Bug Hunt

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Science, TV.

When I saw the trailers for yesterday’s episode of Primeval I wondered whether they were going to give any explanation of how the giant arthropods could survive in our atmosphere, and pleasantly they did – oxygen rich air leaking through the rift anomaly from the Carboniferous.

Then they go and spoil it by having the good looking bloke use a blowtorch right in front of the rift anomaly with no side effects what so ever. If the oxygen levels were high enough to affect the soldiers then wouldn’t any flames also be affected?

Oh, and they doubled the size of Arthropleura. There could be a larger species that simply hasn’t been found in the fossil record yet…

Science aside, it’s fun tea time nonsense, but the geek is very annoying and only Douglas Henshaw shows any signs of actually being able to act.

One last thing. We’ve all been conned. On the ITV web site for the series there’s a list of creatures. Have a look and see if you spot whats missing:

  • Coelurosauravus
  • Scutosaurus
  • Gorgonopsid
  • Giant Spiders
  • Arthropleura
  • Mosasaur
  • Hesperonis
  • Dodo
  • Parasite
  • Pteranodon
  • Agnurognathus
  • Predator

Not one of those is a dinosaur. No dinosaurs. Weren’t we promised dinosaurs? But all we get is arthropods, synapsids, and birds (I know birds are dinosaurs). Give us some proper dinos!

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QA? We don't need no stinking QA!

Posted on in Computers, The World.

Evidence One

Excel macro on a jeans label
Via

Evidence Two

SQL in chocolate raisins ingredients
Via

Evidence Three

Microsoft X/HTML comments as cake decoration
Via

But don’t be too quick to blame Microsoft, etc. ‘cos this is nothing new. A couple of hundred years ago aristocrats would send illustrations of their coats of arms over to China to have them painted on china in order to produce the sort of dinner service that any self respecting stately home should possess. One nobleman decided to save a penny or two and instead of sending a colour illustration sent a black and white illustration with the colours indicated via labels, in English. You can guess the rest.

Ragnarok 51

Posted on in Games, Magazines, Miniatures.

Ragnarok 51Ragnarok is the journal of the Society of Fantasy and Science Fiction Wargamers. The latest issue, the first with John Wilson as editor, of Rag has been published and is in the post to members.

  • Saint Snatch – Relic steaing in Dresda
  • In the Dog House – Strontium Dog in Inquisitor
  • Crimson Twenty One – Crimson Skies in Air War C:21
  • Ottomania II – More Turks in Aeronef
  • The Rules of War – Reviews of Space Vixens from Mars and Battlestations
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Idiot Bashing

Posted on in Blogs, Spam.

A charming individual, dklover@hotmail.com, has been posting abusive comments (now deleted) on an old post of mine, accusing me of over reacting when I laid into some idiots who decided to use the word gay as an insult.

His/her latest missive is presented below, as he/she didn’t included any punctuation I’ve had to guess where one sentence ends and the next begins.

you must be the biggest loser on earth not one person has wrote to you for a long time so i thought i should say some thing

A few facts first, since your last comment on 23rd November, six people have posted comments here (some multiple times, hi Jack) and a further three people have commented on the LJ mirror of this blog. As I’ve only posted seven posts in that time that’s fair number of commenters for a modest little personal blog like this.

your last comments were quite rude implying that im gay and bigot

They were meant to be rude. You came to my web site and attacked me, you reap what you sow.

However, I did not imply that you were gay – I suggested that you might have fun in a gay bar, something that lots of straight people do all the time. Also, I did not imply that you were a bigot – I stated it clearly.

well thats a big word for a small minded person like your self you are strait up and down stupid and i dont have to go off at the deep end like your self and try and use words hat you dont even understand good one brainiack

Bigot. Five letters, two syllables, easy to pronounce, quite easy to define. That may be a big word to you – judging by your spelling, punctuation and grammar you have problems with the English language. However, as your IP address resolves to the Netherlands you may well not be a native speaker.

ha ha ha your such a fool i await your reply wich im sure will be inthrouling

Did you mean enthralling? I don’t know about that, but I’m sure this post will raise a smile or two somewhere.

Stardates via RSS?

Posted on in Blogs, Computers, My Life.

Got a short e-mail today about my StarDate Converter:

Have you considered making the current stardate available via RSS?

Hmm, interesting. First of all I’d have to translate the calculator to PHP or whatever to do the calculations on the server, but after that making the output available via RSS would be easy enough.

But would it be practical: the second decimal place represents a period of little over five minutes, so if someone wanted this to create a stardate ‘clock’ they’d be hitting my server at least that often. Not a disaster on its own but something that would need keeping an eye on if it proved popular.

Maybe I should test it out with the French Revolutionary Calendar first (I really need to convert that to PHP anyway so that the dates on this blog aren’t reliant on JavaScript). Hmmm, let’s see where this leads.

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Making history

Posted on in Computer Games, Magazines, Memes, My Life, TV, Work, WWW.

As we’re all blogging for history, here’s a bit about my day.

Alarm went off at 7:00. Lettice got up. I didn’t. Whoops. Staggered out of bed at 8:00 and between checking e-mail, showering, eating breakfast and faffing about managed to get into work around about 9:45. No meetings this morning so not a problem. Check work e-mail and calendar and tell the project manager that I love her because she’s worked out that in our incredibly tight schedule for the site (www.visitlondon.com) redesign I actually have no tasks allocated to me between the end of November and the sometim in February so I can take some holiday after all. But then I groan as I realise that Friday is booked up with meetings from 10-12 and then 12:30-16:00. Ouch.

Spent most of the day working on a project for our kids’ site (www.kidslovelondon.com). Nothing terribly exciting – a bit of CSS, bit of XSLT, bit of JavaScript (enforcing my own recently written coding standards to avoid document.write and use appendChild() etc.). Minor panic regarding the half term edition of the kids’ newsletter but it got sent out on time and everyone seems very happy with the new style.

Went to lunch with Lettice – she’s working at VL for a few weeks. And after that it was time for today’s round of meetings about the redesign project. Time and money versus ambition. Same as every project I’ve ever worked on. We actually have a very good team (and soon to be a much bigger team, an ad will be appear in this week’s New Media Age for six positions within the web team at VL) and doing most of the work in house will cut down on some of the headaches.

Ended up working until 18:30 which makes up for the late start, though a fair chunk of the last hour was spent playing Bang! Howdy (www.banghowdy.com) whilst waiting for other people to go through the designs of the Christmas pages with me. We need to have some pages up very soon in order to cover the switching on of the Christmas Lights.

London Bridge was busy and I just missed the 18:39. I bought this week’s New Scientist (suckered in by the ‘what would happen to Earth if humans vanished cover story) and this month’s .net (a couple of articles that I can quote mine for a brainstorm in one of Friday’s endless meetings). Ran into Séverine and we caught the 18:51 to Tulse Hill and then walked up to West Norwood together.

Home, sausages for dinner, then watched CSI: Miami with Lettice before sitting down to write this.

So there you are, not my usual sort of post and probably not of any great historical interest.

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Real Life / Online Life

Posted on in Books, Music, My Life, WWW.

On Saturday I bought a song from iTunes by Drill Queen, one of whose members I know in real life.

On Monday a package from Amazon arrived for me, I didn’t remember ordering anything but thought that I might have done when I set up work as a delivery address (Amazon’s courier company is totally incapable of delivering to home). Today I checked the delivery note and discovered that someone else had bought it for me off my wishlist.

I didn’t recognise the name and so checked my Gmail archive to see if it was anyone who had ever spoken to me. It was, a little while ago he had sent me this e-mail:

Hi there, you responded to one of my messages on Usenet, full details here.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.authoring.stylesheets/msg/…

I was wondering if you could please remove it from Google’s archives (you can do this by creating a Google Groups Account, looging in, finding the message and pressing remove).

I’m just not keen on having that URL on the Internet now that it’s used for something different.

Thank in advance,

Used for something different means not used for an escort site anymore. (I’d answered a technical question about the site coding not anything related to the content.) Anyway, today I sent back the message

Bribery worked.

Nice to know that after all these years of giving free advice on Usenet I’m finally getting some reward.

Trekkie stuff

Posted on in Media.

It’s one of those funny but not especially surprising things that fan activity for some well established shows is more creative when the show is off the air and loses momentum somewhat when new material is actually being produced.

Just as a new TV season starts in the US, the first second (bugger, things never sounds as good when the facts are right) without a new Star Trek series for nearly two decades, so two lang standing stalwarts (what I suppose we’d call BNFs in other circles) of treknical fandom produce new material. David Schmidt’s Strategic Design produces a new range of blueprints and Eric Kristiansen releases a new edition of Jackill’s Volume One.

Well, I’m excited even if you’re not.

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Fumblers by name…

Posted on in Computer Games, Sport.

This weekend the Frankenstein’s Fumblers played four matches. How many do you think we won? None. Not a single one. One draw and three losses. Touchdowns scored: one. Touchdowns conceeded: seven. Oh dear. 🙁

Who's a pretty boy then?

Posted on in Dinosaurs, Miniatures.

New from Reaper, a mean look Phorusrhacid.

Axebeak, Prehistoric Bird

Obviously, I want. But do I need another?