we are, after all, professionals... dev-notes and deadlines
Friday, July 11, 2003
Another week...
...has passed without an update. Bad form, in some circles, but it has been a busy week - and sometimes life is like that. Long lulls and troughs punctuated by frenzied peaks that surprise you in the night with yellow eyes and maddening screeches, or thud into the side of your head like a wet sod as you blithely go about your business...
And so much for that. The big news this week? I am, as of 4.40 this morning, an uncle. My younger brother woke me from a deep sleep (and a strange dream involving pubs, burnt out cars and too many people that I haven't thought about in years) to tell me that his wife had given birth to a baby girl. Both are doing well, and I shall be seeing the new Smithlet some time in the next few days. A life begun, and many others changed forever.
Due to severely disturbed recent sleep patterns I am currently knackered, and have a whole shitload of work to do, so this is it for today. Have a good weekend.
My kid brother is a year older today, and The Girl and I will be attending a party this weekend at his place, along with parents, friends, neighbours and, of course, my heavily pregnant sister-in-law. The booze quota may not be up to usual standards, thanks to the impending arrival of child, but it should be a decent gathering, nonetheless. We shouldn't, at the very least, have to deal with cream-clad perverts , waking up naked in the street with no memory of getting there, or finding that our enemies and opponents have joined our cause in a confusing display of solidarity that breeds paranoia and distrust as much as any of the usual adversarial spoutings...
What? That last one? Well, it seems that the Beeb's recent spat with the government over the disgustingly-phrased sexing up of pre-war documents on Iraq. Prune-faced ultra-Tory Nicholas Soames, a former defence minister, "said he had been assured by a senior figure in the intelligence services that it was 'totally and entirely untrue' that the Government had interfered with the flow of secret intelligence" . This comes hot on the heels of the BBC's own astonishing admission that the in formation upon which it is basing this entire shambolic witchhunt may well be a pack of lies. Or not. We don't know, and neither do they - as is now becoming clear.
The BBC is willing to offer the government an olive branch by admitting that the source who claimed that No 10 had "sexed up" intelligence information may not have been entirely correct.
But it will do so only if Downing Street accepts that its story was legitimate in the context of general concern about the government's use of intelligence material.
Holy Jesus, what a mess. And what a disgaceful indication of the level of bias at the once-mighty Beeb, a national broadcaster with a supposed legendary impartiality. "...Legitimate in the context of general concern..."? What the hell does that mean - that inaccuracies and barefaced lies can be masquraded as truth as long as it furthers the writer's own views? My God, we need honest news now more than ever, and this just feels like a smack in the teeth. It's like the fucking Hermano album all over again...
As the government debates once more the benefits of full-scale medication of the populace through the water supply, and the medical profession toys with the idea of creating babies whose biological mothers were never born, I find that my local shopping centre recently came within a whisker of falling under the curse of a pure-bred, dyed-in-the-wool, shamanistic freak-doctor from the other side of the world. This witchdoctor, who practices naked to show his honesty and expects his 'patients' to do the same, apparently had one foot on the steps of his private jet, as it sat on a baking Kenyan runway, when a last minute decision was made to call off the spellcasting - saving thousands of shoppers in England's northwest from a fate one can only imagine. A plague of rats? Boils? The four horsemen splashing through the elegant marble fountains in a raging display of Revelationary savagery? A visit from the Charles and Camilla? And all this because of a low-grade knick-knack store whose business has gone belly-up in the fallout of the great new century's divorce from ethnic fascination - a weird kind of inverted snobbery that attributed all manner of noble and salutory notions to wooden masks and worry beads.
So? Well, I shall be visiting this particular mall tonight, as my brother's birthday looms, followed closely by my mother's, and I need gifts. I'll give the tribal goods store a miss though, as I wouldn't want to risk a cursing. Still, at least Henman is hanging in there, following his bizarre and mind-bending match against Argentina's David Nalbandian. With six consecutive service break games in the third set it was an outrageous explosion of profanity and violence, at my end at least, but the teeth-gritting Henman blundered through in the fading light. One day, perhaps, but I doubt this'll be the year...
OK, back to real work, but in the meantime go and play this game.
I've no clue as to where these came from as I received them from a colleague, but I like 'em! If I'm stealing them from anywhere in particular, well... tough. They're public domain now, my friend...
Japanese Error Message Haikus
In Japan, they have replaced the impersonal and unhelpful Microsoft error messages with Haiku poetry messages. Haiku poetry has strict construction rules. Each poem has 17 syllables: 5 syllables in the first line, 7 in the second, 5 in the third. They are used to communicate a timeless message, often achieving a wistful, yearning and powerful insight through extreme brevity.
Your file was so big.
It might be very useful.
But now it is gone.
The Web site you seek
cannot be located, but
countless more exist.
Chaos reigns within.
Reflect, repent, and reboot.
Order shall return.
Program aborting:
close all that you have worked on.
You ask far too much.
Windows NT crashed.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.
Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.
First snow, then silence.
This thousand-dollar screen dies
so beautifully.
The Tao that is seen
is not the true Tao until
You bring fresh toner.
Stay the patient course.
Of little worth is your ire.
The network is down.
A crash reduces
your expensive computer
to a simple stone.
Three things are certain:
death, taxes and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.
You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
Out of memory.
We wish to hold the whole sky,
but we never will.
Having been erased,
the document you're seeking
must now be retyped.
Serious error.
All shortcuts have disappeared.
Screen. Mind. Both are blank.
Well, it's only Tuesday and already it's shaping up to be a weird week. Children are whooping it up for the written word, armoured shrimps and giant sea-spiders have been found off the coast of New Zealand, and Wimbledon's current champion and number one seed got his ass handed to him by a stammering Croatian giant playing his first ever grand slam match.
Beneath the oceans, it would seem, lurks a motley collection of freaks the likes of which is matched only by the images I see of life in British politics these days. One newly discovered creature, called the fangtooth, has teeth longer than its head. To avoid piercing its own brain when it shuts its mouth, its teeth fit into opposing sockets. This describes equally well the evil-looking prehistoric beast discovered in the Australasian depths and the unnamed speedfreak that lifted material from a twelve-year-old Phd thesis for use in a government dossier on Iraq and didn't even have the nouse to fully rewrite the damn thing. Jack Straw is currently 'giving evidence' to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee in an attempt to hammer Labour's panels back into shape, and will be followed later by the government's smoothest fixer, Alastair Campbell. This dossier, released at the height of public fear and confusion over the war, carried the infamous 45 minutes allegation, and was apparently 'sexed up' to make it more palatable to the public ear. Well, my friend, sex and politics don't mix - just ask William Jefferson Clinton, or David Mellor - and you only have to look at these people to see that. Just the facts ma'am, that's all we ask. Too much? Sure, this is politics after all, but for Christ's sake, if you are getting a backroom lackey to rustle up a little chum, please check that shit before you throw it in the water. The last thing you need is an official release document written by some idiot who spent so much time cheating at school he developed a permanent crick in his neck.
Which just goes to show; behind every great politician is a greater number of loons, shitheels and winos, who hold the dreams of the great and the good in their sticky palms, yet have all the political ken of old Fangtooth - snapping away in the dark, each opening and closing of the mouth just a millimetre or two away from impaling the prefrontal cortex on a five-inch spike. Then one day - maybe it's age, or wear, or just a little of that bad luck people talk so much about - the mouth closes mid-sentence, a little off-centre, and BLAM! The fear centre of the brain is scrambled, burned away by the incision of a needle-sharp fang. So much for that; who needs Fear - this is politics, and a man without fear is a force to be reckoned with in Westminster, just like in the bullring, or when descending to the sea in a coffin-sized tin box just to take photographs of deep-sea creatures the likes of which the human eye has never seen. Except in the halls of government...
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