Blog Archive — Page 31
This is part of my blog, which I have long since stopped maintaining. The page has been preserved in case its content is of any interest. Please go back to the homepage to see the current contents of this site.
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Of Lamb, Pork, Duck, Gammon and Turkey
This week has been a good one for food. Thanks to non-traditional (or at least not traditionally British) Christmas dinners, I’ve had five different meats over the last three days, if you’ll indulge my reference to pork loin and gammon as different things.
And I’ve two days running had my ideal Christmas - sod presents, decorations and all that, my Christmas consists of three things in chronological order:
1) Working my arse off in the kitchen
2) Eating far too much
3) Drinking various alcoholic things while lying back in a comfy chair and chatting to friends and family.I think this might make me an old man, or a father, or something. Fetch me my pipe and slippers.
At this point, I’d also like to thank my stomach for its performance. Tuesday night saw me vomiting copiously and drinking Lemsip, by Wednesday night I was shovelling stilton, Rioja and brandy down my throat with no ill effects at all. Yay!
Multi-bird roast desire this year: 78% and rising.
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Imminence of Christmas
What the hell? Suddenly, it’s the 19th of December. It’s my last day at work before two weeks of Christmas holiday. But where was the build-up? Where the sense of the joyous release of the holiday season?
Is it a sign that I’m getting older - or perhaps that I’m the father of a toddler - that I haven’t felt excited even at the prospect of two weeks off work? Truth be told, I’ve barely noticed that time has passed in the last six months or so. And only a decade ago, December was far, far too long!
One day, when I have a child that understands instead of a toddler that doesn’t, do you reckon I could have that feeling back for a while?
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Iron Man
Clearly I work for an uncool defence contractor, or something. I wonder how you get into the cool side…
Also squee, (the bit after the credits)!
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War on Terror! The RPG
As promised on Twitter earlier today:
A roleplaying revolution!
An assault against all things politically correct!
Hilliary Clinton is Captain America, and there are zombies!
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Snow. In Bournemouth. WTF?
For the attention of Winter and Spring,
Would you guys please sort your shit out? This is getting kind of silly now.
Regards,
Me.
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Higgs Boson
Eric bought a plushie Higgs Boson off t’internet.
First thing she said when she took it out of the box?
“Jesus Christ, it’s heavy!”
Well, er, yes?
(Warning, comedy may be completely lost on non-physicists)
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Anonymous are Everywhere
Discovered this in the window of a phone box on the way home today.
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The Golden Compass
Slowpoke I know, but I just got around to watching it. Is it just me, or was there supposed to be an ending there? You know, one where they don’t just go happily flying off into the sunset?
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ITT we bitch about KDE4
So, KDE4 eh? No offence to the programmers, they’ve certainly achieved something beyond my capabilities, but… So many irritations =S
- Despite a more streamlined codebase and less memory-hungry Qt4, it still runs slow as a dog on my EeePC.
- That's without any visual effects. Turning on compositing makes it near unusable. Oh, and even "fade in menus" (non-composited) displays an ugly mash of pixels before the menu fully renders, a la KDE 3.5.
- Plasma looks very shiny, shame there's only a few widgets with very important things - NetworkManager frontend, volume control - totally missing.
- There aren't icons for half the widgets, and a random selection of other things
- You can't drag widgets onto, or off, the panel.
- The panel has no properties. You can't move it, or resize it. My screen height is 480px, and this thing takes up 10% of it!
- Window names in the taskbar line-wrap, which is fine for two lines worth, but when there's a third line it's partly off-screen and looks ugly.
- KickOff irritates the hell out of me for various reasons, I reverted to the standard menu almost immediately.
- Though it gives you the option to apply QT colouring to GTK apps, it just applies colour to the butt-ugly GTK1-esque default
- Firefox crashed hard the first time I ran it
- I can't make Marble get past the "loading Atlas" dialog
- Plasma is damn pretty, but everything else is by default a vast swathe of grey
- Konqueror still doesn't run Gmail, even if you make it pretend to be something else
tl,dr: grumble grumble rant.
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A Christmas Message
In an age so concentrated on consumerism and tacky plastic ornaments, I believe we should all take time today to reflect on the true meaning of Christmas.
By which, of course, I mean goose, Christmas pudding and brandy!
Merry Christmas everyone!