Posts by The Man Himself

Legonaut!?!?

I hope that your trusty Playmonaut is now demanding unionisation?

Back in my past

I remember when I was working at a place where temp contracted labour such as myself definitely had second-class citizen status...and I also remember the moment when I realised that contracted labour such as myself wasn't constrained in the same way as staffers.

Annoying boss: We're busy doing staffy things - go and make tea

Me: OK. [Exit stage left ]

< some time later >

Me: [Enter stage left, bearing tea] Tea's up

Annoying boss: <Splutter> Yuk! You've put loads of sugar in this

Me: I used my initiative - you look kind of overweight, so I assumed you'd want a few spoonfuls in there.

Oh, the irony

I can't help but smile at the irony of BT being referred to as REMEDY....in my experience they have always been the cause of problems, never the remedy

Patterns

You do see some fairly obvious patterns sometimes though, such as the Hotel-Owner-Sock-Puppet-Defence pattern:

Reviewer with many reviews to their name: "This place is rubbish"

Reviewer with only 1 review to their name: "This place is great"

Another reviewer with many reviews to their name: "We hated this place"

Another reviewer with only 1 review to their name: "We loved it"

Further reviewer with many reviews to their name: "Go back? Over my dead body"

Another reviewer with only 1 review to their name: "Can't wait to go back"

etc., etc., etc....

"The cameras on the vehicle cost about $2,000, Odden said, whereas military cameras would set the army back $100,000"

in other words, the camera kit is rugged enough to be able to describe it a such in marketing literature, but likely to fail or fall to bits when subjected to the rigors of the battlefield

"Hitachi said the new lift will elevate people-carrying technology to ever greater heights."

It sounds more like elevating to similar heights, just getting there a bit quicker

txt spEk

As your first paragraph ably demonstrates, with the proliferation of txt speak, pretty much every SMS I get these days appears to be encrypted. Couple that with a predictive text faux pas here and there, and the content is as unreadable as anything that's been through a military grade encryption system.

Yes, I am an old fart.....and proud of it....

value of intellectual property

" The project, called BULLRUN by the NSA and EDGEHILL by the British spies at GCHQ (named after the first battle in both countries' respective civil wars) meant that anyone with sufficient resources could crack the encryption and destroy the value of intellectual property"

But this would be a Good Thing wouldn't it? At least it would seem to be, based on the number of comments one reads online from freetards demanding that information be free and saying that hoarding of intellectual property is a Bad Thing.

Not trolling, just asking....

Freetards

To all of those whinging about the new changes and the adverts....get a grip. This is a free service. Do you have any idea how much it costs to source, manage and serve the mapping data, to develop and distribute the app, etc.?

I'm not a Google apologist, just a realist. If I pay for something, and the person I'm paying then screws around with what I've paid for, then I can complain. But if someone gives me something for free, at expense to them, I'm not really in a position to claim that I'm hard done by if they change it in a way I don't like.

the right man for the job

Device security is important, so I'm glad this is being addressed by someone as sensible and level-headed as....oh, never mind.....

Gasmasks

Three words for you...Gasmask Kazoo Orchestra. (search for it on the Tube of You, and you'll see what I mean)

surprised?

"Ballmer announced his surprise resignation in August 2013."

He mismanaged a once-mighty tech behemoth into a shadow of its former self....I can't say his departure announcement really came as much of a surprise.

Mission Brief

I had to read that mission summary 2 or 3 times for the enormity of the task to sink in properly. To do all of that, at those speeds, that far from home....absolutely awesome

Books

"Until sometime in the early 1980s, when you reached secondary school you were handed a slim book full of numbers during a maths lesson and taught how to use log tables. Sines, cosines, tangents, square roots - they were all in there too"

I remember that lesson well. Towards the end, one of the girls in the class started crying...when asked what was the matter, she replied "I'll never be able to memorise all of these!"

FX-570

Solar power on the FX-570? No, don't think so. Lithium battery only. I've still got mine in my desk drawer - alongside the WHSmith flowchart stencil, both purchased while studying Computer Studies 'O' Level.

Neither really get used in anger any more, but they do get wheeled out when I go into "nostalgic old git" mode.

fish & chips

I spy salad. That's just wrong. If you want something green with your fish & chips, get some peas (preferably mushy ones) but lose the leaf-based greenery.