Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Dilbert captures the world I live in, again

Made it to the boot fair this morning, having found everyone packed up and gone home last week….caught up with dalglir and his young lady, who seemed to be having a good time there, and found someone selling the Lego Bionicle boardgame (Quest for Makuta, or something) for 2 quid…I got it home and found they’d not even taken everything out of its little plastic bags, let alone played it. Of course, in my eagerness to read the rules I managed to get them covered in Mango chutney. Ooops.


I’m not going to be the only one whose life has fallen apart with a power outage in a remote server room halfway across the world, am I?

Shame, really, ‘cos I’ve got so many things to say, like pointing out the hardcore morris dancers, or warning you about a file-sharers virus, or even pointing out onions (which, for the life of me, I can’t remember why I’ve got open…but I was going to tell somebody about it, so if you can identify yourself as that somebody, consider yourself told).

God told me to use Real Player” (please don’t look at the rest of the site, you’ll find things like “We must go to those who would never come into our churches— to the atheists, to the religious, to the self-righteous, to the God-hating and win their souls to Christ”, I wonder how they identify the self-righteous?)

In fact, I’m hoping they’ll find ‘powermagic.demon.co.uk’ in their logs…that’ll annoy ’em. And I keep thinking about a spoof site called “Repaint America”, which could use some of ventas feng shui colour charts, I reckon it could do with a liberal covering of Dignity and Wisdom to stop its Chi leaking out into the Atlantic.


I’ve just noticed trying to type ‘Vauxhall’ into the predictive text on my phone gives ‘tat?’, maybe I should ask my phone what car I should buy next? Does anyone else use their predictive text to predict other aspects of their life?


“Improper use of cola might result in blunt trauma, puncture wounds, physical illness, mental illness, caffeine dependency, dental necrosis, acid reflux, death, devastation, and random tax audits. Or it might not….OpenCola soda is distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL)”


Today, on my walk to the office, I found some bollard polishers. I don’t remember seeing anyone cleaning them before, but I assume there is a long history of such undertakings by the highways agency. Good work, lads, keep ’em clean.


I’m not a twisted sociopath, everyones forgiven

It seems I accidentally had a phone interview this morning for a job in ‘the M3/M4 corridor area’….not quite sure how that happened, since I’m supposed to be taking a break when I finish my current position at the end of the month.

Today the results of an ’employee satisfaction survey’ were made available. Clearly it is not appropriate for me to comment on the contents of the survey, the results or the conclusions that have been drawn from it. However, I was curious about how widespread these things are and what everyone thought about them….

I can’t get no….