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Author: Richy B.

Follow me on Mastodon at @rbairwell@mastodon.org.uk or just the posts on this blog by following @richyb@blog.rac.me.uk .

Fun: Hot Dog’s aren’t Hot Dogs or…

February 5, 2003
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[Hot Dogs]I’ve just come across this picture and I think we need to step up the educational programme in a number of countries. (click on the picture to enlarge)

At a minimum, we need to explain that hot dogs aren’t really dogs that are hot. And I’m not talking about good looking dogs either. I’m talking about hot dogs that aren’t hot dogs. You know – dogs. As in the animal. And hot dogs as in the not animal type thing. Not a hot dog hot dog as in the picture. But they aren’t hot dog hot dogs any way, just dogs that look like hot dogs – but I suppose someone that really loves dogs a lot will think those two dogs are hot so I suppose they could be hot dog hot dogs.

Actually – I think I need to at least learn English or cut down on my drinking (I’ve only had one bottle of alcohol to drink today – it’s only Wednesday anyway)

Guess That Movie: XXI: The Cure

February 5, 2003
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[Guess That Movie Round 21]Well, Ph33r_m3 is now guaranteed a prize worth at least £5 – he’s managed to pass the 500 points mark by correctly recognising the previous Guess That Movie image as being taken from the third movie in the Die Hard trilogy: Die Hard with a Vengeance (UK visitors can order it on DVD from [Order from Amazon.co.uk] – the more orders of movies and the more donations to the blog mean I can offer more and larger prizes!).

I’m still puzzled quite how Kymberlie recognised the Hackers picture, but hopefully she’ll be back from her little fish bowl to have a guess at this image.

This image is slightly tricker as it’s been taken from an “old” black and white (or, if you prefer, monochrome) film (and, unlike the Dr.Strangelove screen shot, I haven’t bothered to colourise it) – but have a go and see if you can recognise which movie it is.

To guess, just leave a little comment with your name (or alias), your email address (which is for MY use only – it is not displayed anywhere on the blog NOR will it be disclosed to third parties) and the name of the movie you think the screen shot/image capture is taken from. Please do not attempt to multi-guess movies (by including them all in a single comment) or repeat guess (by posting multiple comments): these may be removed or I might just say “Well – the first one is wrong, I’m not saying anymore”.

Simple rules and simple prize structure (each image is worth 100 points: 500 points and above get you a prize, but after each wrong guess the points of an image go down by 5 points. The image also decreases in value by 10 after the first 12 hours of posting and also decreases by 10 points after every 24 hours from the post time).

Go on – get guessing!

Update: Wednesday, 5th February 2003:It seems no one has yet plucked up the courage to even make a guess at this image (it was originally posted on Monday 3rd at 22:33) – so I’ve added a couple more clues: read on…

A: The Cure. Correctly guessed by Kymberlie R. McGuire

Continue ReadingGuess That Movie: XXI: The Cure

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