ajft

Can someone take a cluestick to the newspeople who write gibberish such as the following:

The 2.54pm Williamstown train was expressing from Footscray to Spotswood at the time of the accident.

and:

...said he heard the train sounding its horn as it expressed through the level-crossing.

Go to any dictionary you can find and look up the verb expressing, there is only one definition that I know and it aint the one that they've made up, nor is it an act that a train is likely to perform!

Something that's been bugging me for a while as I deal with ridiculously large amounts of disk space:

Assuming a 2M capacity of an unformatted "1.44M" 3.5" disk which has physical dimensions of 3x90x94mm; 1T of data is a stack 1572m long, or 13.3 cubic metres of disks, or if used as floor tiles, enough to cover 4435 square metres.

Man these guys are fast! It seems to be a week for the Peregrine (Falco peregrinus), yesterday there was an article about a nest and chicks on a city apartment block and photos on page 5 of both the big and the little papers; then today as we were driving out of the street I saw one hurtle past overhead. I think it must be the same one that I saw a few weeks ago in Oakleigh East as I was riding home, and some months ago chase pigeons over our house.

No way I'd be able to catch them on camera, not in flight, not with my camera!

Ride-to-Work day was amusing in some small way. In the morning could I tell it was RTW day? Not really, North road was bumper-to-bumper stationary cars, in twenty minutes I saw one other cyclist, the traffic choked to a halt as the road gets widened to accommodate more cars, with a special bicycle ghetto being built in the median strip that you a) can't get to, then b) have to give way at every single cross road at then c) use the footpath past the primary school. Cyclists dismount please!

In the evening could I tell it was RTW day? Riding up a one-way lane I come to a halt as the p-plate bearing commodore screeches around the corner and comes straight at me. Me: “Mate it's a one way street,” him: “Get fucked, I live here,” me: “I guess if you live here you know its a one way street.” I then had to dive off to the side as he drove straight at me screaming abuse about faggots bicycles poofters f'en cyclist c*ts.

All this followed ten minutes later by a different knob-end throwing the door open and heaving his wobbly belly out of the car and nearly collecting me with the wine bottle he was waving as a counter-balance.

RTW day. Oh yeah. Maybe in the CBD, but out here in 'burbs the petrol-heads go on for ever

Oddness. Placing my mouth to the information firehose for a daily catchup via google reader there's two mentions of tag::pumpkin in two adjacent items — not quite adjacent, I think there were three not-so-interesting ones in between. Norman Walsh plays with Ajax and on his demo portal the first twittering is:

mattb: apparently the UK is experiencing a severe pumpkin shortage due to recent weather. what will we do? (about 8 hours ago)

Second item in a cycling group on Flickr, titled “Pumpkin Runner”, a man jogging carrying a pumpkin.

I guess the northern hemisphere's pumpkin season makes it all a little more understandable...

I wonder what movies I'll end up watching through the year? Here's hoping it'll be more than we managed to see in 2006! Somewhere in the past few years we went from being frequent cinema-goers to almost complete abstainers.

2007-Oct-12 A Scanner Darkly (DVD)
2007-Sep-02 Amazing Grace
2007-Aug-12 Black Book
2007-Aug-10 Desperado (DVD)
2007-Aug-04 El Mariachi (DVD)
2007-Jun-17 Overcoming (DVD)
2007-Jun-03 Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (DVD)
2007-May-27 My Best Friend
2007-Apr-01 A Sunday in Hell (1976)
2007-Apr-01 Vive Le Tour (1962)
2007-Mar-04 Thunderball (DVD)
2007-Mar-03 The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (DVD)
2007-Feb-25 Miss Potter
2007-Feb-24 Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest (DVD)
2007-Jan-20 Casino Royale

Hmm, its been two months now, surely Bigpond have made some sort of progress on my problems with their billing system... surely...

Interactive telephone games, 133.933, 1, 1, 1, 2, 03, home phone number, #, yes, yes, yes... Aha, a human. “What can I do for you today?”

“I lodged a problem report on August the 8th, called again on the 10th and 14th,, then had it escalated on August the 21st. On August the 29th I received a call to see whether I still had the problem and I did. I have heard nothing since.”

A little time on hold, a little wait, then this classic statement:

“It's been escalated up to the helpdesk guys which is up on high and there's no telling how long those guys'll take.”

I pointed out that it has now been two months. Another little wait on hold while Shannon investigated further.

“There's no phone access to them, only email, so you'll just have to wait and there's no telling when they'll get back to you”.

So it could be two days, it could be two months... it could be the middle of next year in which case the two year contract will be expired and I'll be finally rid of them for good and they can keep their broken billing system for all eternity for all I care.

Thread: last next