Quixotic Evil

I shan't be attempting NaNoWriMo this year. I have too much other stuff on.

In trying to work out where the apostrophe(s) go[es] in the contraction of 'shall not', I was reminded of my one-time housemate who claimed that 'shall' was the 'strongest word in the language' because it lacked a negation: he felt that due to its association with petulant middle-class girls 'shan't' was not valid for use. Just thought I'd share that with you.

This article is alternatively entitled 'Stay away from de Voodoooo', especially if you're not a lawyer, a philosopher, or a person with a vague interest in almost anything and too much time on his hands.

Clarke's Third Law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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After a promise a while back then a good month recently, the office has new 19'' flat screens all 'round.
I've also got around to installing MS Visio, and spent a couple of hours playing with it by way of making some diagrams for the report I was preparing. Visio is great: it's not such a complicated brief (I want to be able to put standardised symbols into this diagram easily, connect them with lines where necessary, and if I find something is in the wrong place I want all the lines to follow when I drag it) but I've not found anything else that makes that sort of work quite so convenient.

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'Unusually high call volumes' my arse. They just aren't employing enough people in their call centre. I bet when I do get to speak to someone it'll be an offshore worker with a thick accent I can't understand (and possibly no ability to interpret mine).

Although the internet connection itself only ever had one problem (a problem their technical people completely failed to resolve until they got lucky and sold me an upgrade that happened to fix it), everything about Tiscali's customer service operation stinks of trying to save money. It's a good thing I'm only trying to contact them to get a migration code and leave.

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Damage Done: ~35%, 1^st of 5.
Damage Taken: ~86%, 1^st of 5.
Playing a warrior in World of Warcraft is so much fun.

I'll sort out a proper list of where all my neat script and markup is stolen from at some point, but for the time being I just wanted to confess that the core of my new sidebar-hiding gizmo is ripped out of the Drunkey Love theme for Wordpress, which I learned of through Unreliable Witness. Thanks folks.

I'm kind of hoping the awful button graphics I'm using are temporary, but I doubt I can do all that much better. Graphics really aren't my thing. (Plus they appear in the wrong place in IE)

Sorry for being a little slow on this one: I was away for the weekend and spent a long drive on Friday hearing about this on the radio. In Friday's Daily Mail, which I didn't read, General Sir Richard Dannatt said various things about the UK's presence in Iraq, later revised dramatically for a hasty press release. BBC News summarises the former and quotes the latter.

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For those who read the Troy review and noted that I might soon be trying to get rid of a copy of The Prisoner on DVD, I have the following statement:

You can't have it. It's mine.
It's precious...

...this passes as a sewing pattern:

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Yesterday afternoon my [main] WoW character left her guild. By yesterday evening I had been invited to four others. People really value healing-spec priests: they need someone to shout at when it all goes pear-shaped.

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This Pink for October thing, combined with the resurgence of Orix, one of my friends of many comments (few of them here), has reminded me that November is nearly here, and with it NaNoWriMo.

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I was listening to Radio 1 on the way home last night (as I always do: I absolutely cannot stand radio commercials, and hence never listen to commercial radio), and Scott Mills was being surprisingly smart in his childish humour. Normally his great ideas (and those of his co-presenters, such as looking through a US phone book for people with 'humourous' names and ringing them up) are cringeworthy, and to be fair this one was little different.

As part of the ongoing feud between him and Jo Whiley - gone to and fro since he cut footage of her on a rollercoaster into a montage of moaning and squealing reminiscent of the café scene in When Harry Met Sally - she had sent him text messages pretending to be from David Hasslehoff, saying that he'll write a love scene for Scott and him in his musical. Scott replied, writing 'I can't wait to make love to you'. Jo of course read this out on air, giving Scott a[nother] recording that will bring him endless joy.

The calls he made with the sample were awful, as you'd expect, but I have to respect the manoeuvring to get it.

This is one of the 'why do I bother' posts to defend/justify one of my crazy hobbies. If you haven't seen the previous 'why do I bother' posts, it's because I tend to stick them in the drafts and leave them there, or delete them outright. Perhaps this time will be different.

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DVDs are getting cheaper (at the low end), and so I become more likely to buy them without having seen them. This week it was Troy, an epic retelling of the semi-mythical Trojan War.

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