Category: Life
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1,000km of Solitude
Today, I again cycled into work and back. The commute in was fine, albeit pitch black, but on the way home (also pitch black), the heavens opened – and just when I was half a kilometer from the nearest shelter so I couldn’t even take refuge whilst I pulled the rain cover over my CamelBak. Within minutes I was soaked, and slipping all over everywhere in the mud. It was 5degC, and the wind was a force to be reckoned with, almost blowing me off my bike a couple of times – and inexplicably always being against me, regardless of… Read more
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Anyone for a quick game of scrobble?
Ever since I got my iPod I’ve wanted to find a way to list my ‘recently played’ tracks on this Blogsite. There are a few WordPress plugins and widgets that claim to do this, but they all seemed overly-complicated, requiring additional e-mail accounts, modified server permissions, and god knows what else. So what with having a life to live and all, I never found the time to dig into them and get any of them working properly. Then last week a buddy responded to a post of mine in the Music category, mentioning Last.fm which he said tracked people’s listening… Read more
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Hangin’ On The Telephone
OK, today’s pet peeve is the piped music you get when you’re put on hold on the telephone. I’m in work, it’s 2:15 AM, and we’re working a serious system issue. There are about two dozen of us, physically located everywhere from Guatemala through USA to Belgium, and several points inbetween, and all on the same conference call. Now some idiot has put the call ‘on hold’ which means that the rest of us get piped music blaring out. And because the cheapo conference call system we have here hands the ‘talking stick’ to one person at a time, and… Read more
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Terrorism begins at home
There was a report in the UK’s Guardian Online a couple of weeks ago about Anthony Garcia who is currently on trial in England for ‘conspiracy to cause explosions’ under the terrorism laws. One of the pieces of evidence against him was that he had attended an Al-Qaeda training camp in Pakistan. But in his defence, Mr. Garcia explains that he only attended the camp for a couple of weeks, before checking himself out. And why did he leave early? Because he’d learnt all there was to know about blowing up innocent people? Or because he was disappointed to find… Read more
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Wow, I feel safer already!
Well, that’s another near-death experience narrowly avoided. Someone from PC Support just came round to my desk and started fiddling around the back of my PC. I asked him what he was doing, and he pointed out that he had been ‘disabling’ the voltage selector on the back of the PC. [For the uninitiated, most PCs these days have a voltage selector on the back that allows you to switch (with the aid of a starightened-out paperclip) between 110v (used in the U.S.) and 240v (used just about everywhere else in the World) – it means that the PC manufacturers… Read more