Apart from getting our new boat, the best thing that happened this weekend occurred while visiting friends, Kev and Alice. They have a pet African pygmy hedgehog.
What do you mean, 'look out'?
The hedgehog, called Crumble, first performed his sounding grumpy and curling into a ball for 30 minutes routine. Then he went for a stroll in his outsize hamster wheel.
After a few paces, his body became wracked with spasms, in what turned out to be a prelude to defecation. Having laid down what was troubling him in his wheel, he paused and then…
I thought to myself, ‘If he keeps walking that thing is going to reach the top of the wheel, almost certainly become unstuck and fall on his head.”
Crumble took two steps, raising his glistening handiwork to nine o’clock, and paused. We looked on agog.
With perfect comic timing, he twitched his nose, took two more steps and, testing the adhesive properties of his own faeces to breaking point, stopped.
To the great delight of everyone, apart from possibly Alice, it detached and fell, neatly skewering itself on Crumble’s tiny African spines.
It doesn’t get much better than that.
WAN optimisation expert says rabbits should be kept well away from relational databases
In a keynote address at Dean Street’s Subway, leading WAN optimisation expert, Elmer Fudd, said that on no account should rabbits be given access to relational databases or the recent rash of highly publicised incidences of network slowdown would inevitably continue.
“Rabbits are just bad for databases,” said Fudd. “It’s the hair on their tall and pointy ears. There is nothing else on the planet as good at collecting electricity from the atmosphere and conducting it into nearby databases as rabbit ears. It messes with the metadata. And when that’s messed up the network can’t perform well at all.”
Fudd concluded that the best way to maintain slick WAN optimisation is to keep the rascally rabbit problem to an absolute minimum, especially in data centre space. He cautioned that rabbits dressed as ladies should not be trusted and the best thing to do is unload both barrels of an elephant gun into cooling ducts, where they typically make their homes.
WAN optimisation expert Elmer Fudd
It’s not like they’re any good or anything but that other lot are taking us to the dogs and need to go.
We went to the London Boatshow, made a bee-line to the RS stand, bought a brand new racing dinghy and then went home. It was the weirdest thing.
Here’s a photo of one (that I half-inched from Highcliffe Sailing Club’s website):
It’s the future of cinema blockbusters
The last time I saw a 3D movie it was in the late 70s/early 80s. It was Jaws and it was pony.
Yesterday, just after being prompted to don 3D spectacles, the trailers for future 3D movies started. Within seconds I was slack-jawed in amazement. I wanted to reach out and touch the Cheshire cat floating just in front of my face (fortunately, I had read something advising that only really stupid people do that). If there had been a train, I would have run out of the cinema screaming. It was brilliant.
Then Avatar started and reminded me that technical wizardry is best used to serve plot and script, rather than the other way round.
It had all been said
The girl bought nice stuff to them
He would not blubber
(Why write a standard review of a book when it can be done in Haiku?)
Our flight from Grenoble arrived tolerably late. However, we weren’t allowed off the plane because BAA hadn’t bothered to have enough chocks available to stop the plane from rolling around the tarmac as we descended the stairs.
When we did get off, BAA hadn’t bothered to unlock the door into the terminal so 200 people had to just stand about until it was opened.
Then BAA couldn’t be bothered to get our bags off the plane so we had to stand around for 45 minutes while they cleared the fluff out of their navel and remembered what it is they are supposed to do.
While waiting, we got thirsty so went to the Coca Cola vending machine, which had a very clear BAA logo on it. The machine didn’t vend but did steal our money, and the BAA representative said he, ‘ …didn’t care.”
What the following video doesn’t show is what happened when we pressed the so called ‘coin return’ button (nothing)
BAA: load of rubbish (and that goes for you too, Coca Cola vending machine people)
My life is going to be much better from now on. Probably, this device will prove transformational. Yes.
Does anyone know how to delete the welcome text messages from Orange?
Madame, I can not see, but I definitely remember.
In this novel, the population of an unamed city, one by one, goes blind. Imagine that. Yes, it would be bad, wouldn’t it. The premise provides Saramago with an opportunity to explore ideas about the individual, relationships and society not available if he played his novel off a straight bat. However, in the process, he comes over as a sex mad old giffer, slightly out of depth in credibly presenting what is essentially a sci-fi plot.
The Road details the effects of all encompassing environmental problems on the individual. Blindness is more introspective than that, as blindness is first of all an individual problem that, with enough of it about, affects society.
On a point of order, the translation (from the original Portuguese), doesn’t seem to know the difference between a comma and a full stop, and ignores other niceties, such as paragraphs. Hard work.
José Saramago won the Nobel prize for literature. I assume his other work was written further within his comfort zone. I doubt I’ll ever find out.
Phase 1 of the plan is working…
