Will’s Web Miscellany

This has to be a fake, surely no-one could be stupid enough to name a shop ‘kidsexchange’?

I spotted this dodgy looking surveillance van in Manchester a couple of weeks ago (I have just managed to get the images off my phone).

Notice the cameras on top. It would only have been more menacing if it had ‘FREEDOM IS SLAVERY’ written down each side.

I took this photo of a dingy, slightly seedy looking second-hand book shop near the Northern Quarter in Manchester. There is something slightly sinister about the sign, almost like it should read ‘Kittens *Desperatly* Wanted’.

How to deal with Dangerous Animals, including:

Leopard:

Apparently one can pass close by a hiding Leopard and as long as your eyes don’t meet, it will allow one to pass. But the moment it is aware that one has noticed it, it will flee, or if cornered, may attack.

and:

Lion:

Never run away when you encounter Lions. If you run, they will run you down, as Lions instinctively charge and kill a fleeing animal. Stand still and slowly back away downwind until you are out of sight. If the Lion does not like the movement, stand still.

Useful information. Maybe.

“It’s pizza and beer in a bottle,” Seefurth, a self-proclaimed beer nut, says.

No no no no no! What’s wrong with beer flavoured beer!

Tony brought me a bottle of chili beer from his holiday.

It really does have an actual chilli in it.

Overall it was reasonably spicy, about madras level. And you couldn’t really taste the beer, it just tasted of chilli. An interesting experience though :)

I need a recommendation for something that is close to most geeks hearts, which coffee machine should we get for the 29degrees office!

At the moment we are buying coffee from the scowling café trolls downstairs and my two cups a day are starting to eat into my beer fund. Our requirements are:

1. Takes beans (or at least ground coffee, we could grind the beans ourselves I suppose)
2. Outputs good tasting coffee
3. Doesn’t need to be plumbed in
4. Doesn’t cost more than £1000 (I guess, I don’t know the budget)

Does anyone have any recommendations, specific machines, brands to go for or brands to avoid? Of course this this question makes the vain and probably misguided assumption that anyone will read this, or even care if they do :)

Someone has build a steam powered R2-D2:

The first robot that I ever built, was a R2…. out of legos when I was 5 years old. So after building over a dozen steam powered contraptions, when I “grew up”, I knew I had to visit my old friend R2. I love machines with personalities and charm. You can love or hate StarWars, but everyone loves R2. To many of us, R2D2 was our first introduction to robots, he’s a swiss army gadget bot with charm, who always saves the day. It just doesn’t get any better than that.

I disagree. It isn’t possible to hate StarWars (the original three films anyway). Really nice idea though.

Someone has posted their life in computers. Some good quotes:

After dropping out of college and spending two years flying airplanes and helicopters (while managing a pizza place), I got a bee in my bonnet to buy a computer. I walked into a store that sold Macintosh computers and walked out $5,000 poorer with an Apple Mac IIvx. It was a pretty big deal because it was the first Mac built to house an internal CD-ROM drive, and the first time I had even seen one.

and

Oh yeah…it was also the first machine I had seen Internet porn on…in glorious 256 colors!!!

My life in computers:

1. Acorn electron when I was about five.
2. BBC micro when I was about twelve becoming two BBC micros by the time I was fourteen.
3. An Amiga 1200 when I was about fourteen/fifteen. I had lusted after a couple of friend’s Amiga 500s for ages but the 1200 was well worth the wait.
4. My dad got a 486 DX2 66 with a whopping 8MB RAM when I was about sixteen.
5. From then until today I have had an immemorable series of home-made beige boxes, most of them free second-hand rejects full of spare parts.
6. A 15″ MacBook Pro with 2GB RAM. Yeah right, maybe one-day :)

Interesting article:

…I recently asked readers for their “tricks of the trade,” and was amazed by the response. It seems every profession is rich with clever little occupational secrets.

Here is one:

Juggler

With any routine under seven minutes (which is almost all of them), you only really need one thing: a good closer. And there are only two things you really need to know about a great closer. First, it needs to be impressive. That sounds obvious, but most beginning jugglers think “difficult” and “impressive” are synonymous. Your closer must look hard, but there’s no real reason it has to be hard. Secondly, you should intentionally blow your closer on the first two tries. If you get it on the first try it looks too easy, but if you “miss” it a few times it looks harder and builds tension.