Bagels and Bacon

So, on the recommendation of the nice dinner lady in the canteen this morning, I had a toasted bagel with butter, brown sauce and bacon.

It was very tasty, but I couldn't help feeling oddly guilty as I ate it. Bagels and bacon ain't exactly... kosher.

Names

So there's this girl in my office who recently got married, but didn't take the name of her husband. When asked why, she simply gets huffy and mutters about it being old fashioned. She also gets the hump when you refer to her as a Mrs. It's Ms.

It kinda begs the question... why bother getting married in the first place? There aren't any tax advantages any more, she certainly didn't get married for religious reasons and it's not like it's a respectability thing any more. (I suspect it was more for the dress and the attention... but that's my opinion)

So, I tried to reason with her. Who's surname were their kids (should they have any) going to adopt.

It's going to be hyphenated, she told me (unneccesarily hyphenated names are a load of old pretention twaddle, by the way. Trust me!).

So... being the pedantic basserd that I am, I took this waaaay to far. What if everyone did this. The hyphenation would double with every generation. So you'd end up with this situation:

G1: John Smith
G2: John Smith-Jones
G3: John Smith-Jones-Bailey-Thompson
G4: John Smith-Jones-Bailey-Thompson-Pilkington-Brown-Blair-Jarvis

As you can see, it doesn't take long for it to get out of hand. And it's only a matter of time before you come across someone who's ancestor also married a Smith-Jones. Do you then double up the combos, so you'd have John Smith^2-Jones^2-Bailey-Thompson-Plikington-Brown-Blair^3-Jarvis-Alcock -Steadman-Fisher^2...?

Oh... the inanities that come out of my head. You all wish you were as inane as me. You know you do...

Right. That's it! Christmas is bloody cancelled!

I've just walked through the centre of Bristol, where I witnessed the erection (yes, I can say erection cos I'm the king!) of a bloody great effin' Christmas tree.

So it's now time for my annual rant and moan about effin Christmas being celebrated for effin months before the effin event. Effers.

Sod it, I can't be bothered.

Dumb Assedness

BBC Article:

Computer terms 'confuse workers'

Most office workers find computer jargon as difficult to understand as a foreign language, a survey suggests.

Three quarters of workers waste more than an hour a week deciphering what a technical term means, the poll found.

Phrases like jpeg, java script and cookies are among the problem terms highlighted by Computer People.

The recruitment firm, which questioned 1,500 workers, says effective IT professionals "understand the need to tailor their levels of jargon".

My opinion... Go on guess. That's right. If these people are too lazy (or dumb) to learn the basics of the tools that they use every day, then maybe they should consider a career change. As far as I'm concerned, that's like a car mechanic saying 'I don't know what a sparkplug is' or a chippie saying 'A saw? What's that?'.

I have people in my office who simply refuse to learn how to sort a column in excel, or print double sided or use the tab key in word rather than lots of spaces. Doesn't matter how often I show them this stuff, it just slides right off em.

I don't subscribe to this 'I'm just not a computer person' gibberish that they spout when you challenge them with it. And I definitely don't appreciate the ones that say 'Well if they'd train me...' Frankly I've had almost no IT training at all in my life. I once went on a Visual Basic course only to find that I already knew everything they tried to teach me. I'm entirely self taught.

And this hour a week to decipher technical terms like cookie or jpeg means? If the numpties just typed em into the help search, they'd find out in about 5 seconds.

I'm not even tech support. I do a little bit of developing and tinkering and stuff, but mostly I read e-mails sleep through tele-conferences and go to meetings. I'm still, apparently, the most qualified person to repair everyone's computers and answer their questions, despite that fact that we have an IT helpdesk and an on-site engineer.

I love it when people walk up to me and start the conversation with 'You're a techie person, aren't you..?' Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

we have a nice little intranet based system at work that allows you to reactivate your network password if you get locked out. It works really well and is nice and quick and easy to use... if you bother to take the 10 seconds to register for it.

There was a lovely e-mail that went round about a year ago, which explained it all, nice and simply, told you how to register and suggested that you do it as soon as possible.

Guess who the only person to bother registering was. Go on guess.

On of the guys down the end of the office locked himself out after his 2 week break this morning. Since it's before 8am, the IT helpdesk isn't open (actually 8am is just their official opening time - you'd be lucky to get an answer before 8.30) so he was cussing and moaning because he couldn't get his password reset.

So I said... "Why don't you use the password reset system on the intranet?"

"The what?" he asked, with a confused expression on his face.

"The password reset system," I explained, "that allows you to reset your password with great ease and even greater speed without having to involve the IT helpdesk. It was set up for just this scenario."

Needless to say, when he received the e-mail about a year ago, not to mention the monthly 'reminder' mails that we've had since then, he's simply hit the delete key, rather than actually read it. The result being that he now has to twiddle his thumbs at his desk until the IT helpdesk opens...

His colleague who had similarly disregarded the e-mails (to the point that he was insistent that they never existed) read up on the system this morning on my insistence. His reaction? "Well I have to fill out a form. I don't have the time."

He then spent half an hour at the opposite end of the office looking at someone's holiday snaps.

No sympathy. No patience. Sorry.

There. Rant over for the day!

Handbag Arm Syndrome

I need something explained to me.

What is it with girls and ‘handbag arms’? Why do girls feel the need to wave their non-handbag bearing arm around as they walk?

I was walking through town yesterday lunchtime and witnessed a particularly spectacular and dangerous example of this. This rather short, squat girl was walking ahead of me. Her right arm was clamped down on her handbag, whilst the other appeared to be spasming. It’s possible that it wasn’t actually attached to her body and was, in fact, independently mobile. Its movement ranged from flopping around like a fish next to her waist to being extended perpendicularly at almost 90 degrees from her body. At times it appeared to be the subject of some form of electro-shock therapy. Had she been a tall person, passers-by may well have been in danger of losing eyes or teeth. As it was she almost punched several passing blokes in the groin with it.

So… those members of the female persuasion, perhaps you could explain this arm-flailing requirement to me. As for the blokes... well... just talk amongst yourselves for a bit!

Fifty Seven anna Half Kilos

I know, I know. All this talk of weight training is intensely dull and no-one else gives a monkey's. But I'm gonna write about it anyway.

Last night we upped the weights to 57.5 kilos. Hard work, that. Unfortunately, while the banch pressing isn't presenting too much of a problem, I'm having a little problem with the tendons in my forearms that's preventing me from doing my curls for a week or so.

Bugrit.

Citizen's Arrest

So the Stead and I were heading back to my gaffe in his new works van. We were on the Ring Road at Filton, when we noticed that the car in front was veering all over the road. That stretch is a dual carriageway and this guy was crossing the line than wavering back and forth and doing it all really slowly.

So we pulled up next to him at the traffic lights and wound down the window. The driver was an old guy and was kinda lolling in the drivers seat.

Straight to the point, Stead asked the guy "Are you drunk?"

The driver kinda looked at us blearily and than said "Yes."

So Stead puts on his stern expression (which is really scary, cos he juts his jaw out and his eyebrows do this funny joining up thing), waves his finger pointedly and says "Pull over right now. I'm gonna do a Citizens arrest".

The guy was clearly unimpressed because when the lights turned green, he just pulled away and carried on taking up both lanes all the way down a major A road.

So we followed at a distance, and I called the police, who told me they'd send a car over. Never heard anything after that. I want closure.

Anyway. Here's the interesting part. I was somewhat dubious of Stead's power to make a legal citizen's arrest, so I've checked it out. A handy BBC site says:

The right to make a citizen’s arrest comes under section 3(1) of the Criminal Law Act 1967 which says:

"A person may use such force as is reasonable in the circumstances in the prevention of crime, or in effecting or assisting in the lawful arrest of offenders or suspected offenders or of persons unlawfully at large."

The crime must be a ‘serious offence’, i.e. one which could potentially result in a prison sentence of five years or more. So drink-driving would not qualify as it has a maximum prison sentence of six months but stealing would because it can result in a long prison sentence.

This is backed up by a couple of other site's I've checked out, too. So... it seems that had he arrested the guy, it would have been an unlawful arrest. And the drunk guy could have sued him. So now you know. Don't try and arrest drink drivers!

Oddly, however, you can get him to pull over and take his keys, as that doesn't count as an offence as you haven't deprived him of his liberty.

You learn something new every day!

55 Kilos. Woohoo

So the good news is that the Stead and I are now bench-pressing 55 kilos. Woohoo. It may not be the most kilos ever bench pressed in the world, but it's certainly pretty good progress for us! Next stop... 60 kilos!

Lightening and Ladders

So last night we had a reasonably spectacular (for Bristol) thunder storm with lovely forked lightening and everything. And while the storm was raging around me I wondered what the best thing I could do was. And then I thought: I know, I’ll head down to B&Q with Stead and we’ll buy a really long, super-conductive aluminium ladder! What could possibly go wrong?

Actually nothing did. But it’s the thought that counts!