Sitting in my garden this evening when an impressively-coloured bird landed three or four feet away. It just so happened that I had a portable device with me which could tell me, without me having to make any sudden movements or noises that would scare it away, that it was a goldfinch.
Now tell me. When, in the entire history of civilisation, has that been possible before now? Technology – it’s blimmin marvellous.
Because I just had a minor panic thinking that the screen on my MacBook was completely screwed, and I think the solution needs a bit of Googlejuice:
The symptom: Your screen shows patches or bands of alternate in-focus and out-of-focus pixels, as if it was set to a resolution one or two pixels out from the correct one. Moving your mouse pointer up and down the screen causes the screen to shift up or down by one pixel (and the blurriness to move to another region). Restarting doesn’t fix it, although the problem only reappears part way through logging in, and it doesn’t affect any other users on the system.
The solution: Press Alt+Apple+8.
The explanation: You accidentally turned on OS X’s ‘zoom’ accessibility feature. It seems that if you’ve never used this before, or you have your preferences set up in just the wrong way, the default zoom level is “just a couple of pixels in from full screen” – enough to make things go nasty and anti-aliased without it being obvious that it’s zooming in on anything.
…and no, this is not your cue to crack jokes about things that give you blurry eyesight and their possible correlation to being a mac owner.
Sundown 2007 – the UK’s premier demo party, happening beside the seaside in lovely jubbly Budleigh
Ah, the joys of having an online pseudonym that’s completely irrelevant to anything…
Dear Gasman,
I am Mr. Alex Ibe, an accountant with one of the reputable banks in
Nigeria. I was also an account officer to late Mr. Gary Gasman, a national of your country who was a contractor with Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas Company (NLNG). On 18th May 2003, Mr. Gary his wife and their two Children were involved in a car accident along Kaduna-Abuja express road.All occupants of the vehicle unfortunately lost their lives. Since then I have been trying to locate any of Mr. Gary’s extended relatives, but this has also proved unsuccessful. After these several unsuccessful attempts, I decided to track his last name over the Internet, to locate any member of his family hence this proposal to you in other to assist repatriate the money left behind by late Mr. Gary before they get confiscated or declared unserviceable by my bank.
You can guess the rest.
I’m in two minds as to whether it’s a straight cut-and-paste job, or whether this guy spent some time lovingly hand-crafting this tale of Mr Gasman who works for a gas company. I really wish it’s the latter.
I notice that McVities Digestives now have a little note on the packet saying “Lower in salt”.
So I did. It was disgusting.
In the town centre this morning, I had this exchange with a random bloke:
Him: ‘Scuse me, have you got the time?’
Me: (checks watch) ‘Twenty-five past eleven.’
Him: ‘Cheers.’
(double take)
Him: ‘Twenty-five past one?!?’
Me: (checks watch again) ‘No – eleven.’
Him: ‘Ah. Thanks.’
This in itself might seem fairly mundane, but what makes it rather amusing is that
1) only 30 seconds previously, I’d just picked up my watch from Timpsons where I was having the battery replaced, and was pleasantly surprised to note that the nice man in the shop had set it to the correct time, and
2) since Friday night I’ve been intentionally mucking around with my sleeping patterns and attempting to work to a 27-hour(ish) cycle to try and get my demo finished for Assembly, and up until that point I’d been trying to persuade myself that it was in fact some time around 5 in the afternoon.
What, still not amusing? Please yourselves.
Here’s something random to distract you on your next coffee break. As many people are no doubt familiar, when you play a song on an iPod it displays the following information arranged in three lines:
Title of song
Artist
Title of album
On the way to work this morning with my colleague Dave, I noticed that his iPod was displaying
The Hand That Feeds
Nine Inch Nails
With Teeth
and after briefly wondering whether those nine inch nails had teeth or were being fed them, I set off thinking about other songs which spelled out phrases and sentences in the same way. They seem surprisingly uncommon – besides a few dubious constructions (“I Do Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians Shooting Rubber Bands At The Stars”) the only good one I could come up with was “In A Graveyard Rufus Wainwright Poses”.
Any others? Three million bonus points if you can find one that fits 5-7-5 syllable haiku form.
I’m back from a skiing holiday with folks from work, in Chamonix in the French Alps. It was my first experience of skiing apart from one afternoon on the dry slope at Pendle aged about ten, and over four days I acquired some stylish moves on the green run at Le Tour, a chronic fear of ski lifts, and a large quantity of photos which are up on my newly-created Flickr account.
A warm welcome to everyone who stumbles upon this site! I’ve finally caught up with the year 2004 and got myself a Proper Blog, and this is the first real entry. (Just to be confusing, I’ll be extensively back-dating entries to cover things I’ve done in the past, so eventually this is going to end up somewhere in the middle of the archive. Never mind.)
The main reason it’s taken so long to get round to this is my pathological mistrust of other people’s software. I really wanted to write my own blog engine, something like Blosxom but in PHP and even more minimalist, but having watched that sink slowly down my personal todo list, I swallowed my pride and (encouraged by Tom, who has generously let me loose on his UML server) installed WordPress. And, I have to begrudgingly admit, it mostly does what I want. Just not as elegantly, that’s all. (Plugins that do their own database queries? Shock horror! They should be doing it through a billion levels of abstraction, so that the database can be swapped out and replaced with an NNTP server, or a P2P network, or…)
I’ve already made a (two line) hack to the code to set up the events listing in the sidebar just how I want – the EventCalendar plugin is pretty good, but it’s based on the assumption that you’re going to write a whole blog entry about that event. Why on earth would I want to do that? It’s someone else’s event, and they’ve invariably already got a perfectly good page that I can link to directly.
In fact, that’s more or less going to be my philosophy for this site as a whole. I’m determined not to let this become one of those blogs that just regurgitates other people’s news stories in different words, or plays trackback table-tennis with speculations about Steve Jobs’s new haircut. I reserve the right to indulge in opinionated rants now and again, but it’s primarily going to serve as an outlet for my own original work. No gimmicks. Just me, in a pub, with a pint of John Smiths.
