Archive for the 'General' Category

8 bit ties

Tuesday, April 10th, 2007

Apparently thinkgeek.com’s 8 bit ties were a popular enough April-fools joke that they are actually going to become real:

“Hey! You! Quit emailing us to make this for REAL already ;) We promise, we’ll make it. In fact we are already working on it. You’ve just forced our hand! Click the ‘email me when available’ link above to get notified! Thanks! I guess the joke is on us this year :p”

Yay! If I ever wore a tie this would be the tie I wore.

8 bit tie

Star Wars’ R2-D2 to collect post

Friday, March 16th, 2007

“Postboxes across the US are to be dressed up as Star Wars robot R2-D2 to celebrate 30 years since the release of the sci-fi series’ first outing.

I like it. I want one. And that is exactly why all these will have been stolen within a week. Anything starwars at all is collectable, and I predict these will be collected.

Full story at the BBC.

Really cool Rube Goldberg device

Friday, March 16th, 2007

I love these sorts of things. Found via Wondermark.

Five things

Thursday, February 15th, 2007

I’ve been tagged by Dean Wilson, so here are five things you might not know about me.

  1. When I was younger I wanted to be be a dustman so I could operate the jaws on the back of a rubbish lorry. Later I wanted to be a robot.
  2. I only started to like cheese about two years ago (when I was 26).
  3. I start a new job at 29degrees on Monday.
  4. The first computer I had was an Acorn Electron, the first language I programmed in was BBC Basic.
  5. My favourite food is not Curry, that is second. My favourite food is Italian.

Damn you Dean, this will teach me to read your blog ;)

I am a meme-whore so I pass this on to Andrew Disley, Paul Robinson, Dan Morris, Dave Verwer and Deb Bassett.

Management speak, translated!

Wednesday, January 24th, 2007

Management speak: ‘Informal Catchup Meeting

Rest of the world: ‘Talk

This wouldn’t be so bad if the person who uttered this phrase had actually arranged to meet the only other ‘meeting’ attendee in an informal setting to catch up on whatever needed to be caught up on, but this phrase was actually used to refer to two people bumping into each other in the canteen and having a chat. Brilliant.

If anyone actually reads this and has any other good examples of management speak please add them in the comments.

More for your Money

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

Apparently ‘Homes in Corby, the next property hotspot, cost 154% less than London’Homes in Corby, the next property hotspot, cost 154% less than London

This looks like a mistake until you do a google image search for Corby which turns up a site with aerial photographs of Corby which could better be described as a ’shithole in the middle of no-where you would have to pay people to live in’.

Thanks to Christian Smith for the Original image.

This had to be deliberate

Monday, September 25th, 2006

According to Alan Gibson, (Acpo’s lead on cannabis cultivation) “Cannabis cultivation is an increasing problem which must be nipped in the bud

You can’t make this stuff up

New meaning of ‘Bad username or password’

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

Today the automatic password generator at work came up with the gem ‘dildorapers’.

Nice.

Set the format of ‘Date’ fields returned by Oracle

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

For some reason Oracle returns the date from ‘date’ fields in the format ‘dd-short_month_name-yy’ (or something like that) by default. This is crazy, who uses the date in that format? No-one, that’s who. To change the format of dates returned for all queries returned to a database handle do something like this:

$dbh->do("alter session set nls_date_format='yyyy-mm-dd hh24:mi:ss'");

(or the equivalent in your language of choice) and the date returned from any date fields will be sensible, much like the way postgres does it. And why does Oracle not allow the use of limit? I guess this comes as a £10,000 upgrade or something.

Amusing response seen on a mailing list

Friday, July 14th, 2006

http://www.sun.com/servers/x64/x4500/index.jsp

24TB in 4U. Oooohhhh… missus…

Depends if you are a storage man or a processor man.