus want to almost run out of fuel tonight. But don’t want to run out of fuel on the way to work this morning.
Second, seeing Harry Gration on the forecourt of the garage, looking fairly grumpy and miserable I have to say, presumably at the somewhat grumpy and miserable weather we’re having right now. It was nice to see that individuals at such an elevated position in life are still subject to the same treatment at the hands of the elements as the rest of us. I expect he’ll still be having words with Paul Hudson when he gets to work.
I came upon the term Passive Aggressive in the Woody Allen film Husbands And Wives, and it occurred to me that all I know about it is what I learned from that film. It’s a great trait in a fictional character, as a Passive Aggressive “fosters chaos” and provides a constant stream of new conflict for the protagonists to overcome.
From Wikipedia:
In the psychoanalytic theory of transactional analysis, many types of passive-aggressive behavior are interpreted as “games” with a hidden psychological payoff, and are classified into stereotypical scenarios with names like “See What You Made Me Do” and “Look How Hard I’ve Tried”.
What works in fiction is not so great IRL however.
Oh noes!
The world famous isitfriday.net has fallen off the internet, possibly for ever! Insider information has it that the very server it sat upon has been put in a box and into storage pending the sale of the house it used to live in. Obviously this is a stressful and emotional time for all concerned but won’t somebody consider the children?
Meantime, we will all be forced to find OTHER MEANS of working out whether it’s going to be the weekend soon!