“This Standard applies the product known as kimchi, as defined in Section 2 below, which is prepared with Chinese cabbage as a predominant ingredient and other vegetables which have been trimmed, cut, salted and seasoned before fermentation.”
Neil Hopcroft
A digital misfit
If you wanna use my washing machine, first you gotta buy the detergent…
“Hello, this is Comet home delivery, we went to your house but nobody was in so we’ve gone away again, please call us to arrange another day for delivery”
Oh, ok, so this’ll be the 30 minutes notice I asked for. Having deleted the message in a fit of ‘I’m gonna cancel my order ‘cos you’re a bunch of incompetents’ I started randomly calling numbers from my ‘recent missed calls’ list in the hope of finding someone who knew what I was talking about. If you received a call that went along the lines of “Hello” “Hello” “What do you want?” “Well, you called me, what do you want?” with no rational explanation, please accept my apologies. Finally somebody seemed to know something about it, but who was currently in a van heading away from my house. By some bizarre mixture of anger and dispair I managed to convince them to turn around after their next drop and come back.
So, this evening, I’ve been playing with my new washing machine. It goes around, and it really does only have two buttons on it. And a dial. But you must have a dial. Its not a washing machine if it doesn’t have a dial. I even have a handy efficiency sticker that I can stick onto something inappropriate – do you reckon I could realistically mark my car as ‘B’ rated for electrical efficiency? What about its water consumption?
! THINK
I forgot – yesterdays travels around the roads of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire seemed to have a lot of IBM adverts, though I’m not sure why they’d be sponsoring red warning triangle signs, its not their normal big-blue image….there also seemed to be a running total of fatalities for each stretch of road, suggesting a game of trying to drive the most dangerous route across the flatlands. Its not a metric in my satnav at the moment, have to try and figure a way to enlighten it…
“We used the commercial tool IDA (the Interactive DisAssembler) [4] to reverse-engineer the binary. About 300KiB of the binary was 32-bit ARM code, 500KiB high-entropy data with some fairly regular structure visible, and the remainder was blank.”
Yesterday I took a wander around the Cambridge Science Park, just over the other side of the A14 – there aren’t many places in this country that could sustain such a development, its certainly some kind of hub of biotech and electronics research, like a little outpost of silicon valley, which is why its called Silicon Fen, I suppose. The weather was miserable but that made it all the better, these places are just like the photos if you see them in sunlight, unreal. I was amused to see the Napp building – someones got too much money and a James-Bond-Villain complex of some sort, haven’t they? Moat, mirrorglass castle, invisible security screen, maybe even a minefield to keep out the curious. Its all getting a bit Gattaca.
Then, in the evening, a small gathering over at lark_ascending and crazyscots place. Much geeking including a certain amount of camera confusion, hearing about architectural psychologists, ballroom dancing and some twisted future explored in sci-fi books I really don’t need to buy more of…
Today another miserable day in the fens, that kind of driving-through-clouds effect where it isn’t really raining, more condensing on the windscreen. I went to March, since I didn’t really have a plan and it was the next place I found a sign to after Ely. I was looking for brown tourist-attraction signs, but they seem rather sparse around here. I guess I was spoiled over near the Wychwood.
March is a dreadful little town full of kids with neon cars who still have something to prove to the world. Luckily they didn’t feel a need to prove anything to me and I went about my business of trying to find something interesting to do in a fenland town on a sunday evening. The best I could come up with was an auctionhouse at the end of the main drag, which looked like it had a bunch of things going on, mostly the normal estate agent stuff but there was some businesses for sale as going concerns along with a collection of peculiar premises. Have to go back sometime when they’re open and see if I can find out more about their auctions….doubt theres much of interest there but its worth a look.
Then back for an evening of wrestling with GPRS internet access points and trying to make them work automagically…*phew* thats rather more involved than I’d hoped. Still, at least that bit is working now.
“Marketers looked at these companies and said they were succeeding because their brands were strong. In reality, the brands were strong because the companies were succeeding.”
A useful register of where to find caches of expensive equipment, if only it were easy to hack…
Someone pointed out this site – I’m assuming, given the context of the link, that they are a legal company. However, I can’t see from their website what they do. I guess the problem here is relying too much on brand awareness and not enough on clear statements of who you are or what you do.
This, I’m sure, will be appreciated by Grandi, amongst others:
“testiculate
[tes-tik-u-layt]
vb
(intransitive)
to wave your hands about in wild but vague manner because you suspect you are talking bollocks.”
(from Morph)
“Beneath the eight grave markers, and perhaps in a rumored unmarked grave nearby, lie reams of paper printouts of code for software that has left this mortal operating system.”