Lost

A little anecdote for you:

On Tuesday night, when I was visiting my old mum in hospital, I managed to get a little lost. Well... not lost exactly. Look - it all happened like this:

Southmead Hospital is one of those big sprawling campuses of about 50 separate buildings, some of which are interconnected by covered walkways. It's all very confusing and it's not helped by the current wave of building work and 'improvements' that are currently under way, which means that following signs for the Urology department can leave you standing in front of a fenced off road wondering where the hell to go next!

Anyway - having made the requisite visit and been kicked out by the nurses at the end of visiting hours (and starving, by the way - I'd gone straight from work), I retraced my steps back to my car. Or that's what I thought until I found myself standing by a 3 storey white building that I didn't remember from my walk in or, indeed any of my previous visits.

Convinced that I'd taken a wrong turn, I looked around, unsuccessfully, for one of those handy maps with the big 'you are here' arrows on them. Finally, in desperation I stopped a passing workman and asked him where I was. He told me.

"That's where I thought I was," I said, "but I didn't pass this building on the way in."

"That," he told me, "is because we only put it up this evening."

Holy crap! They erected an entire building in an hour and a half. Okay, it was only a prefab building, but it was 3 storeys! That's a lot of effort to go to for the express purpose of confusing me. I'm hardly the sharpest knife in the block; they could have just put up a hand written cardboard sign saying 'You are not here' to achieve the same affect - but no! They built an entire temporary, 3 storey radiology building. That demonstrates a very special sort of vindictiveness!

And that is the story of how I nearly got lost in the hospital. I hope you enjoyed it.

(On a side note, mum is now out of hospital and is convalescing in bed at home!)

Avatar

So this weekend, we donned our 3D glasses (which, as you can see from the photo, made me look like a bearded Roy Orbison) and headed out to the cinema to see Dances with Wol... no... Last of the Samu... no, that's not right either. Avatar. That's it, Avatar! You can tell the difference because the Native Americ… er… Samuar… um… alien dudes are BLUE!

Man, was that a pretty movie! The 3D started off as a bit of a distraction but I soon got used to it, although I did duck once near the end when some shrapnel flew out at me, but covered it up by pretending I was shifting in my seat.

So yeah. It was a good movie. Nothing very original in it - the plot, as I may have intimated above, has been done any number of times before. The floating mountains can be found all over anime and in fantasy literature; and the crazy crazy alien animals and bizzare fauna can be seen in all sorts of fantasy art; and the spaceships were mostly nicked from Aliens.

But it was very nicely made, decently scripted and performed and the CGI was good enough that after a while I forgot it was CGI. And the inevitable great big battle scene at the end was very, very well orchestrated - it's not often you see a great big battle scene that doesn't waste any shots on frivolous killings. It goes on for just as long as it needs to and then it finishes. Hoorah.

So if you haven't already, go and see it!

If you have a problem and no-one else can help...

...maybe you can hire THE A TEAM!



This looks like it's gonna be pretty crazy stuff - check out the parachuting tank bit! Murdoch seems spot on from is one tiny line of dialogue.

Snow Day

I had an unexpected day off work today.

One of the guys in the office had been getting all worried about the snowy Doomsday that was supposed to occur today. Naturally, I scoffed at him and insisted that it would be fine.

I got snowed in.

I did get some nice photos, though.

2010

Hmm. It looks like I didn't post anything at all in 2009. I should probably try harder.

Oh my...

Here's a sordid little tale that's worthy of preservation. I came across it through a post on another forum...

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Pictures automatically attach to e-mail?

Susan042764
Posts: 2
Registered: Nov 11, 2008

Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!

Tamara
Posts: 8,106
Registered: Nov 26, 2002

Images don't automatically attach to emails.
I hope you and your husband can work things out though.

Allan Sampson
Posts: 31,752
Registered: May 12, 2003

I have never heard of such a glitch.
An email will not be in an account's Sent mailbox unless the message was successfully sent, and an email with a photo attached cannot be created by itself and sent without user interaction.

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Blah blah blah - a bunch of posts that mostly say that the glitch doesn't exist. And then this:

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erikislame
Posts: 5
Registered: Jul 3, 2007

Susan, it's most DEFINITELY a glitch. I've had it happen several times on my phone, as have my coworkers who use iPhones.
The reason the answers here have been so skeptical is just how rare photo use is with the iPhone, as well as the apps installed on the phone that would cause this. It has to be under very UNUSUAL circumstances that it can happen--yet it can and does frequently.
Please ignore any of the "troll" answers you're getting causing you grief. (You can find a definition of troll at www.urbandictionary.com )
Hopefully, this bug will be resolved in the next firmware update.

Judgement
Posts: 1
Registered: Nov 14, 2008

This has definitely happened to me a couple times too. At first I thought it was just accidental with the phone being in my pocket and just jumping around, but since the first two times I have made sure I have locked it.
I don't really know how to fix it but its starting to worry me. My phone has already sent pictures to the girl I like, my grandmother as well as a buddy of mine. Thankfully none of them have been too ranchy.

lythic
Posts: 1
Registered: Nov 14, 2008

... and erikislame and Judgement are both your husband! Note that Judgement is a new user who registered just to respond to you.
The iPhone does not have this bug. Ditch the creep.

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And from there on, it's all about 'ditching the creep'! The best post is this one:

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dedhero0
Posts: 1
Registered: Nov 14, 2008

I think your marriage has a glitch.

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While the events themselves are quite sad, I did enjoy hubby's lame attempt to convince his wife otherwise.

Is Bryan Singer Going to Direct the Next Superman?
Ever since he rebooted the Superman franchise with Superman Returns, people have wondered if Bryan Singer would be directing the sequel, tentatively titled Superman: The Man of Steel. Well, MTV had the chance to talk to the director about his upcoming Tom Cruise-starring Valkyrie, and they asked him about the next Superman.

Singer's answer? Well, let's just say it was maddeningly vague.

"At the moment I can't really talk about that," said Singer. "I wish I could. From my perspective I'm going to take a brief pause. Valkyrie has taken a long time so I'm going to take a pause. A movie like that takes some time to do right. That's all I can say about that."

You gotta love the internet! Pages and pages and pages of no news about superman at all. I think I’ll write and article. It will go something like this:

EXCLUSIVE: SINGER DOESN’T SAY IF HE’S MAKING A NEW SUPERMAN

I didn’t interview Bryan Singer today. I do know however that he was breathing for most of the day, probably had a meal or two and a couple of p1sses. Her certainly didn’t mention to me whether he was, maybe, perhaps, possibly going to direct a new Superman movie that may or may not be made at some point in the near or perhaps far future. Gotta fill those interweb pages though, so here’s some idle speculation for you:

As he’s an American, Bryan probably had pancakes and maple syrup for breakfast. Superman is and adopted American and probably also has pancakes occasionally, so we can read into that that they both had pancakes at some point which is really positive news for those of you waiting for Superman news!

More as it comes in!

Heh. I think I’m so funny!

Stripped!

This week I took 2 days off to take Dr K and the Woolies to see Eddie Izzard's new show in London!

Awesome, it was! I won't write a detailed review of it, because that'll have been done on blogs up and down the interweb by people far more elequent than I. But I will mention that it was awesome!

Woohoo!

Poo!

So DrK and I returned home at about 9pm last night after an unsuccessful shopping trip to find a horrific smell permeating the house. It was one of those smell that was so bad, we just couldn't tell where it was coming from. It was EVERYWHERE!

Eventually, after about half an hour of searching in all the nooks and crannies, we dicovered that the kitten had done a lovely runny poo all over the cabling behind the telly.

Lovely.

The shame of Britain's intolerance of children (or how Barnardos lied to me for money!)

The shame of Britain's intolerance of children

There is an unjustified and disturbing intolerance of children in the UK according to a shocking poll commissioned by Barnardo's.
The poll shows that society casually condemns all children, with more than half the population (54%) thinking that British children are beginning to behave like animals.

Research conducted by YouGov shows that the public holds a negative view of all children, despite the vast majority of children making positive contributions to their communities, attending school, taking part in activities and a significant number volunteering.

The findings show:

just under half (49%) of people agree that children are increasingly a danger to each other and adults
43% agree something has to be done to protect us from children
more than a third (35%) of people agree that nowadays it feels like the streets are infested with children
45% of public agree that people refer to children as feral because they behave this way*
nearly half of people (49%) disagree with the statement that children who get into trouble are often misunderstood and in need of professional help

I saw this on the news this morning. Basically, the guy from Barnado’s says that they have conducted a survey of 2000 people that shows that about half of us think that kids are vermin and feral and dangerous; then went on to say how horrible people were. The guy interviewing him wanted to know if there were any divisive questions in the survey and Barnardo’s guy said ‘No.’

In fact, the survey appears to either have been written by morons, or deliberately worded to elicit ‘negative’ answers, presumably in an effort to create sensational headlines and thereby get more media attention and, presumably more donations from people who feel bad because ‘society’ hates children.

An example – their press release reads:

45% of public agree that people refer to children as feral because they behave this way

In their notes to editors at the bottom, they then state:

45% of people disagreed with the statement 'People refer to children as feral but I don’t think they behave this way.'

That seems pretty divisive to me. No I don’t think that kids are feral. I don’t think they act like that. And most importantly, I’ve never heard anyone refer to kids as ‘feral’. So to answer the question literally and truthfully, I would probably disagree with the statement.

If this is representative of the questions asked in the survey, I’m not only a bit worried about how the respondents interpreted the question but also about how the answers are being interpreted.

I’m worried that Barnardo’s are trying to deceive me and as a result I will not donate to them.