T O T K a t - 2 0 0 6

Burnt Bullshit

Aww diddums, a bunch of total crap, masqueraded as art, got burnt in a fire. A few people will make a lot of money from the insurance, but the art world will also be richer without this stuff. For God's sake, how can anyone view a bed with some messy bedclothes on it as art? It isn't. Emin is a fraud and so many people have been taken in by her. My only sympathy for this incident goes to the insurance companies who insured the "art works" and will have to pay out a lot of money as a result. OK, normally I see insurance companies as blood-sucking evil institutions, but on this one occasion I have sympathy.

Barbecueueueing

The barbecue appears to work. Well, OK, it'd be crazy and quite a feat of mis-engineering for it to fail to allow charcoal to burn. But still. Burnt potato, chicken leg, sausage and banana with melted chocolate coins were had.

Why is it that there are some days that you're permanently hungry? I mean, I had a toasted onion bagel with marmite for breakfast, pasta thingy and a yogurt for lunch and now I'm hungry again. Hmph.

And I hate Thameslink. More so than usual.

Oh and Livejournal people, if you like, you can syndicate my feed - user totkat_org is this journal, thanks to Gabe.

Niiice

There's something rather nice about a good quality, well-fitting shirt. Thank you Charles Tyrwhitt for the Paris range of ladies' shirts.

You and I or you and me?

Please God, can people just learn to get this right? It really is NOT HARD and getting it wrong makes you come across as... well, I was going to say a bit dim, but that's not fair if you just haven't been taught well. It's just so easy to get right.

Follow the bouncing ball and repeat after me;

   "You and I are going swimming, but Billy will be taking you and me to the swimming pool."

Think about it, drop the "you" from the sentence and see how it sounds;

   "I am going swimming, but Billy will be taking me to the swimming pool."

Now try it the wrong way;

   "You and me are going swimming, but Billy will be taking you and I to the swimming pool."

and remove the "you" again, you get;

   "Me am going swimming, but Billy will be taking I to the swimming pool.".

See? That's how you do it. If it sounds wrong without the other person then it is wrong, so do it the other way.

Rural Broadband

I remember watching this in the office on the day it was happening. There was much hole-picking going on by my cow-orkers and myself and quite rightly so. Not much I can add to the commentary in the link, really.

Last straw!

Right, Sainsburys, that's it. I put up with the Budwieser instead of Budvar, lime and coriander sauce instead of kaffir lime sauce, orange Fanta instead of lemon and lime Fanta, olives stuffed with garlic instead of olives stuffed with anchovy, Thatchers Cox instead of Thatchers Katy, 3 litres and 1 pint of semi-skimmed milk instead of 4 litres of semi-skimmed milk, and many more minorish irritations, but today was just the final straw.

Here were today's substitutions: pork loin chops instead of bacon chops (not too bad); Dove body wash instead of Dove hand wash (huh?); patterned kitchen towel instead of plain kitchen towel (no problem there); oh and no barbecue which I'd ordered, but all of the stuff that goes with a barbecue, like charcoal. Why do I shop online? So I don't have to go to the sodding shops? Now, it could be because I don't have a car, or I can't manage large/heavy things by myself so why in God's name do they let me have all of the barbecue accessories, ingredients and consumables but not the damned barbecue itself? Argh!

So, no more Sainsburys from now on. I'll get my barbecue from Ikea and shop with Ocado for the household stuff and food. Despite the fact that they don't do loose deli, meat, fish, fruit or veg, only pre-packed. At least they won't let you order anything that they can't deliver.

*giggle*

Essex Earthquake Appeal.

Saving money

How often did I watch the movie channels on Sky? More often than sports, which was never, and less often than the pay-per-view films. Hm. Not exactly rocket science to cut down the subscription then, was it?

And 1.5Mb down with 256Kb up for broadband. Do I really take up that much bandwidth? How often do I download large files? Quite. Winding that down to the 512 package (which is 750Kb down and 128Kb up, should be plenty) took less than 3 minutes, too. Easy £30 a month saving in less than 10 minutes, total. If it turns out that the 512 package isn't good enough, it'll be easy to ramp it back up again.

God given right

I've been following this little discussion about Penn State making students jump through hoops to run servers in their dorm rooms and have comment to make on the latest stanza.

Yes, higher education and academic freedom is important, but both are not god-given rights. And, I'm thinking that any reasonable enforcement of a policy would be fairly lenient with who it granted permission to run a server. That particular policy reads fairly harshly, but if it means that the central computing facility have a list of approved students it is easier for them deal with any investigations that may arise due to complaints; checking the "legitimate" servers first.

Yes, most students who run servers aren't serving gigabytes of porn, warez or other copyrighted material, or even doing anything for commercial profit (as that is against the JANET AUP too, kiddies!), but given that some do, I think Universities have a right to be cautious. Take an extreme analogy in gun control; not everyone who has or wants to own a gun would use it to kill someone, but it is made a little difficult in that you need a licence to own one which puts you on a register of owners. Does that make controlling ownership wrong?

Just think that anyone not at university who wanted to run a server (remember those at university are in a pretty privileged position in the first place) would have to sign up with a hosting service company, ISP or rack space provider and fill in very similar forms declaring that the server would not be used for any illegal purposes and then pay a not insignificant amount of money for this service. If it is a case of railing against being allowed to serve your own blog from your own server in your own room as an infringement of freedom of speech, um, no it isn't. You can do what every other Tom, Dick and Harry does and get a Livejournal.

If students want to learn about server technology, they sign up for the course, surely? I can't imagine a student who wanted to learn about biology and practise dissecting things in his own room would be looked upon too kindly, why are computers any different? OK, so learning about computers is massively helped by tinkering and fiddling, but why should that not be done in a semi-controlled manner? I can imagine, as yer man at uffish.net points out, that anyone who does want to do interesting stuff that isn't against the JANET AUP, will most likely be allowed to.

Meme

I don't normally go in for memes, but this one has pretty pictures...

You are a silver dragon. The rarest kind of dragon.
You are noble yet avoid humans as much as
possible. You are the guardian of the
defensless and you rule the skies.


Which Dragon resides in your soul?

Mind warping

TiVo had not only finished setting itself up and recorded the film I'd asked it to last night, but by this morning it had also recorded something it thought I might like (and it wasn't far off even though I hadn't set up anything else to be recorded and the genre of the film and programme quite different ).

However, I have warped its little brain with a bunch of season passes this morning for all the stuff I could think of off the top of my head. I'm thinking medium quality may well be a bit high for the amount it is going to be stuffing onto disk. Next month, I believe I shall mostly be looking at getting a 120GB disk to add into TiVo.

Ti-i-i-i-I - Vo!

Don't mind me... I'm just in lust with my new baby. TiVo is, well, just perfect. I can't pervert its tiny little mind properly until it sorts out the listings overnight, but... oh there is nothing I can say. The only teeny-tiny issue is the IR emitter is currently glued to a ruler that is sitting on top of my Sky box for channel changing. I'll find a more permanent solution at some point, I suppose.

My PVR, my precious. Not even because its my birthday, but just because we wants it. I. Can. Pause. Live. TV.

Lycos just don't get it...

...along with all of the other crazy scare-mongers who have demanded legislation against GMail. The eloquent version of the rant here.

Ti! Vo!

TiVo has arrived! Wooooyeah! OK, so I can't get _too_ excited until I've plugged it all in, set it up and made sure it works properly tonight, but I've got it!

Just not screwed on

It has to be one of the most annoying things to do... get home (or almost all the way home) and realise that your house keys are not with you.

There I was, in M&S, hurling the Lemon Meringue sorbet back into the freezer because I wasn't going to get served in time to pay for it (because everyone in the fast track queue was paying by Switch for 4 items and wanted cashback and... gnngh!) and catch my train for the penultimate leg home from work and I realised I didn't have my keys on me. How cross was I?

It ended up with me having a curry and 1 1/2 beers that I hadn't intended to have and feeling quite ill on the way out of the restaurant. Next time I get the feeling there's something missing as I leave work, maybe I should check that I have everything I need. Hmph.

Mourn the passing of BBCi

I can't say I think it was a good idea, dropping BBCi in favour of bbc.co.uk. It just looks less good. But still. There it is. No more BBCi, only bbc.co.uk.

The drooling is over

TiVo will be mine in a matter of less than 48 hours. Oh yes. Muh hah hah hah haaaa!

Rail rage and suchlike

So there was a points and signal failure in the Kings Cross area just before I wanted to get a Thameslink train out of City Thameslink to go around the Sutton loop. This meant no trains coming into City for a 45 minute delay. Then we were sat at City for a further 15 minutes as the train in front (at Blackfriars) was awaiting crew. Meanwhile, the guy say in front of me huffed, swore and slapped his hands to his forehead all in rotation; eventually getting out and yelling aggressively at platform staff at Blackfriars (once we'd moved to the next station) to ask when we would be moving. Thankfully the station staff replied, quite firmly, that the train would be moving when the driver got the signal. That went down _really_ well with the guy who got back to swearing, huffing and slapping his own forehead.

So, I can handle the fact that there are problems until we get tipped out at Wimbledon; the train we're all on being called to reverse and go fast back to Blackfriars. The station annoucement said the next Sutton train would be in 10 minutes and anyone wanting intermediate stations to Blackfriars would have to consider using SWT or the tube, or wait a further 30-40 minutes at platform 9.

The next announcement, another 5 minutes later said exactly the same thing. Nice that we lost another 5 minutes. Hey ho. Anyway, the train finally arrived and I got on, along with a gang of schoolkids who then get down to the serious business of being irritating little shits. I only realised when I got off at my stop that they hadn't been just messing about with the doors, jumping on and off at each station and holding them open, but that the familiar smell that I couldn't place was, in fact, permanent marker that they'd been using to graffiti all over the back wall of the carriage. I'd been facing the other way, so I didn't see them do it. Dammit, if I'd been facing the right way I'd've used my phone to photograph them at it and hand it over next time I go through a manned Thameslink station.

Why are so many schoolkids like this? Or is it just where I live?

Wi Fidelity

The new WiFi access point has arrived, is set up and running. Easy peasy set up, thank you 3Com and it allows for port forwarding. So it looks like I'll be getting rid of the router PC, which will be good in terms of noise and power draw reduction in the study. All in good time, though.

Back to drooling over TiVo. (Sky+ just isn't the same.)

css

So why is it that Moz, Netscape, Safari and Firefox (and possibly a whole raft more) half ignore css? The link styles get respected in the side bar, and in the main body, totally by IE. The others respect the link styles in the side bar, then completely ignore the link and visited link styles in the body, but respect the highlighted and active link styles in the body. *wail* Why? I'd rather they thoroughly ignored all or did what they were told completely, not some half-way house, hybrid mess.

On call

Another week of being on call looms and it looks like just the weekend will be a bit busy, with possible excitement on Sunday night/Monday morning. A week of gameplaying ahead. Or it would be if I weren't off out for 3 lunchtimes... social calendar *grin*

2am again

...and there I was, staring at the insides of my eyelids, wondering if sleep would come. No external reason for no sleep last night. Bah. I think my body clock needs a smack. Shame I go on call on Friday, as that usually makes it a whole lot worse.

But then again, I will be able to get some quality DAoC in during the week. Mmmyes. I'd not been playing much recently and was missing it. Having done some really quality RvR last night - I mean, a group of 6 of us toasted 2 full groups (16 people) of fairly high realm rank, in a prologed scrap at the end - I'm raring to get back into it properly.

...and there's a horrid and untraceable smell in the office.

New toy... kinda

To replace the Airport Extreme which will be going in the next month or so, I've ordered a 3Com wireless jobbie and found this cutie while I was shopping around. Very sweet and handy for moving around machines if needed. I didn't get one this time, but I may do in the future. At least I know they exist now. USB WiFi cards made by a reasonable manufacturer that is.

Loony clips

I guess it would have been pretty at totality had I remembered to look. Still, I saw it at around 22:10 and it was pretty cool then. Er, the lunar eclipse, that is. The next one is on my birthday, which will be nice.

The torrential rain afterwards was not so nice. Having the windows open a little to keep the temperature down, meant that the rain kept me awake until around 2am. How grouchy? Grr.

Bah

Can't sleep. School tomorrow. And I can't sleep. *grouch*