Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
04 2005
Loose electrical wiring, when kicked out of the way because your hands are full with heavy, bulky objects, will always fall in exactly the spot where it will be most in the way, or do the most damage, or both.
Corollary
The same applies to computer networking, mouse and keyboard wiring; only moreso.
posted at: 21:02 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
Today's lesson was to not typo an IP address and end up trying to VNC 'view' localhost.
Despite some rather surreal window-in-window, -in-window, -in-window, etc... action, I fail to see what lesson can be learned from this experience... apart from not doing it again.
posted at: 17:55 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
The problem with eating a turkey fillet sandwich while having a bath is that a large glob of salad cream and tomato ketchup is inevitably going to fall into the water, which is a bit ick.
On the other hand, it can be used as an educational experience regarding the vast amount of food colouring in ketchup...
posted at: 13:44 | path: /observations | permanent link to this entry
My God do these programs suck! They make each other crash - I don't know how/why. They hog the CPU and RAM like something, well, from the Microsoft stable of products? I estimate I am wasting up to 2 hours a day due to these products crashing and losing my work on a regular (hourly, or more frequent at times) basis. I am doing a significant amount of cutting and pasting between the two apps - but still... Do Microsoft have no QA? The levels of instability of these products belies belief.
Once again, I have opened Visio while editing a Word document - and it managed to take both itself and Word out. Completely! It also managed to use all my CPU until a three finger salute, wait for screen to redraw itself, select the processes, click [End Task]. Visio now crashes itself EVERY time I paste anything from it into Word. It does (at least) complete the paste operation, which is something, I guess... Though I do then have to save the Word document and restart Word to ensure that Word doesn't crash itself a few minutes later. This is not the Utopian computing experience I aspire to...
If I had any choice in the matter, I would not use either of these tools for anything. The levels of frustration they have driven me to over the past few weeks (I've been predominantly writing up my design work for a software project, readying it for implementation) is immense. I have no choice in the matter, since these are the chosen tools of my workplace. If you have any say in the matter, just say no. I know there are alternatives to Word - not really looked into a Visio alternative yet - but rest assured I will. Microsoft Word and Visio are appalling.
I will finish this rant by saying that should anyone from Microsoft read this and care to comment on it to me, preferably with some solution for the ongoing pain I am having with these two products, please do drop me a line at bigbro-at-signal2noise-dot-co-dot-uk.
posted at: 23:36 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
I've finally given into pressure and managed to overcome my extreme laziness and made a little script that generates thumbnails for my gallery postings. I'll backport the existing gallery postings to use the generated thumbnails over the next couple of days, but I'm pretty busy at the moment so it may take some time.
I've also created a blog for The Priestley so hopefully there will be some photos and stuff there soon. URL for the blog will be released shortly.
posted at: 14:37 | path: /gallery | permanent link to this entry
URL (Uniform Rubbish Locator?)
Ah... the internet... bless its little cotton TCP/IP stacks...
Found this on the web today...
Eventually I've had the chance to clear the photographs off my phone and put them up for all to see. Paddy's Day this year started with a charity gig for the Lord Mayor's Trust in Bradford. Irish music and dance provided the centrepiece for an indoor market of Patrick's Day, Easter related and local arts, crafts and produce. Lots of fun and lots of money raised for local charity.
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Some links that some other people found and gave me because my links of the day is becoming so famous throughout the world... or something. At least, that is what I am choosing to believe ;-)
We had some friends over at the weekend (review of the all important
TerrorVision gig coming soon) and we decided to go and see some big old
machines on the Sunday. I took some pictures, presented here for your viewing
pleasure, or something :-)
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The daily dosage of linkage, dude...
(What I was trying to post yesterday from my Nokia 9500 Communicator was actually the following observation.)
My mobile phone rudely pointed out to me the gaping chasm between non-engineer's writing and their meaning. I'm sure you've all seen the notices requesting you to turn your phone off when entering a cinema, or a similar location where quiet is required. But, turning my phone off doesn't make it stay quiet at all: it cleverly turns itself back on again to make loud alarm noises for calendar appointments, todo items and a host of other things.
There is, of course, a way to ensure it stays silent: selecting the 'silent' profile. Perhaps we need to update all those signs to tell mobile phone users to 'put your phone on "silent"' rather than suggesting they turn them off? Is this a case where organisations with a policy on mobile devices should actually state their desired outcome, rather than some 'interpreted' method of supposedly achieving their end? There are some interesting parallels between this technique of putting interpreted desires on notices, rather than the actual desire, and the dreyfus learning model. Perhaps I'll meander through this another day :-)
Of course, in places such as hospitals where there are EMI issues, the notice to power your phone off is correct and should be respected.
posted at: 12:52 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
At no expense whatsoever, here are some links that Sinéad and I found today, for your education and amusement. The really strange weird ones are Sinéad's ones... I'm not taking responsibility for them ;-)
Some arbitrary HTML that appeared interesting to me at the time...
Why can I not cut and paste between the document writing app on my Nokia 9500 and PuTTY (also on the 9500?) Things like this upset me.
posted at: 16:16 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Just a spoon full of links to help the medicine go down... (yes... they're getting worse... *cry* )
The truth is out there... allegedly. Here are some URLs I found today that may or may not prove this:
I have bitten the bullet and managed to find the 10 minutes required to put some hot CSS action into the blosxom script that generates my blog. I think it looks a lot prettier... one reader commented it looked a lot more 'grey' - Grey is the new black, I tell ya! I may get a bit more adventurous when I find more time to devote to it, but it seems to be working okay (for some value of 'ok') at the moment.
One issue I had was that I failed to be able to find a way to distinguish between <a href="remote_page.htm">...<a> type links (that are links to remote pages) and <a name="#anchor_name">...<a> type anchors. Am I missing something blatantly obvious? Or was I just being bitten by various CSS implementation bugs which fail to honour the a:hover style for a:link type links? Answers on postcard to...
(Note: Gareth promises to set up a method of providing comments and feedback on blog entries in the very near future. Honest, he does... *cough*)
posted at: 12:32 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Some links that found their way (mostly accidentally) into my browser...
As seen on a certain IRC channel earlier today:
<dredg> Sammi: oh well. i'll just have to amuse myself by reading bigbro's girly-man blog (the life and times of a long haired crusty posing as a 14 year old girl)
I'm not sure if it applies, or in fact if it makes any sense whatsoever - but I'm glad that a certain segment of society are getting their jollies from my blog ;-)
Note: Yes, dredg scares me a lot. Him and his awe-inspiring battallion of ice-weasels...
posted at: 15:13 | path: | permanent link to this entry
Sinéad found some links again...
Some links someone sent me because they thought they should be here...
Tongue firmly in cheek, 10 minutes (or probably a little less, actually) with the GIMP and I'd come up with this... ph34r! ;-)
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