Will’s Web Miscellany

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.

“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.

I love these sorts of things. Found via Wondermark.

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: ‘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.

Apparently ‘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.

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

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

Nice.

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.

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.