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Damn snow

// February 27th, 2004 // No Comments » // Personal

Well the snow from the night before last was obviously only the precursor to big daddy snow. We got about 6 inches on the ground this morning (yeah, I know it’s not a lot, but this is the first time we’ve had snow anywhere near that deep on the ground since 1997) which in turn meant that the motor bike stayed home and I had to get the bus in. I dislike bussing to work. Not out of any hatred for public transport – I’d quite happily bus it every day if it were feasible. No the problem is that on the bike it takes 20 minutes (max) and on the bus it takes an hour and 10 minutes with a change of buses in between.

Last night was interesting (the quiz went great by the way – a whole 3 teams braved the snow to play). After the quiz had finished we were invited back to a friend’s place to build a snowman in the front garden of their work. Snow is heavy. and wet. and cold but fortunately we were able to make two massive snow people. One was obviously female by dint of her rather large frontage and we left them, smiling at the world through coal eyes, holding hands and enjoying the fall of fresh snow…

Many of the children currently enjoying half term would not have seen snow before (or not in this kind of quantity anyway) .

So I can’t feel too bad about having to bus everywhere today because, whilst snow is a nightmare for adults, it still fills kids with wonder and excitement and they deserve a bit of fun.

Interesting facts

// February 26th, 2004 // 1 Comment » // Personal

via Toby who doesn’t have a blog but sends me tons of this shit via email every week:

A rat can last longer without water than a camel.

All the planets in our solar system rotate anticlockwise except for Venus,
which rotates clockwise.

A ‘jiffy’ is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.

A hippopotamus can run faster than a man.

Chocolate kills dogs.

Armadillos can be housebroken. Armadillos can walk underwater.

The very first bomb dropped by the allies on Berlin during WW2 killed the
only elephant in Berlin Zoo.

0.3% of all road accidents in Canada involve a moose.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors.

Babies are born without knee caps. The develop them around 2-6 years of age.

On average, 100 people a year choke to death on ball-point pens.

Update: Also from Toby, some interesting questions about these interesting facts
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Whoo looks like the quizzes are back up to speed

// February 26th, 2004 // No Comments » // Personal

You’re The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe! by C.S. Lewis

You were just looking for some decent clothes when everything changed quite dramatically. For the better or for the worse, it is still hard to tell. Now it seems like winter will never end and you feel cursed. Soon there will be an epic struggle between two forces in your life and you are very concerned about a betrayal that could turn the balance. If this makes it sound like you’re re-enacting Christian theological events, that may or may not be coincidence. When in doubt, put your trust in zoo animals.

Take the Book Quiz at the Blue Pyramid.

Pinched magnanimously from Sue (who for the record has a cool new skin so go and say hi and take baked goods and stuff)

I get to do a quiz tonight

// February 26th, 2004 // 3 Comments » // Personal

Following my immense success with bingo over Christmas it has been decided that I am a worthy candidate for the post of substitute quiz master tonight at my local.

Only one slight problem – so far the quiz that the regular guy was supposed to prepare has yet to materialse… oh dear.

Fortunately, I don’t have a lot on at work today and so should be able to craft the required 40 questions (that’s not a lot really is it) over the course of today. And just because I know you guys like a challenge, I’ll post the questions in 5 question blocks starting tomorrow.

Markiss – you’re not allowed to enter as you’re more than likely going to be there tonight anyway.

Oh and if anyone has some real humdingers of questions let me know and I may well include them…

Fucking snow???

// February 26th, 2004 // 2 Comments » // Personal

Welcome one and all to the sun kissed Channel Islands… the forecast for today looks bright with a slight risk of snow flurries throughout the day …

Yes it’s snowed in Jersey. This ridiculous behavior began late last night and has continued, on and off, throughout this morning. It’s a pain in the arse. We don;t get enough to do anything useful (like provide a reason to not go to work) but we do get enough to make motorbiking into work more than a little hazardous.

I need a car just in case this ever happens again.

Crashy Badness

// February 25th, 2004 // 1 Comment » // Personal

So Windows is back on (nice clean fast new install which will remain that way for about … ooh a week) and I finally got Mandrake to install but only in text based mode.

It seems there is something in my system at home that Linux just doesn’t like and I can get about 5 – 7 minutes of runtime out of the system before it locks up. The main suspect is the graphics card but I won’t know until I get the spare one home tonight. It seems that maybe I should start looking for a cheap spare system with no components made before 2001…

Flux

// February 25th, 2004 // 2 Comments » // Personal

This weekend marks a pretty major change in my lifestyle, the first of such changes for a good 3 years. Moving out is going to be a good thing *hopes* but there’s so much to think about that every time I start I nearly drive myself crazy. The big stuff is not really a problem – Rent sorted, actual task of moving dealt with. But it’s the little bits that are driving me up the wall. Things like kitchen equipment, the ominous task of running cable everywhere (I use a lot of power points and quite a few other points – best guess any room I inhabit will have at least 50m of cable in it).

Then there’s the areas where I’ve never really excelled previously, shopping being one of them. I’ve never quite managed to convince myself that bread and milk are staples, olives, proscutio and tapenade are not! I can see my moving process going something like this:

Pack up life (computer is the last thing to get packed)
Zoom off to new flat all of 2 miles from current one
Unload car and unpack boxes (computer is the first thing to get set up)
Settle back with glass of red wine whilst wondering where everything is going to go.

Then just to make matters worse, I have my bike test on the Monday. If I’m a little quiet this weekend then you’ll know why.

It’s been a while…

// February 25th, 2004 // 5 Comments » // Personal

But Pixy found a great lil quiz thing:

Rob

Guppy

Agility: 7
Strength: 8
Stamina: 8
Battle Rating: 23

Origins
Rob is the spawn of nuclear sludge released into a lake

Heh, my fishy kicked Pixy’s fishy’s ass! Yay piscine violence

The fates are conspiring against me

// February 24th, 2004 // 10 Comments » // Personal

I’d like to apologies in advance for this blog being a bastion of technicality for the next couple of days but there are big changes afoot in the way my home PC is organised.
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Only 1hour 19 minutes to go

// February 24th, 2004 // No Comments » // Personal

Until the third and final disc image of Mandrake is safely sat on my hard-drive. We were talking about his in the pub last night – the way that expectations have changed with regards to downloading software from the Internet. The time was that we would think nothing of connecting to the Internet at speeds of 2-3kbps. Then of course you have the advent of 56k dial up which seemed like such an improvement.

The only problem with connection speeds is that your expectations shift in line with the increase. Suddenly 56k meant we could view flash movies, download larger images and maybe even connect to something like Napster. Downloading anything under a MB didn’t seem to pose a problem.

But equally, where in the bad old days, users would bemoan the length of time it took to download half a floppy disk’s worth of information, 56k users would bitch incessantly about how long they were forced to wait for programs or animations to download. Nobody seemed to notice that image quality had improved and that the average web page size had quadrupled.

Th same thing happened with Broadband (I’m going to skirt round ISDN here because anyone who tried to set one of those up will know that connection speed was the least of your worries). As soon as ADSL and cable sustained any kind of proliferation the Internet shifted. Now we’re complaining that the MP3’s just aren’t easy enough to find and that the quality of the streaming video is nowhere near as good as it is on your DVD player. I’ve been guilty of this today, halfway through my second disc image (thats 1.5 lots of 700mb for those who don’t know) I was bemoaning the fact that the connection speed had dropped to about half it’s original state. I stopped myself and couldn’t believe what I’d just said! I was bother that it would take an extra 30 minutes to download over 2GB of data.

You have to wonder what they, the boffins in charge of this stuff, are going to come up with next! My home network runs a gigabit link and is tied into to a relatively paltry 512kbps DSL line. What happens when the average connection speed is up to 512gbps? What then will they have found to maintain our disappointment …