Ying Tong Iddle I Po

Well the Lady Margaret Players (the John’s drama society) had a play pull out on them so, at incredibly short notice, Improvised Comedy Ents proudly presents improv@john’s — an evening of improvised comedy and sketches at John’s on Wednesday (1st March). See below cut for full details. (more…)

I’ve just received an email sent from some London-based financial recruiting firm which has obviously been Bcc’d to a large number of PhD students spamming their services (without even including a To: field, just Bcc-s). I convinced myself the reply address was genuine and fired off a ‘how rude are you’ email. The bloke eplied saying he found nothing wrong with using a list of email addresses of people in the University given to him by a random recruit to send information to. Just a list of emails of people at the University who are PhD students, no prior reason for expecting them to be interested in his wares. Wanker.

I have just spent my afternoon losing another part of my Windows virginity. I found that one of those lovely pieces of shareware whose author decided that launching IE pointing to their webpage instead of coding an About box was a lot easier than actually querying windows for the web-browser of choice. Said webpage no longer exists but it does point to a dodgy ’spyware removal tool’ website which decides to install spy/adware via an IE ’sploit.

Suddenly the AV tool starts shouting about AdWare being installed at an astonishing rate. One reboot into safe-mode later I’m staring at a scan progress dialogue hunting through the HD finding all those lovely nuggets of Windows pain. Finally it thinks everything is gone and I reboot.

Bang! Blue-screen every time I log into my account.

After manually removing my profile by loggining in as Administrator I manage to boot without blue-screening. Immediately my (Linux) firewall starts emailing me telling me my machine is attempting hundreds of SMTP connections a second. Joys!

So tomorrow it is in with a Knoppix disc and a day of re-imaging my machine. Luckily I’ve setup Samba as a PDC so much of my data is on my network-shared home directory.

I wish I wasn’t involed in writing DirectX stuff otherwise the first job tomorrow would be to install Ubuntu.

*phew*

We did Lights! Camera! Improv! last night at the ADC. A perfectly reasonable show although I thought I was a little off-form. I am now officially sick of organising improv events :). There is a slight possibility of doing both a King’s show and a John’s show in the near future. I think I’m going to delegate the organisation of those to others though :).

Expect Google Video links fairly soon.

Well yesterday wasn’t too bad. Both Jennie and I resisted the lure of the Greater Hallmark Empire (although she didn’t resist the lure of the Lesser Tesco Kids Kreate a Kard Kit Principality). Instead of the usual dog-show of trying to find somewhere to charge you twice as much for a meal because it comes on pink plates we decided to cook each other dinner.

Jennie did a lovely meaty chilli (beyond the call of duty for a vegetarian) with lots of spice which went wonderfully in flour tortillas. I made-up something which I can probably call Champignon Normande et Riz comme les Ancients without French people hating me too badly for abusing their language. For the uninitiated this is mushroom and Quorn in a creamy cider sauce with mixed brown and wild rices. It seemed to go down well and was fairly low in fat (due to using Creme Fraiche instead of cream). It sucked up an entire bottle of cider which reduced down to but tablespoons of the final sauce. Mmm.

Which reminds me… On our first V-Day Jennie probably still thought I couldn’t cook[1] so she would’ve made some lovely dinner. Why is it not only accepted but perhas even the norm that people can’t cook, or at last use recipies for inspiration rather than slavishly following them? Do people not learn to cook from their parents any more? Or is it the case, as I suspect, that my generation is one of the first where the parents are used to ready-meals and individually wrapped microwave-friendly sossies? Perhaps that is why most cooking programmes on telly now are mindless escapism to some ideal of European cafe-culture, micro settlement, traditional ‘way-mamma-useda-to-makea-it’ rather than actually telling you how to make a Bernaise sauce or a basic lasagne.

[1] Because I am both male and a geek and stereotypically devoid of any ability in that direction.

Public Service Announcement: Blender truly is a great piece of software. That is all :).

So I’ve been seeing lots of things like this floating around on the web:

“Novel [sic] im am honestly disgusted in you people, a shit ass expose rip, alt-tab rip, and the cube switch around. Thats the thing about most companies you steal from them, and can’t think of your own ideas. I really hope Apple sues your ass, because I think it is time for others to stop ripping off other companies.

“I think it’s great that Novel [sic] is copying all the idea from Apple, and in some cases, using them in another form (ie. cube effect between virutal screens while holding onto a window)… I think its great because it means Apple got it right.”

… and lots of other flames. Could I point out that all this ‘desktop on cube eye-candy stuff’ wasn’t an Apple innovation in the first place[1] and, if I have anything to contribute the matter, I am really very pleased the rendering model of X has matured to the state where this can be implemented. About time! Not only do I fully support this ‘rip-off’ but I’ve been playing with the code myself. Can one copy from oneself in a morally repugnant manner?

For my small part I don’t care about the copying so people can stop being offended on my behalf.

[1] The first cube switch on OS X happened in my lap in my girlfriend’s house whilst we were watching telly. I think I might’ve been eating a sandwich too.

We play a game called MacGuyver in which we improvise bizarre ways to solve a world crisis using equally bizarre objects. This is, of course, a parody of the real MacGuyver TV show. Wikipedia, bless its little cotton socks, has shown us that any parody is unlikely to be as incredible as the ‘reality’:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_problems_solved_by_MacGyver

*groan*. I’m ill. Proper man-style lie on the sofa in a dressing gown moaning ill. Unfortunately Jennie is upstairs in bed not doing her girly duty and treating me like a 3 year old so I’m having to sort myself out. On the positive side I’m watching Rachel’s Favourite Foods on telly… mmm, horny Irish women.