Press and hold the ctrl-alt-cmd keys (the three left-most keys on the bottom row)
Then repeatedly tap the full stop key
You may stop when your display looks a bit stupid. To reverse the process hold down the three modifiers and tap the comma key instead.
Now, tell me how you would manage all that by accident. Twice. And not notice that you were doing it either time until it was already done.
Once you’ve managed that, try dragging Mail.app from /Applications onto your desktop and doing a system update in a multi-user system. It is possible (though how, I am still unsure) to update the copy on your desktop while leaving an old copy elsewhere which other users will still try to use. The old version will cease to work if the OS update leaves it incompatible with the rest of the system.
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?
This is the second grocery-shopping post I have made in a row, which is slightly alarming. In future will all my blog posts have some theme of standing in the cheese aisle, fretting over which kind of cheddar to buy? I hope not.
Anyway, at some point in the last six months — and I can honestly say I refuse to hunt down the references because it simply does not matter — the supply of 100W incandescent light bulbs has dried up. By law. I refuse to act like it is my human right to buy bulbs that are hot enough to burn fingertips. No doubt there are professional Boring Farts out there doing that very thing, in between complaining about the weather forecast being in degrees Celsius and milk being sold in litres.
Instead I will say something that really matters:
The aforesaid Co-op (the one that occasionally stock Our Kind of Tea™) has decided that No 100W Bulbs means No 100W-equivalent Bulbs. I’m only asking for something like a 20W bulb, but the most I can buy is a 65W-equivalent (=14W actual).
Sooner or later there will be a generation that doesn’t know what a 100W light bulb means. Woah.
If there’s a product you buy regularly — like tea or washing powder or chocolate biscuits — which isn’t always available locally, you might be inclined to buy it when it’s there, to encourage the shop to stock the item you want.
I saw the brand of tea we like in the big Co-op at the Foot of the Walk the other day, so I bought two boxes instead of just one. Then I realised, if we have twice as much tea in the house, I’ll be buying it half as often. The money we spend on tea in a given year won’t change. So maybe there’s nothing I can actually do to implicitly encourage the Co-op to stock our preferred tea. Unless we drink twice as much tea as before.
Last weekend Mat invited us round for an evening of bad — nay, terrible — movies, centred around his bargain purchase of Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus. We also saw a bit of Batman & Robin that was telly at the time, and I Know Who Killed Me, a horror movie.
Mega Shark really was as bad as we all imagined. The acting was just short of terrible, but the overall artistic vision was disastrous. It’s amazing how many “armed guards” there were in this movie, standing in the background in laboratories and offices, all wearing dark glasses despite the moody lighting.
I took particular enjoyment from the “science” scene, in which the marine biologists mixed arbitrary liquids in test tubes until they found that right combination that luminesced. (Don’t worry, it wasn’t all taxing science in the laboratory: there was time for a sex scene in the supply cupboard. Unusually, it’s legitimate to say that it was a necessary part of the plot.)
The shark and octopuses were a bit lacklustre. I was hoping for some old-school giant rubber tentacles reaching over boat decks and maybe some stop-motion or something. Instead we were treated to the same three clips of shark swimming, shark fighting octopus, octopus swimming, in various combinations. It was just like watching Saturday morning cartoons again.
The sizes and capabilities of the monsters are ludicrous to say the least. How fast does a shark have to be swimming when it leaves the water in order to overtake — and maul — a cruising 747? Answers on a postcard.
The title Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus doesn’t hide any aspect of the film from you. It’s exactly as you imagine. I Know Who Killed Me is another daft title but this one was apparently meant with all sincerity. Lindsay Lohan is abducted by a serial killer and then Lindsay Lohan turns up a few days later claiming to be a different Lindsay Lohan but bearing all the wounds which identify this particular serial killer.
This film wasn’t as bad as I expected. I don’t know if that’s because of drastically lowered expectations, or whether the elements of goodness shone through the rubbishness. Lohan did win two Golden Raspberry Awards for it, tying first and second place for Worst Actress, which I think is a bit harsh. She was far from the worst thing about this film.
Last night I saw a pilot for a modern version of the 80s classic Knight Rider. It was about as rubbish as you’d imagine, though the Hoff got a little cameo as the main dude’s absent father. And they ended on the original theme tune. But the rest of it was still crap. Reimagined, reworked and rebooted series can work very well — see Star Trek: TNG, Battlestar Galactica — but the real work is not done by the computer graphics people. You need good stories, believable plots, interesting characters! Wikipedia reveals that the series had one (shortened) season and was dropped. Hardly surprising.
I’m looking for more so-bad-it’s-good movies if you have something to recommend(!). Fixed in my mind is Battlefied Earth. Any others?
You see, this is why you should never announce intentions, never announce that you’re going to do something imminently because the only possible outcome of that kind of promise is that (a) you then find life carries you away to do a million other things and you have no time to do the last few things you meant to do or (b) you realise what a horrible mess you’ve made and dive back into the project in order to fix it.
I have been suffering a little from (a) and a little from (b) this weekend. Thankfully I’ve got Monday and Tuesday off work in which to make some amends, though really I’m using that time to whip the house into some neater shape for The Student, and tomorrow we’re away to Glasgow. I’m managing to snatch minutes here and there and I’m slowly getting close to something I’d be happy to release.
Last night was the final night of the Edinburgh International Festival, with a concert and firework display above Princes’ Street Gardens. We had Kate and Ben around for dinner and we peered out the window at the fireworks, listening to the performance streamed from the Forth One website. Unfortunately there’s a row of chimney pots that block a good chunk of the view, so we could only see the top half of the higher explosions. (So we couldn’t see the waterfall, but it’s always rubbish I think anyway.) Hilariously the radio stream was several seconds behind the display. At one interlude the radio commentator was still talking while the first fireworks exploded in the distance. I wonder if that was a special delay for those using the intarwebs or if the radio was also slightly behind.
Meal was good though and we had good chat. Kate and Helen had a knitting session while Ben and I looked on, slightly aghast. For the first time that I remember we managed to get everything prepared ahead of schedule and weren’t fretting as people arrived. We must be grown-ups now. Maybe I should start keeping stamps in my wallet.
The International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP) is taking place this week in Edinburgh. A substantial group of attendees are Haskell programmers and researchers, so it seemed a good idea to organise a Hackathon to work on libraries, infrastructure tools and various bits that everybody can use.
Eric Kow was the driving force behind this, and he managed to get us use of the conference facilities on Sunday, while there were a couple of workshops happening elsewhere in the building.
We didn’t have anywhere definite arranged for Saturday, so I went scouting a couple of weeks ago and identified a couple of places that would be suitable. I emailed and phoned Henderson’s and they weren’t horrified by the idea. We spent the day there, making sure to buy enough coffees to keep the management happy. There were 8 or 9 of us at the busiest point and we got some pretty amused/strange looks from other customers: a crowded table of people all with laptops open, ignoring each other…
In the evening we went out restaurant-hunting, which I don’t recommend in these circumstances — 9 people, Saturday night, Edinburgh festival, centre of town, no booking. I tried calling Calistoga (their number was still in my phone) as they’re both spacious and hidden from the tourists but they couldn’t take us either. We eventually found an Indian restaurant that would take us, so we idled in the pub across the road while they got ready for us.
On Sunday we were using the ICFP conference facilities, deep in the bowels of the Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street. It was a nice room, with little groups of tables, plenty of extension blocks for powering laptops, a flip chart and a projector. We even had wifi, though the networking infrastructure died a few times from heavy use. We were running off a separate system from the rest of the conference centre and their wireless access died, so there was an influx of random conference-goers looking for net access, which brought our wifi to its knees too. I had felt slightly guilty about taking people to a cafe with dodgy wifi the day before, but in fact the conference centre had an even less reliable connection! :-)
My sincere thanks to the staff of Henderson’s for putting up with us, to Graeme Hutton and Philip Wadler for getting us a room in the conference venue on Sunday, to Eric for doing all his organisation and to everybody who actually came along.
I’m putting a call out to everyone that attended to let me know what they did and so on. More updates when I hear back from them.
Busy weekend. On Friday night I left work and went straight to The Shore for a pub meet — Greener Leith and Green Drinks teaming up, and we took over the largest chunk of the pub. It was fun and though I didn’t meet many Leith people it was a nice evening.
On Saturday we had a very slow start. The plan had been an early rise and get a final coat of paint on two walls in the living room, and make a start on walls in the turret/alcove. But the previous night’s revelry slowed down things a bit, and then lack of planning (ie, not enough paint) meant we didn’t start until after we’d eaten lunch. Also, I saw a bush-baby in the peeling paint after we removed the curtain rail. That beats seeing Cthulhu in the Nutella, I think.
We did get some good stuff done round the window though the walls are looking as patchy as ever. On Sunday morning we did the biggest wall and then went out to Roseleaf to meet Gemma, David and Graeme. Spent the afternoon wandering from pub to pub. The Halt and Mops Malt and Hops and then Sofi’s, then up the hill to La Favorita for takeaway pizza which we ate in the flat. Naturally, we have no photos cos we’re dead organised innit.
This Sunday we’ve got another Potluck and Prose, the lazy person’s book group, where you don’t technically need to have read your book, and bringing one is only suggested. As long as you’ve got a dish then all is fine.
Thankfully, after a bad start with Swallows and Amazons which I took two months to get through, I’m on a roll. This month I finished my own Foundation and Helen’s book too, Flowers for Algernon. Since then I’ve also been reading Innocent When You Dream (a compilation of interviews with Tom Waits) and started Quicksilver.
This latter is another seriously hefty book from Neal Stephenson, and is something like a prequel to Cryptonomicon. I cannot praise Cryptonomicon enough and would recommend it to anyone who asked. It was a fictionalised account of cryptography in the Second World War and modern computing, and riveting to boot. In order to outdo himself, Stephenson has chosen “science” as his theme and “the Age of Enlightenment” his time period. I’m only a few chapters in but it’s not disappointing so far!
Back round to the other book group, for science stuff, the next few books have been announced. One in particular looks very interesting, and will no doubt be particularly enjoyable once I’ve finished Quicksilver. It is Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. That’s not until March next year though.
But before that we’ve got:
How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood by Alison Gopnik, Patricia K Kuhl and Andrew Meltzoff
Last week I made a batch of low-yeast bread which was allowed to develop over the course of an evening. I moulded them and let them prove overnight in the fridge.
Not only was it easier and less hassle to bake first thing in the morning but I also had the satisfaction of making some of the nicest loaves I’ve made in a while. Helen and I took a baguette each and a box of sandwich ingredients to work, which also cut down on my effort in the morning. No more making sandwiches!
I’ve been too busy to do this again lately — I tried again on Sunday but the yeast was more active than I assumed it would be and it would have been over-proved after a night on its own. So I just baked that night. But I’m looking forward to doing this again.
