Ferraris and rollercoasters
A couple of good videos of late from the BBC. First, the reconstruction after 27 years of the cub scouts’ rollercoaster lunch on Jim’ll Fix It. And next to Eddie Griffin’s totalling of a £760,000 Ferrari Enzo.
Both worth a squizz.
156 chimes
Big Ben chimes 156 times a day, a useful fact I calculated yesterday while listening to six glorious such chimes.
Stat. of the day
The richest two Americans have the same total wealth as the poorest 90 million.
Source: tonight’s BBC News. For the record, the richest two are Billy G. and Warren Buffett.
1,000th comment
Congratulations, little site. After 992 days in existence and 841 posts, you’ve have your 1,000th comment.
The momentous comment was from Thomas in response to post 839 at 2.02pm today.
Of course, you’re a website, so you deal in 1s and 0s. So you’re eagerly awaiting comment 1,024, right? Shouldn’t be long now.
For the statistically-obsessed, some averages for you.
- 1.19 comments per post
- 0.85 posts per day
- 1.01 comments per day
- 204 words per post
That is all.
Fabulous collectibles
A couple of words that have caught my eye of late.
First, I used the word fabulous recently. I loved the idea that it could be construed as meaning of or relating to fables. It inspires a much greater feeling than its regular meaning of really good.
And today, I passed a charity shop that was advertising its sale of collectibles. (It was spelt collectables but I don’t like that version.) Surely technically, everything falls into this category. Everything, that is, of which there are two or more in existence. Collecting one-offs would be somewhat challenging, and arguably futile.
A couple of captchas
A couple of neat captchas designed to go beyond the traditional warped letters and random sums. For those not in the know, captcha stands for completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart, and it’s that step you have to go through sometimes when you buy tickets, add comments etc.
First of all, asirra from Microsoft Research. Basically, you’re presented with a picture of nine cats and dogs, and you have to pick out the cats. Apparently, asirra stands for Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access. (I wonder if they’re going to offer me a fortune to buy my domain name off me.)
And then there’s Hot Captcha, the same concept, but with attractive and unattractive women/men (you can choose).
Great concept.
Bus stop injustice
Fuck it’s cold today.
I only realised just how cold while waiting at a bus stop for the 77 to take me home, having ventured out this morning to pick up some parking permits for my builder. My trepid (it must be a word, given that intrepid and trepidation both are) hands deemed it sufficiently cold not to venture out of their respective pockets to hold the book I’d brought with me to wile away very moments like these.
And boy did I wait? (For the record, boy will have no option but to respond with a resounding "yes sirree".) A full half an hour wait for a bus that is scheduled to come by (not in the One Man And His Dog sense, more in the bus sense) every 9–12 minutes (after 8am on Saturdays). For the entire half hour, I waited alone at the bus stop, while buses sporting numbers other than 77 steamed past me, leaving backdrafts of cold air in their wake to add to my misery.
And finally, the 77 arrived, at the same time as a lady who also needed its service. Why did I have to wait half an hour, while she had no such wait? I felt cold and cheated.
Yet my chivalrous nature wasn’t compromised, as I allowed her to board the bus before me. Now I feel warm, self-righteous and I can read my book.
Exclusively voicemail
Over the last few days, I’ve been conducting my friendship with my, er, friend Rob by the medium of voicemail. I have to say, it’s been quite refreshing.
For whatever reason, I’ve been otherwise engaged whenever he’s called. And I can only imagine that the same must be true for him on the times when I have returned said calls.
I have enjoyed listening to his vocal ramblings, and apparently one of my such replies ranks as the third funniest voicemail of all time. Not sure whether that’s across all voicemails to all phones, or just to Rob. Also, when his voicemail kicks in, I enjoy listening to his very random, unprofessional (he’s a student; why would he need to be professional?) invite for me to leave a message ("or something").
The dialogue-embargo was broken yesterday evening, when Rob decided that he was able to talk to me directly. It fell way short of the earlier voicemail shenanigans. Way short.
Starbucks’ 1005% mark-up
Often, when I go into my local Starbucks early in the morning, they have their food order sheet lying around on the counter. This is the sheet confirming all the food that has been delivered that day.
I can’t help but scan down that sheet and did so this morning, only to find their average muffins (including the Sunrise Muffin) coming in at £1.52 for a pack of twelve. That’s a little over 12.5p each. Just off to the right of that sheet, the very same muffins are on sale (on sale in the being sold sense of the word, rather than the discounted price sense) for £1.40 each.
That’s a healthy 1005% mark-up.
Excellentialism
Someone at work the other day described Excel as "God’s tool". While not being a believer (in God, not Excel. I believe in Excel, a belief called excellentialism), I have to agree.
It’s surprising, as this guy was, and indeed is, a techie. Usually, techies and Excel don’t mix.
Why is that tart texting me?
Yesterday was a really long and hard day. I did smile, however, when the first words heard on arrival at IKEA Croydon at 9.30pm were "Why is that tart texting me?"
They were uttered into a mobile phone by some local teenage girl. I smiled.
Mind maps
A lovely, short programme called Design Classics on BBC4 this evening focusing on Harry C. Beck’s London Underground map. It’s an old programme, indicating that the Docklands Light Railway is "due to open next month". Thanks to Ben for pointing it out.
In one comment, a design expert indicated that for many people, the map (or "diagram" as some experts call it, given its non-geographic representation) is their primary representation of London.
It reminded me of my first few years in London. My London world consisted of small areas surrounding primary Tube stations. Every so often, I’d enjoy a small revelation, whereby my ventures would connect two previously distinct areas. Gradually, through these revelations along with overland bus journeys, I built up my now comprehensive knowledge of central London. Holborn suddenly connected to Covent Garden, Leicester Square to Piccadilly Circus, Embankment to Charing Cross etc.
One big thing hindered this. For some reason when I first came to London, I thought that Soho was on the north side of Oxford Street and Fitzrovia on the south side. This made connections thereafter very illogical, and it took quite a while for my mind to reverse the inferences I’d made.
DotP is dead
So, it seems that DotP is dead. Its death was sealed by the Department of Health’s website moving off the DotP platform on Wednesday, 40 days shy of DotP’s fourth birthday.
It could have lasted longer and been more successful; it could have died a death. In the end, it achieved something in between. It would be interesting to know how many clicks it supported during its 1,420 days’ existence.
The new £20 note
I was surprised the other day when I got some cash out of the ATM. The £20 notes were completely different, and for a brief moment, I thought there was a problem. Then I remembered the recent news stories about Adam Smith, the first Scotsman to grace a Bank of England note, and all fell into place.
The note itself is nice. Much nicer font for the £20 on the front, and very clean design. I do find it slightly odd, however, that the image of the Queen used is from many years ago. (The same image adorns the old note as does the new one.) And I can’t help but think that Smith was a rather strange choice on the back. He wasn’t an attractive chap. Dreadful nose and bulgy frog-eyes.
Pakistan’s Gaelic football prowess
So, the Irish beat Pakistan at cricket, sending them home. Surely that’s the equivalent of Pakistan knocking Ireland out of the World Gaelic football championships.
Breadless deli
Back in August, Chris sponsored me for the October 10K run subject to my refraining to compare the US and the UK in blog posts for six months. The six months are now over, and so is the embargo.
We have a deli at the top of our road. I call it a deli, because that’s what its signage indicates that it is. And generally, when it sells things, it lives up to this name.
But rarely is it stocked well enough to sell things. Yesterday, I went in just after 2pm to buy a couple of sandwiches, to be greeted by a chalkboard reading "No bread left". This experience is far from rare. During yesterday’s short visit, a lady poked her head around the door to ask what time thy closed. "Five o’clock", was the reply, "but it’s not a question of when we close, more a question of when we run out of food", the owner proudly clarified.
While I fully understand the need to stock according to expected demand, for a deli to run out of bread three ours before closing is a crime. Nowhere in New York would that be considered acceptable.
Happy pi day
“Happy pi day”, I said to my wife as I left home this morning.
“Ooh. Is it pie day? I love a pie.”
Happy pi/pie day everyone.
You’ll never see an old man eating a Twix
Karl Pilkington devised a quiz a while ago on XFM whereby he’s string a sentence together using clips from songs. Called Songs of Phrase, the listener had to identify each snippet to win a bunch of tat.
Examples included My girlfriend had a problem with her marrow, My neighbour had a horse in her house and You’ll never see an old man eat a Twix. For the final one of these, he couldn’t find any songs containing the word Twix, so he settled for Mars Bar. It made for a great 5m22s of radio.
Here’s the online equivalent. Type in a sentence and it will sing it back to you. Enjoy!
Greasemonkey magic
I’ve just been futzing around with Greasemonkey. It’s basically a Firefox extension that allows you to install little scripts that can do cool stuff.
The original reason for installing it was to exploit Matt Cutts’ advice on more efficient management of Google Mail. That needed Google’s own saved searches script installing. That works very nicely—thanks, Matt.
I then had a look around for other scripts, and found a gem: postcode linkify. It basically identifies postcodes when a page loads, and displays them all as links to the relevant Google Map. I can’t begin to estimate how many times I’ve copied a postcode from a page, opened Google Maps and pasted the postcode in to find out where something is. I love this.
There’s also Tin Foil Hat, which displays the correct URL of all TinyURLs on hover. Quite useful if you don’t trust the source.
Time-sensitive stylesheets
What a wonderful idea. Katherine Gallia has developed a set of six stylesheets that present themselves depending on the time of day. She has sunrise, morning, noon, afternoon, sunset and twilight.
Lovely concept. I might even implement it if I had the time and skill to develop six stylesheets. I have enough trouble keeping on top of the one.