Looking Out To Sea

The tooltip on today’s XKCD has this challenge:

Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at “Philosophy”

I tried it by starting out in the first thing I thought of, category theory, and ended up looping back round. Mathematics is a closed loop under this rule, as is Breadpig…

Category theory, Mathematics, Quantity, Change, Social change, Social progress, Social enterprise, Uncorporation, Breadpig, xkcd, Webcomic, Comics, Graphics, Visual system, Central nervous system, Nervous system, Biological system, Biology, Natural science, Science, Knowledge, Fact, Information, Sequence, Mathematics

I had to use some judgement because I ended up on a disambiguation page at one point, so I chose the first real article on the page. And there’s also a good chance I misclicked somewhere and broke the circuit.

Edit: I spotted the problem. Someone edited the Quantity page to break the chain… crafty, but inevitable.

Over Christmas we stayed with Helen’s parents, though they left on Boxing Day for Forn Parts. Sadly we both got quite ill on the 27th of December. We made it as far as the medicine cabinet in the morning and the sofa in front of the TV in the afternoon. And through all that we couldn’t have a single cup of tea because there was no milk.

I consoled myself by reading Hugh Fearlessly Eats It All, a collection of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s columns, which includes a hilarious, in-depth and overblown guide to tea-making. Read it, I insist: skip down to the paragraph beginning “That’s all changed. Now, to make my tea…” and boggle.

Hugh’s convoluted method is of course just the latest in the long list of articles written in pursuit of the Perfect Cuppa™. The most famous I know of is George Orwell’s A Nice Cup of Tea though there are definitely others. (Edit — As if to prove the point, I’ve just spotted Christopher Hitchens writing about the same topic at citing Orwell too.)

When I couldn’t face any more reading we watched Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, which has DVD extras including interviews from people around the world explaining why they like Wallace and Gromit so much. The Japanese lady explaining the insight into English life and how much tea they drink was particularly amusing. This from the nation that invented the tea ceremony!

Discussion of tea without milk will not be entertained.

I feel like I’m just posting stupid screenshots at the moment, but this is the second time E-ON have done this to me so there’s no mercy.

Come on, form mail isn’t difficult! Get your act together, and check the damn things before you hit send.

Description of screenshot included in blog post:

D: Did I send you the link about the woman who was blogging everything her husband said as he fell asleep?

H: No! Did he say something about being hacked by 2012…

(About leaving first thing in the morning before I am awake.)

H: I see you there all asleep and not even moving and I worry that there’s something wrong with you and then you open your can of Coke…

D: Buahahaha!

H: What? Oh. There wasn’t a security barrier either, was there? :-(

H: I see what you’re doing there. I see what you’re gathering.

D: What?

H: You’re going around gathering … recipes …

For the past three and a half years I have been working on router redundancy protocols. When your router (or its upstream connection) dies for some reason you want to minimise the loss on people using the network. Ideally users should never notice loss of connection, though in the real world there will be some time delay before things are working again. The work I’ve been doing relies on having a second router which has its own connection to the local network and to the wider world. It acts as a redundant backup so that when the first one dies the second can step into its place within some short period.

When the primary router is working normally the secondary doesn’t do much. Its only role is to monitor the liveliness of the primary machine. The redundant router can often be used for other things when the primary is operating — and many times the primary acts as a redundant router for the secondary’s clients. Each provides backup for the other.

So when I found out recently that I was being made redundant I thought “great! I’ll just sit and watch other people working and take over if they burst into flames”. But it turns out that when people are redundant it’s totally different from when routers are redundant. Instead of being relied on for backup in case of failure, it means “no longer working”. Strange but true! I can see why it wouldn’t catch on very well in networking.

My last day at Cisco is this Friday (30 July). It’s been an interesting few years and provided novel experiences, silly conversations about Star Trek and given me a bit more confidence. I’m sad to be going, and though there will always be loose ends to tie up and the promise of interesting projects on the horizon, the team I’m leaving behind seems to have a glut of these at the moment. I’m also disappointed that the study group at work will continue reading SICP without me. Obviously I can read it alone but the discussion and peer support/pressure was a useful part of it.

Meanwhile, the job hunt continues. Recruitment agencies make this process at least ten times harder by hiding the employer, the industry and the specifics of the job for their own ends. I have had a few friends pass on job details, and had some telephone discussions, but no success yet. Watch this space, or one very much like it.

Would it be “ludicrous to think of hiring a juggler without first seeing him perform”? Raganwald has made this point in the past, with reference to professional interviews. But if someone comes to you claiming to be a yo-yo champion it would be rude to challenge them on this point.

Taken from the man page for strncmp:

       The following sections are informative.
 
EXAMPLES
       None.
 
APPLICATION USAGE
       None.
 
RATIONALE
       None.
 
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
       None.

I hope that was a joke.

A conversation over IM earlier today. I’m the guilty D in this exchange.

M: Then all you need is a sofa on wheels, and you can really travel in style.

D: I know where I can get one of them! Ssofa so good you might say, but how do I couch my idea in more marketable terms? I don’t want to lounge around all day, I want to chaise the big money!

M: Those were terrible.

D: You can’t deny the joy of punning — have a go, you ottoman.

M: You are a bad man.

D: It was all going so well, and then I just went and put my futon it.

M: I’m going to report you to the ‘Law and Order: Misuse of Puns’ division

D: Will they lock me up and take me away in divan?

Five minutes pass.

D: Oh no, I’ve killed him.

From Charlie Brooker’s latest column:

God/no God? No God. We’re all freelancers. Some of us may choose to sit in imaginary offices from time to time, pretending to receive memos from our made-up boss, or enjoying watercooler conversations about the loving/vengeful/forgiving nature of our fictional chief with our colleagues, but no matter how many hours we clock up, it doesn’t alter the fact that no one’s actually running things on the top floor. This is good news. We own the company!