How The Elephant Got It's Trunk

Sparta Och aye, da noo!

2007-03-29T03:13:00.000-07:00

The current and past 300 stylee films ('The 300 Spartans' and 'The 300') seem to focus on the egalaterian visions of the Spartan race: The ‘We fight for Greece’ and ‘We are free men, get thee hence you nasty tyrant, shoo shoo!” type Holywood bumf.

The reality is something quite different:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=441339&in_page_id=1879

Anyhow, I was much relived to see there is a fourore going on regarding the is he/isn’t he pumped up by CGI debate. Whatever the answer I’m looking forward to this type of effect being in photoshop very soon.

Well, the main reason for this post is to RSS a 'Go pub drink beer' invitation to all my chums and chumettes.
Say next Wednesay at the Giff'Ard park? It's quiz night.

Fudge!

2006-10-26T04:22:00.000-07:00

Fudge.

Surely the most ubiquitous method of separating a tourist from his, or her, hard earned Obols.

Given the basic recipe;
· 4 cups of white sugar
· 1 cup of whole milk
· 2tbs of butter

The most obvious question is: How does fudge, ‘hand crafted’ and sold by ‘discerning patrons’ from ‘a recipe handed down from father to son since the time of the druids’ at a roadside barrow in Camden, London differ from a similar offering you might come across in oh-I-don’t-know Addis Ababa?

Considering fudge is mostly made from sugar (the two largest producers are India and Brazil, followed by Australia and Thailand); just about the cheapest ingredient you can get, apart from water, how then does the ‘epicurean purveyor’, gloriously attired in his finest jeans and T-shirt, standing across the hinged serving aperture from you, imbue his product with that quintessential essence of Britain? Does he have a bottle marked ‘tincture of Ye Olde London’ that he ladles in at the appropriate moment?*

The answer dear reader is; “Of course he f**cking doesn’t”.

However, as a tourist you’ve found your holy grail, a small, light, tasty gift for friends and family that just oozes [insert name of city, country, principality here]. The complex cultures and landscapes just leach out of every mouthful, the postcard attached to the tastefully designed cardboard box is just icing on the cake really.

The import thing to remember is; you’ve bought them something, they’ve eaten it, it was good (how can sugar and fat be anything but tasty?), it’s gone and now all they have is a fond memory that you brought them something nice back from Addis Ababa.

So, just blank your memory to the obvious truth; that this box of fudge now has a carbon footprint larger than the super tanker that shipped the constituent sugar all the way across the Atlantic, because it’s now taking a similar return journey via a 767, and remember that;

As a top-of-the-economic-food chain tourist, you’re simply redistributing your wealth to the bottom by buying goods produced from raw materials you can get at home anyway.

*Answers on a postcard please. First correct answer wins a prize.**
**This is a lie.***
***No really it is.

N.B. The more observant among you will recognise the picture as a detail from the carving ‘Raven and the First Men’, by Bill Reid. It is in Yellow Cedar and is currently on display at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology http://www.moa.ubc.ca. Well done, aren’t you clever!

Filthy Bench.

2006-08-25T03:21:00.000-07:00

//eatpes.com/roofsex.html

Dear Lord! That's the loudest profanity I've ever heard.

2006-07-09T10:29:00.000-07:00

‘t wife broke my ‘I love Namibia mug’.
It was 18-ish years old, a bit worn and much loved.
RIP old friend.

Which brings back old memories:

My Kalahari Safari T-shirt – One wash too many.
My San Diego Pizza Palace T-shirt, won playing Bingo – relinquished to duster duties several years ago.
My Zambezi White Water rafting T-shirt, I’m wearing it now and it’s on its way out, sniff.
My Maui Surf Shack T-shirt. This was so cool with a Gecko and a surf board, MIA circa last century.

That's it I'm getting all misty.

2005-11-22T03:18:00.000-08:00

Muse of the day.

Computers: Why is it that that all peripheral cables have those annoying screw fixings that Techs like to applying maximum torque to?
The power cable doesn’t have one, so why should anything else? Surely having your power cable fall out is a teensy bit worse than a dangly monitor cable?

A Gin & Tonic of Stick Insects

2005-10-17T11:10:00.000-07:00

The title is from and old Smith & Jones sketch about collective nouns (and has only a tenuous link with the rest of the contents of this post).

Anyway on with the post:

Bunnies are cute. They belong to this rare subset of animal species that are cute even when they are grown up. Sure, they’re cute when they’re young, almost everything is, but they keep this quality even when they age.

Awww! look at da bunny wabbit.

Hares aren’t cute, neither are Jack Rabbits. It’s axiomatic.

Shetland ponies are also cute, especially when they’ve grown up. Which leads me to wonder are there any other animals that belong to this subset: Animals that are cute even when they have grown up?

Also, as a corollary, are there any animals that are not cute even when they are young?

Hmmm...

What goes around, swings around

2005-09-08T12:22:00.000-07:00

Cast your mind back to the days of grunge (cue Scooby Doo effect).

Slack jawed teenagers danced like swaying Kelp beds in a minor swell, grouched about everything and generally did their best to look like Swamp Thing.

And what has happened to the quintessential grunge anthem? See Track 9 ...
see amazon

These are the times we live in. Today's teenage angst will become tomorrows swing. Deal with it.

So Long Suckers

2005-08-01T09:55:00.000-07:00

Read it and weep.

http://www.newscientistjobs.com/list/ViewJob-scij13354.html

Job ref: 25405

(no I haven't applied yet)

Stupid all over again

2005-07-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

In my daily battle against the forces of evil and 3D graphics I've suddenly remembered why I despised so many maths books all those years ago:

Here is a snippet from: I’m vastly more intelligent than you – A 3D rotation maths primer. By Hue Janus.

It is then clear from fig. 7b that the projection of OUT onto UPw is equal to the magnitude of OUT times the cosine of theta.

No it bloody isn’t.

The Dance of the 7 Veils

2005-06-09T04:25:00.000-07:00

As some of you may or may not know (or even care) I have been trying to start a business doing… well stuff to do with VR (or really just about anything that pays).

Here follows a true and honest account of the mechanism of selling computing services through repeated meetings with clients, so help me… me.

I have called it the Dance of the 7 Veils as seven seems to be the average number of meetings/contacts required to in order to get to a resolution (as well as for extra comedy value).

1. The Initial Meeting
Them: What are you selling?
You: This, it’s really good.
Them: Can it do this, this and this? And this sideways?
You: Oh yes and it’s available in a range of exciting flavours!
Them: Sounds good, we’ll have some. Lets arrange another meeting with our team to discuss the technical aspects.
You: Oh yes!

2. The Technical Meeting
Them: We need to do this, by then, in this way and we really really need someone to help us.
You: We can do that, using this with this and extending that by this.
Them: That sounds good, will you be able to revert that into what and this into that?
You: Oh yes! In addition we can turn it inside out and upside down.
Them: We’re impressed (but we don’t show it too much), how much will it cost?
You: We will submit a quote for this and this, and if you decide you want to pursue this route, we will give you a quote for this and that.
Them: Great, we look forward to hearing from you.

3. The Quotation Email:
You: Dear Them, this is how much it will cost. Our quality is second to none and our service is great – you will love us. Lots of love Us.

4. The Reply
Them: Dear You. Wow that’s a bit steep! I could tile my Olympic size swimming pool (including Sauna, Jacuzzi and barbecue pit) with jewel encrusted solid gold tiles for that sort of Moolah! Yours in decreasing profit margin, Us.

5. The Hasty Phone Call.
You: Ah Them! Maybe there’s been some sort of misunderstanding. Our price includes this and this, with 3 months of that. Don’t forget these are business rates and include the cost of thingamajigs and wot-nots. Price (like our ability to actually make some money out of this) is of course flexible, lets arrange a meeting to thrash this out!
Them: Ok, but be prepared to meet my senior negotiator Mr Ben Dover.

6. The Rescue Meeting
You: Soooo Them…We have revised our pricing structure to come into line with your requirements (we will work nights and invent two new hours in every day – we wouldn’t want you to loose out on your jewel encrusted solid gold swimming pool tiles).
Them: That’s more like it!
You: That is of course based on the assumption that there is future work that we would be involved in (we wouldn’t want to bust our balls for a paltry few weeks of work).
Them: Natch!
You: Cool!
Them: We’ll get back to you by the end of this week as we are currently re-prioritising our negative work schedule.
You: We prostrate ourselves before you magnificence.

7. The Final Email (received 4 days late)
Them: Dear You. After much consideration we have decided not go ahead with this project. Regards Us.

You:
!&*%%$@”£!

The Agony and the .... Agony

2005-05-17T13:22:00.000-07:00

Ahhh, the unbearable ecstasy of job hunting.
After a few (cough, cough) weeks of this lark I have managed to draw up the average job description:

Senior Developer

n+ (try a number from the Fibonnaci sequence) years (insert C++, Java, Assembler, Visual Basic)

Extensive hands on experience with all Microsoft platforms, Unix flavours (UNICS ideally) and XP or WinCE.

Very strong to unbelievably prescient knowledge of OO design methodology.

Experience of MFC, ATL, COM, COM+, OLE, OLAP, RDBMS, MMC, HTML, DHTML, CSS, XML/XSL, IIS, ISAPI, Win APIs, SQL, ODBC, ADO, RDO, GDI API, UML and Sockets.

CASE tool experience with RUP, Booch, SSADM and FITW (finger in the wind).

Must have multithreaded embedded asynchronous relational n-tier partitioning within a scaled-out multicast federated server farm dynamic with thread safe distributed graphical template architectures and hyper transactional service orientated information processing.

Good communication skills.

Preference will be given to candidates who can show a significant contribution to the fields of Quantum Computing, Information Theory or Elliptical functions.

In short we are really looking for someone who we have already been employing for the last 5 years.

I'm going for a lie down now...