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Month: February 2003

Joke: Things It Takes Most Of Us 50 years to learn

February 3, 2003
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[1950s style television]

  • You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe British summer time (daylight-saving time).
  • The quality of a movie is directly disproportional to the number of helicopters in it.
  • You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests you think she’s pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.
  • The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we ALL believe that we are above-average drivers.
  • There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is: age 11.
  • There is a very fine line between “hobby” and “mental illness.”
  • People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.
  • If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be “meetings.”
  • The main accomplishment of almost all organised protests is to annoy people who are not in them.
  • If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and he decides to deliver a message to humanity, he will NOT use as his messenger a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle or in some cases, really bad make-up too (they have hankies).
  • You should not confuse your career with your life.
  • A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter/janitor, is not a nice person.
  • No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.
  • When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.
  • Your true friends love you, anyway.
  • Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.

Work: Slow, bad and then Extremely Good

February 3, 2003
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[Good Search Engine Positions]Well today was an interesting day at work. First hour or so was quite quiet (mainly responding to any technical helpdesk enquiries that were logged over the weekend and just following up on a few things), but then things started to get just a little bit busier… Then one of our main servers failed 🙁 It’s the one we’ve been having a few problems with. We hoped that the RAM swap-out would have sorted the issue, but it died big time again today and we were without it for an hour or so. Proactive action is being taken though – we (more technically, me) are moving the critical files off that server on to one of our spares (the helpdesk and client system) and I’m planning on getting some really severe logging systems running on the server. By really severe, I mean regular system snapshots to let us know exactly what is happening, monitors running in case pre-determined levels are exceeded yadda yadda yadda. I was hoping it wouldn’t be necessary, but we do need to find the cause of this fault ASAP. Yes, our customers don’t pay a lot to be hosted on the server (it’s one of the cheapest hosting plans available to my knowledge) and we don’t offer a SLA (Service Level Agreement) so technically we can just let the box “die” and be done with it – but that’s not good for our customers and since our major form of advertising is “word of mouth” – downtime ain’t good for us!

After the server came back up (and we got full email capabilities back) I had loads of work come in. I had sent out emails on Thursday, Friday and this morning saying “I need approval on this/I need these details” for a number of our search engine optimisation customers and they all decided to get back to me in the same time frame. Grrr. Combine that with ‘standard’ customer side of things I’m involved with (I seem to be getting “respond to this potential customer with your standard marketing gumff” style emails from my boss) and I was overloaded!

Continue ReadingWork: Slow, bad and then Extremely Good

Guess That Movie: XX: Die Hard 3

February 3, 2003
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[Guess That Movie 20]The last round of Guess That Movie was won by Lord Nikon herself – Kymberlie R. McGuire – who correctly recognised Lisa Blair (I doubt she’s any relation to Linda Blair [Order from Amazon.co.uk] ) who lived at 26 East 7th Street, Apartment 16 (telephone number 555-4817) appearing around the 43rd minute of the movie Hackers [Order from Amazon.co.uk] . Yes, I’ve watched that movie plenty of times – but I’m still surprised how Kymberlie managed to recognise it within 7 minutes – that’s just 2 minutes of the current record – as it’s not a major character (I think she just says “What?” in the movie).

Anyway, Kymberlie’s got herself another 100 points moving her up four positions in the score chart to fourth place (with 120 total points). Will she do any better with this screenshot or will someone else guess it first?.

A: Die Hard 3: Die Hard With A Vengence [Order from Amazon.co.uk] . Correctly guessed by Ph33r_m3

Guess That Movie: XIX: Hackers

February 3, 2003
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[Guess That Movie Round 19]As promised here’s round 19 of the popular Guess That Movie contest!

The scores are quite close with Ph33r_m3 having 490 points, LD 380 and “Super Beastmaster” have 280 – but it’s possible for anyone to guess this image and move into the lead. Prizes will NOT be awarded until the end of round 27 (in another 8 images time): this will give everyone a chance to try and get to the magical “500 prize point” and for me to confirm the scores. A word of warning though – at the moment I’m not sure if Guess That Movie will continue using the present prize/score structure after round 27: I’m in the process of creating a new site just for Guess That Movie and the scoring system may be subject to change… So guess now and win!

All you’ve got to do is to recognise which movie the small screen shot on the left was taken from – place your guess in the comments and wait for me to go “yea” or “neigh”. Did I hear some one ask for a clue? Ok – the character who appears in this screen shot lives on the East end of a street….

A: Hackers [Order from Amazon.co.uk] . Correctly guessed by Kymberlie R. McGuire

Snippet: Make Mental Note

February 2, 2003
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*snippet* I must make a mental note: If manipulating data which is 150Mb compressed/600Mb uncompressed and you are creating several temp files for the data before loading it into a MySQL database (all on the same harddrive): ensure you have PLENTY of hard drive space AND stop your main internet downloads….

Windows doesn’t like it when you go from 1.5Gb to less than 500Kb free space on the main drive within 30 minutes.

CD burner currently working overtime 🙁 Guess That Movie’s new site will NOT be ready by tomorrow.