#32: News

I paid attention to two news stories in the past couple of days, due to being bored at work and using net surfing as a source of procrastination.

1) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6735631.stm
Paris Hilton got sent back to jail! I hope she does the female equivalent of dropping the soap in the shower and learns a lesson. She’s nothing but a deluded socialite who thinks that she can do anything she likes because Daddy has made a fortune, and she totally deserves to spend the time in jail. What sort of society are we living in where people can get out of jail after just three days and spend the time living in a cushy mansion somewhere under “house arrest”?

2) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6732873.stm
So a white middle class girl called someone a nigger? Big deal, it’s happened before and it will happen again. The fact is that racism is an integral part of British society. It might not be right, but it is just something that is true. Everyone tries to claim that they are bigger than it, or that they love everyone equally, but it just isn’t true.

Think of it this way. Anyone who gets even slightly worried when a group of black people walks towards them on their walk home is technically a racist. Anyone who sees an Asian man in the street and thinks “I bet he’s either a doctor or owns a corner shop” is technically a racist. There are many more examples of this.

Political correctness has gone too far, and in my opinion, we are at risk of losing our British identity in an effort to be too tolerant and multicultural. Is it any wonder that the BNP have a lot of support in northern English cities? A lot of people do literally see the world as black and white, and the media circus that is created whenever something like this happens is just serving to unsettle the country. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we see another civil war at some point in my lifetime.

The other reality is that Big Brother only booted Emily from the house because of the Shilpa Shetty race row that got them negative publicity last time. They got a slap on the wrist from OFCOM and now they have to make examples of anyone who uses certain words on the show.

I’d like to know what Endemol would do if everyone else in the house got involved in an absolutely huge row and used “racist” words, to the point where they had no alternative but to throw all the housemates out. That’d make their overtired show a bit more interesting, wouldn’t it?!

#30: Defined

I did a meme on Facebook this morning with the title “How will you be defined in the dictionary?”

Do they actually know me, or something?! :scared:

#29: Measure this

Some units of measurement you rarely see:

2000 mockingbirds: 2 kilomockingbirds

Ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi

2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton

Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement: 1 bananosecond

Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon

1000 aches: 1 megahurtz

Basic unit of laryngitis: 1 hoarsepower

Shortest distance between two jokes: A straight line

1 million-million microphones: 1 megaphone

1 million bicycles: 2 megacycles

10 cards: 1 decacards

Force of 1 kilogram of falling figs: 1 Fig Newton

1000 grams of wet socks: 1 literhosen

1 millionth of a fish: 1 microfiche

1 trillion pins: 1 terrapin

10 rations: 1 decoration

100 rations: 1 C-ration

8 nickels: 2 paradigms

#27: History Lesson

Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846.
John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946.

Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860.
John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960.

Both were particularly concerned with civil rights.
Both wives lost their children while living in the White House.

Both Presidents were shot on a Friday.
Both Presidents were shot in the head.

Now it gets really weird.

Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy.
Kennedy’s Secretary was named Lincoln.

Both were assassinated by Southerners.
Both were succeeded by Southerners named Johnson.

Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln, was born in 1808.
Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded Kennedy, was born in 1908.

John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born in 1839.
Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939.

Both assassins were known by their three names.
Both names are composed of fifteen letters.

Now hang on to your seat.

Lincoln was shot at the theater named ‘Ford.’
Kennedy was shot in a car called ‘ Lincoln’ made by ‘Ford.’

Lincoln was shot in a theater and his assassin ran and hid in a
warehouse.
Kennedy was shot from a warehouse and his assassin ran and hid in a
theater.

Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials.

And here’s the kicker…

A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland
A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe.

#24: 2.2

I am now running Wordpress 2.2. This makes no difference to most people who read this as they do it via RSS, but there’s a few nice cosmetic changes in it. I need to find a template that’ll work with the sidebar widgets though, as they look like they could be quite nice.

I’ve been meaning to write about the Driver Improvement Course that I did recently, but I haven’t had the time inclination to do so just yet. I’ve got the draft saved in here and it just needs to be added to, but I am on an “IBE* week” at work this week and need to dedicate my time to that instead.

* The IBE is our new work project which needs finishing. Hopefully when it’s done, it’ll be gooooood.

#12: Motivation

Sometimes at work, I struggle for motivation. It’s quite difficult to make yourself do things when all you have on your to-do board is stuff that you don’t actually want “to-do” - stuff that’s been there for ages and you know won’t go away, but you can’t bring yourself to do.

“I don’t want to edit your website. It’s poorly designed and doesn’t conform to any standards anywhere, and was last overhauled in about 1999. I’d offer to redesign it all for you except I suck at design, and all I’d do would be to keep the current layout but make it XHTML compliant. That’s a bit pointless.”

I need to switch all our work websites over to a content management system or something like that, but I’ve never found one yet that I’ve really got to grips with and liked. I’ve tried Mambo, PHPnuke and Drupal, but none of them have given me all the options I want.

I guess I could write my own, but that would be a disaster waiting to happen. Last time I wrote something, it was designed to be able to take 500 or so “offers” (rows in a database) and display them to the user, so they could be modified one at a time. I didn’t think it’d be a problem… until such time as they (the users, who else) decided that actually, they were going to load 23,000 offers into it instead.

In fairness to my code, it’s stood up to it remarkably well, and provides the XML feed that it’s supposed to, but it’s totally horrific if you try and use it edit more than one offer at a time with it. I told them that they hadn’t given me any idea of the scale and couldn’t be blamed for it, but still they whinged. In the end, I capitulated and made a couple of extra modules - one that outputs the whole database as a CSV file, and one that can accept a CSV file as input and publish it back to the database. At least then they can edit the bastard thing with Excel (which is a total nightmare when it comes to MySQL DATE formats in CSV files, by the way)

If only they’d told me they wanted to load 23,000 offers into it, I’d have taken a bit longer over the design of the database and made it possible to edit multiple offers at once in the style of Phpmyadmin or similar. I’d also have introduced support for scrolling the offers by page, and the ability to jump to a particular offer if you knew something about it. I just didn’t bank on them totally moving the goalposts.

I guess that’s business for you.

In other news, I went to the gym yesterday and worked myself harder than I ever have at a gym before. I felt absolutely great when I left - so good in fact that I’m going again tonight. I’m only doing a two and a half day week at work this week - I’m doing a half day Thursday and have Friday off, as I’m off to see the Arctic Monkeys at the Astoria on Thursday evening and I’m not planning on being back until late.

What was the point of this post? Perhaps I should make a “procrastination” category.

I think I will.