This isn't right

Vista has misplaced it's Control Panel! Time for yet another reboot..

Lydia oh Lydia, oh have you met Lydia..

I came across this website on a blog entry and I think it deserves more publicity, especially as the owner has it up for sale: www.modestapparelchristianclothinglydiaofpurpledressescustomsewing.com - so that's Modest Apparel Christian Clothing Lydia Of Purple Dresses Custom Sewing.com. Have a poke about, there's lots to see.

Lydia of Purple specializes in custom sewn garments for homeschooling mothers that homeschool their young ladies and girls in modest dress.

Somehow I think 'homeschooling' has a subtext here.

The War On Stupidity

The Wire is a US drama series: if you haven't seen it, I envy you, you have a treat in store. If you have you'll know it's about the drug trade in Baltimore, seen from both sides.

Anyway, there's a quote from it which for me perfectly encapsulates the War On Drugs even though it's apparently about a turf war between two drug gangs: the quality of the writing of the series is so high that I wouldn't be at all surprised if that was exactly the effect they wanted to achieve.

It don't matter who did what to whom: we went to war, and now there ain't no turning back.

I mean, shit, that's what war is, you know - once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie, but we gotta fight" (Hear it)

Oh, there's this quote as well:

Detective Greggs: "Fighting the war on drugs, one brutality case at a time"
Detective Carver: "You can't even call this shit a war."
Detective Hauk: "Why not?"
Detective Carver: "Wars end.."

Edit: This applies just as well to the War On Terrorism. Hopefully not the second bit..

Another edit: apparently, The Wire is Barack Obama's favourite TV show..

New Mismatism

New coin designs have been announced by the Royal Mint. Nice.

Incidentaly, on their faq page, they link to an email enquiry form. Unfortunately the URL is www.r2d2net.com/help/contactus.aspx (which doesn't exist) instead of www.royalmint.com/help/contactus.aspx. Obviously this needs repairing and "if any of my circuits or gears will help, I'll gladly donate them".. (found the correct quote thanks to Wookiepedia (groan))

Two leads are better than one

I bought a little 250GB USB hard disk. It comes with a strange thing I've never seen before: a split USB lead which goes into 2 USB sockets at once. Just as well I haven't got a MacBook Air with it's single USB socket!

Presumably this allows it to read from both or write to both or read from one and write to the other, or power through one and data through the other - who knows, Seagate certainly don't say.

Edit: Canadian Rob tells Robin it's for power, but you don't have to use both.

Applications

I used to use a bunch of methods of starting applications in OSX Tiger: spotlight, the recent apps menu, fire up a finder instance, but now in Leopard I only ever use my Application stack from the dock. I've created aliases for the most useful programs that aren't directly in the Applications folder (ie they are in subfolders or /Developer) and turned on the highlight effect. I've even started to develop mouse-memory for where they are in the stack.

Try it, you might like it.. here's a pic of mine.

So true...

My favourite aphorism of the moment is:

Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement.

There's some confusion about who to attribute it to though.

All right, we don't really know why we recommended it..

Bit of a WTF from Amazon:

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots

I finally went out and bought a disk big enough to back up all the disks and data on my poor old PowerMac G4 with Time Machine. Bit surprised to find there are 939,685 items on it: I deleted fink and all sorts of other stuff after the Leopard upgrade. Maybe I need to start a new user account and dump this one. Maybe I need to do a clean install after all - I have had a few Colonel Panics (i.e. crashes), though fewer since 10.5.2 came out.

Nothing, nada, nil

I watched The English Surgeon on Sunday night, a superb documentary about an English neurosurgeon called Henry Marsh who goes to the Ukraine every year to hew out brain tumours with Homebase drills and a Ukraninan doctor called (of course) Igor. I wasn't watching at first, just left it on after MOTD2, but by the end there wasn't a dry eye in the room.

The last line (spoken by Henry) was:

"What are we if we don't try to help others? We're nothing, nothing at all"

What a scam!

I wish I'd thought of this .uk.com stuff - Centralnic will sell you yourname.uk.com for £32.50!

What this basically means is they bought the domain uk.com (and lots of other codes) and they are selling people subdomains. For £32.50!

(About subdomains: if I owned stuartd.com, I could set up blog.stuartd.com and fubar.stuartd.com and crapola.stuartd.com as many others as I cared to do _for free_.)

Dead Brum Society

footballfunerals.co.uk are the "Official Contracted Funeral Directors to Birmingham City Football Club" and will give you a good send off if you're a blue. Slightly misleading domain name, or perhaps they hope to expand and become the Official Contracted Funeral Directors to more clubs, or maybe the league itself.

Who is the sire, sir?

"What Is Radio 4?

Created in 1967 out of the Home Service, Radio 4 is the "daddy" of speech radio."

This is on their interactive TV page and mobile pages.. Odd that they would choose a quote from Scum.

First-order Freak

After my previous post on my fellow employees, I've been wondering which category I fall into. Oh dear!

Be like has real

These are random quotes from the first few paragraphs on blog.webhosting.uk.com - this has to be dodgy translation, surely, no-one would actually write these..?

There are various reasons why an online sector individual suchlike you has decided to shift to a new web hosting providers. Your old web hosting provider be like has real impecunious specialized funding

Doing channelize in inferior than one month clip under frame will put your website in assay of untracked.

Now, sign-up your new web hosting bringing once you make definite the morpheme familiar mentioned above.

In most cases, you already jazz all the files of your website on your local computer.

In addition, you should run all the hyperlinks in the modal web pages if affirmable to secure no humble course.

Satanic Jon reckons it's keyword injection, but I'm not so sure. Funnily enough, the older entries are quite comprehensible, maybe someone there took a trip too..

Freak Or Unique?

I work for a fairly large local government organisation, so I get plenty of chances to play "Freak Or Unique?" when I have to leave my desk.. so far the score is 237-0 (with maybe a dozen or so exceptions)

MacVista takes a trip, gets double vision

I installed Vista Service Pack 1 last night in Boot Camp my MacBook: well, I tried: three restarts and two hours later it failed (error 0xC004F013) and had to roll the update back - which it did, more or less successfully, a couple of reboots (and another hour or so) later. Everything seemed OK except I had a quite large message on the bottom of my screen with the build number (6000) and a message saying my copy of Vista isn't genuine. Cheek!

I wouldn't have minded the restarts - I am very glad Vista and Leopard do updates after logoff and before shutdown, it's much more sensible than doing them in userspace - but I was only expecting one like previous service packs so I didn't bother changing my boot disk to Windows, which meant I had to sit about watching it and waiting for it to reboot.

It seems the second time the service pack is installed it works, but failure took so long - it was 86% through phase three (of three) that it really started to drag - I uninstalled update KB941649 which is the bad boy just in case and resinstalled and that's more like it. Took a bit less than an hour: it's build 6001 now, which is a departure from Microsoft's usual build nomenclature.


Oh, I do have one problem - Vista now thinks this MacBook has two monitors in it..

Claim Your Vista

A Firefox vs IE comparison is one thing, but Paint vs The GiMP proves this is a spoof..

Technically, Sir, I was never alive - but I appreciate your concern

I saw Sir Ian McKellen crossing The Level today - he was walking with a stick, it was definitely him. Gandalf! Magneto! I was with James, scootering.

Hate

From 'I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison:

HATE.
LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE.

THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD 'HATE' WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU.
HATE.
HATE.

Always useful. Today, to the woman in front of me in the canteen queue who ordered three ("no, can I make that four?") coffees at the last poossible minute - that's you that is.