Stuff Archives

So the news story from the US is that United are going to start charging $25 per additional bag. The news from France, however, is that flight attendants are stripping for the pilots. Probably a fair reflection on the difference in service.

The video of the strip tease can be found on The Sun's website. The think I like best about the article is the fact that it isn't possible to squeeze in another pun. Starting with the title across the picture “ hello ... this is your captain tweaking” to the old favorite of finding somewhere to abuse the term “joystick”

Saturday morning and time to head out to go house hunting. But not any ordinary Saturday morning to go out for a drive. No, brother Hog ordered himself a car public address system that you connect up and it plays noises (like the noise of a cow) so that you can surprise unsuspecting people. Or so it says on the box. This product is, apparently only available in the US and will only ship to a US address so my brother had it shipped to me and I can then arrange to pass it on to him in the UK - either on my next trip home or by mailing it.

Obviously I couldn't resist the urge to test out this ingenious invention. So I thought, why not video it, so I did. You too can see how amazing this product isn't by clicking on the “Hog Horn” link from the Other Videos page.

Things to look out for:

• Between the break when I connect it up, I'd practiced using it. Note William's expression when I flash to him
• On the animal noises, it seems like those that we actually take a guess at (chicken and pig) are actually wrong.
• Is it me, or is the car's indicator the loudest thing on the video?

Now, what you don't see is that after I turned the camera off, there was actually someone at the side of the road. I hit him with the duck noise and he totally didn't hear it.

Now, now, the other bit that you didn't see was the effort that went into putting this together. We head off on our journey and the windscreen wipers on Karen's car were just leaving a smeary mess on the winDSCreen. I couldn't see a thing out of my side. Karen claimed she could see out of hers, but appeared to be peering between the streaks akin to looking out of a pillbox. I seriously thought this gadget was going to work, so I made her drive back to the car parts shop. I bought two new winDSCreen wipers and stood in the rain for about 30 minutes getting soaked trying to figure out how to fit them. It really wasn't worth it.

Now, now, now, did you know that there is a left and right winDSCreen wiper. No? Well, nor did I. I guess I had a 50% chance of getting it right when I put them on, but odds like that never seem to work out. I believe Murphy's Law intervenes somewhere along the line to considerably reduce the odds below 50% which is why I fitted the new wipers the wrong way round. You can't actually tell from the video as most of the video is just a shot of the speaker on my knee. We drove round for about 4 hours before I realized that I was looking through a brand new widescreen TV and Karen was again peering though the old 14" black and white. I guess I could see so that's all that matters really.

Press release:

“EastBayRag, the Bay Area company headquartered in San Francisco, announces that it is going to cut 1,000 jobs throughout it's global operations. The company is feeling the pressure of all the other software companies being bought for obscene amounts. In an effort to realize the EBR Business Plan, and to entice even higher bids (hopefully up to $44.6 billion), the company has decided to take the drastic measures.”

I mean, come on Microsoft - $44.6 billion for Yahoo! I only want $10 million. It's a drop in the ocean and look what you get. So Yahoo's got a bigger customer base, more intellectual capital and a couple more assets, EastBayRag has a logo with a bloke fishing on it. And one that I ripped off from some clipart somewhere. What more could you want?

Following the theme of the previous article of random irrelevant facts, here's one for you. If you go to Google and type in EastBayRag, it will find this site and display entries to hit the relevant page. If you go to Yahoo and try the same it will not find anything and will ask you if you meant to try something different. Now, if you look at the IP address that this website is on and lookup the owner, you will find it belongs to Yahoo. Although I host this site myself, Yahoo is my ISP and they are the ones providing connectivity to the Internet. It seems that Yahoo's search engine doesn't look at what's going on under its own nose. (I'll leave you to deduce the rest for yourself).

Is it just me or do I have a right to question the units of measurement used on the news this morning? They were discussing the fact that January has had a significant amount of rainfall. And I quote, the amount of rainfall was “eight and thirty nine hundredths of an inch.” It was even written as 8.39"

Last time I checked, inches were typically broken into sixteenths or multiples thereof so you could go to 1/32 or 1/64 etc. I don't recall ever hearing an imperial measurement having a metric (or decimal I suppose) end to it.

Maybe the US is not content with just altering the rules around language to make it more phonetic (as opposed to correct [he hypocritically says typing and spelling in English US]) that they decided to bastardize (noting the spelling with a “zee”) the measurement system.

(And I know the measurement systems aren't the same in the sense that things like the fact that a US pint is different from a UK pint, but at least there's a reason for that. That reason being that the UK changed its system to imperial in 1824 which is post some irrelevant July 4th date so America didn't adopt it. If you really want to get you head in a spin, America uses English Units. English units are outlawed in the UK by the 1824 Weights and Measurements Act, so the UK uses imperial, a.k.a. British Imperial System. I guess the US is more traditional than the UK).

Congratulations to Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates for winning the Daytona 24hr race for the third year in a row. Second year in a row for Scott Pruett and Juan Pablo Montoya at the wheel. (Not at the same time, obviously, otherwise it would have been a little crowded in the drivers seat). And first time for Dario Franchitti and Memo Rojas who were the other two drivers to take the wheel for stints.

In other news, beware the little people. Whilst most people are focused on the recession, The Sun ran an article this week about gangs in Sweeden putting dwarves into bags and putting them on buses. Whilst in transit, the dwarves would crawl out of their hiding place and loot the belongings of other passengers. Full story Cops Hunt Dwarf Thieves

“A view or outlook” normally associated with something of beauty or worth looking at. Bought a new computer at the weekend for Karen as I seem to be taking up the others so she needed something to use. It came with Windows Vista on it. Turned the computer on and it spent several hours unpacking itself (metaphorically speaking as I mean unpacking of files, not unpacking itself from the box - that would be pretty cool if it did that) then it spent the next two days patching itself which resulted in it not being able to run the pre-packages software that came with it.

Seriously! Now when you boot the computer it tells you that it has compatibility issues with the webroot (anti-spyware) software that came with it. There's a button to click to fix - click it and it goes off to the internet, spends a couple of minutes searching, then tells you it can't fix it but you'll be notified when a fix is available. In the meantime contact the application vendor. You go to webroot's website and it tells you that the Windows Vista upgrades are causing problems with their software but they are “aggressively” working with Microsoft to fix the issue and as a workaround, you should consider uninstalling the Vista upgrades.

And that's progress!!

(Yes, I know all you Mac fans are laughing, but you really don't know what you're missing. Where's the fun in having a product that works as you expect it to?)

After doing some general housekeeping to tidy up some bits and pieces that I've been meaning to do for a while, I got to thinking about changing the intro to the site. It used to start by quoting the opening line from the WASP song Electric Circus - welcome, I bid you welcome, to life inside the electric circus - and I thought probably about time for a change. So I moved the intro text off the home page and created a page that gave an overview of the genesis of this site.

Whilst doing it, I got to thinking “what do I want to get out of this?” so I wrote a business plan to define my long term strategic objectives. It took me a long while to put this together, factoring in global economic conditions (strength of dollar, price of oil etc.), looking at my career plans and growth opportunities on my current career path, performing a SWOT analysis layered onto PEST analysis multiplied by Porter's Five Forces. Finally, considering Maslow's hierarchy of needs to establish my desired end state and help determine what I would need to climb to that level of the pyramid.

Anyway, the business plan is linked from the genesis page, but to save you from searching, you can access it from the link below:

EBR Business Plan

2008 certainly seems to be the year of the tit so far. As many of you avid readers may know, I've developed an interest in photography. You may not, however, be aware that my folks put nuts out in their garden for the local birds. What that means is that this Christmas holiday presented itself with the opportunity to take a few photos of the birds in my parents garden. And, as the title suggests, the most common was the tit. First off, there's the common pair of tits (Great and Blue). These are your bankers, those that you can gaurantee to see on any day. “The pair that keeps popping out.”

Now, ordinarily, most people would leave it at that. And I have to admit, at first, that's all I thought was there. Now I think the problem is that typically you get into the “can't see the tits for the bush” syndrome. Basically, getting caught by the other features and not staying focused on the tits. But if you look carefully, there's always another pair lurking in the background. In this case the Coal and Long-Tailed Tits as shown below.

Well, there you have it ..... “ddddrrrrrrr” ..... What was that? ..... “ddddrrrrrrr” ..... There it goes again. Surely it can't be? But yes, it's obvious really. With all these tits about, there was sure to be a large woody somewhere wasn't there. And in this case a pair of Greater Spotted Woodpeckers. Woody's pictured with their nuts below.

I was watching “How William Shatner Changed the World” the other day. Hold on a minute, did I just say that out loud. Ooops! Looks like I did and what's worse, I seem to have written it down. Still, I suppose most people know I'm a geek by now, but if there was any doubt left in your mind, I think I've just killed it.

Anyway, the program was talking about things like the flip phones in use today being designed by Star Trek fans, then moving onto things like whether or not the warp drive concept would be possible (which, apparently some people think it could be). Finally it got onto the transporter system which unfortunately isn't going to be possible given the amoung of energy it would require to work - clearly they haven't seen &ldquoThe Fly” - and the person talking on this section commented on the fact that it would be very desireable as he did a lot of flying and really didn't like it.

I too feel that I'm in the same position. I know all the statistics are there around safety, but that doesn't mean I have to like it. I think it's the not being in control bit that bothers me. On my flight over here, we encountered some turbulence whilst flying over the States that made me really want someone to press ahead with the invention of the transporter.

One other random fact, we arrived in the UK too early as we had favorable tail winds. Too early as Heathrow doesn't open until 6:00 am. Odd as I thought it was a 24 hour airport, but apparently not!

Yet again, Mr O met up with Karen and myself to do the local bumpkin quiz. This time, however, it was the big annual Cricket Club quiz which we've never won before. There were about 20 teams that entered the quiz and we came out victorious even though we were one of the few teams that only had three members.

Well, according to everybody else in the pub we may as well have only had one member - Mr O. After we won (on a tie break question as we had drawn with one of the other teams) everybody came over and congratulated Mr O on his win. Nobody gave Karen or myself any credit for our involvement in this (supposed) team victory.

As I felt the need to point out later, it was very much a team effort. Mr O did actually get the answers to all the questions, which probably warrants most of the credit, however, Karen wrote all the answers on the answer sheet and I sat there making fart noises to put off the other teams.

My Christmas present this year was a "Dr Fart." Said items is a keyring thing with six buttons on it that you can press to emit different sounds of flatulence. I've been kept continuously amused with it for two days now, so it was money well spent. The only complaint I have is that it's not loud enough. What that meant is that I needed to time the trumping noises with when it was quiet. Sort of going for the "OK, Question one [slight pause] thbbrrrtttt" Anyway, you get the picture (talking of which, there's a picture below of my wonderful present) and I don't feel that my skill or contribution to the team effort was truly recognized, so I'm going to take the opportunity here to congratulate myself!