2009 — 1 December: Tuesday — rabbits!

Good grief again. This is the fourth time it's been the 1st of December since I became an ex-IBM gentleman of leisure. And, almost before I know it, it's now 00:22 and I've lost a minor league chunk of my life watching "Catch & Release". I truly believe nobody actually sets out with the intention of making a bad movie, so where does it all go wrong?

Beats me, chief. I'm off to bed; I have a crockpot to be assembled before I set off to see Ian later today. The forecast suggests it will most likely be dry during the trip, but not very warm. So it will be nice to come back home to a nice hot meal without the bother of having to cook it. G'night.

Unlike Webster's Dictionary...

... I'm Bordon-bound. But not without a) some breakfast (when I can face it), b) at least one hot cuppa inside me (check), c) a sizzling crockpot left behind to do its thermal thing (give me a while), and d) a feeling of minor smugness knowing that (unlike all my neighbours) I'm not going to be spending a few minutes scraping ice off my car's eyelids following (judging by the evidence of my bleary eyes) what must have been quite a severe frost last night. I thought it felt quite cool as I staggered up the stairs just after midnight.

It's 08:58 and the sun has been out and about only a little longer than me. I shall give it time to do its thermal thing. (And try to remember a can of de-icer as Ian's drive lacks my amenities.) The "Africa fantasy" by Saint-Saens nicely segued1 into a lovely bit of Bach. That's better.

Here we go again... dept.

During one (of several) periods of uninspired lunacy when programmers in IBM Hursley with nothing better to do decided they could write code to assess the innate quality of a technical writer's output I had some fun battles (a bit like shooting fish in a barrel) taking the "results" of their (asinine) "analysis"2 and eviscerating it in (for me) really quite angry memos3 to a manager or three. The software has become more sophisticated, if one is to believe today's Guardian. Source and snippet:

But perhaps most intriguing are the tag clouds generated from each episode. In the [CSI] episode Cool Change, the tag cloud reads: jackpot-shakes-night-suicide-word-brass-want-bringing-somebody-statement-interview-intercut-stuff-sidewalk-money-can-minute-ear-grabs-sir-stay-coffee-little-present-officer-until-leans-eyes-watch-doubt-enough-fibres-sees-key-question-sits-home. Reducing an hour-long drama to the 30 or so most-mentioned words ought to be meaningless, yet weirdly, it gives a surprisingly accurate summary of key plot points and how the drama mounts.

Mira Katbamna in the Guardian


You don't say. :-)

Time to start the crock-pottery process. It's 09:55 and lovely and sunny out there. This bodes well.

(More than) one in four of us here in the benighted Kingdom is now in education. Crikey. So how come we're not smart? (Source.) Perhaps here's a clue?

Don't say: "The thing about children these days is that because of television and the internet they've got very short — oh wow, look at that dragon."

Anon in the Guardian


Why is my online bank offline? "24 x 7" indeed. It's 11:26 — not siesta time already, surely?

Oops

Not even enough time to type the word "be"! Is it just coincidence that spam emails ordering me to perform mandatory update of my data with this bank are currently running at about three per hour?

The glory that was...

... the Lower Danube Valley? Fascinating. (Source.) I wonder if, in years to come, any of the artefacts mentioned here will be deemed as amazing?

It's December, Christa...

... and still your favourite rose bush carries on carrying on!

Rose

Probably misses you as much as I do, I guess. Right! Time I wasn't here. I shall say "Hi" to Ian for you.

75 miles later...

... I can report that my chum Ian is on great form, perhaps slightly towards the manic (or, in his term, "wired") side of his bipolar condition, syndrome, whatever. He is, in addition, a Mensan of considerable attainment, which all makes keeping up with him an interesting task for a cold afternoon — his gas boiler had packed up this morning, just in time for my visit. Brrr. We were also entertained by a Mori interviewer who called in. I suspect Ian is as far from the "normal" as I am — it was fun to eavesdrop.

Somehow, I found my way back (in the dark, of course) via yet another route, but it was a vast improvement on the nadgy little dirt tracks I was taken down by my faithless dominatrix-in-a-box earlier in the afternoon. I arrived one minute late, which struck me as quite good. But at home the ansaphone held another message from my mother's worried neighbour, so my good mood has dissipated somewhat. However, a cheerful call from Junior got me back on an upswing. It's now 22:13 and I'm a fair way towards being knackered. I got back just in time to stop the crockpot going super-critical, but now need another cuppa while the rest of it chills down for further enjoyment later this week.

I'm never quite sure...

... when Private Eye is reporting, as it were, "just the facts, ma'am, just the facts":

Only recently secretary of state Hilary Benn and his Defra [Dept. of Environment Food & Rural Affairs] team had to launch an emergency redesign of their website (cost: £180,000) after a focus group said it had too much brown in it and looked "too agricultural".

"New Bio-waste spreader" in Private Eye


Priceless.

  

Footnotes

1  Not a word I've ever used before. The only occurrence of it on my entire PC is in a scurrilous piece by Paul Krassner that I have tucked away for a rainy day. It's an urban myth about Lyndon Johnson, and definitely not grist for my morning mill.
2  Just one example (from memory). A simple three-bullet list of less than twenty words in total was assessed (automatically) as requiring the reader to have a PhD level of education. Each time I asked a manager whether they had a PhD, and then asked them if they understood the text list. The usual answers were "No", "Yes, of course" and then "Why do you ask?" Good fun.
3  One (but by no means the last) mistake during my inglorious "career" down the various greasy Corporate snakes that seemed (in my case) vastly to out-number the ladders.