Well Thumbed

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to be taken to the Goldfrapp concert at the Brixton Academy by a good friend. It was a belated birthday present and it was well worth the wait. I was surprised to see that almost everyone in the hall assumed their position standing in neat little rows and patiently waited for Alison Goldfrapp to entertain us. Unfortunately, one group of 3 girls with a presumably long-suffering fellow decided to buck the trend and landed up in front of us.

Normally this would be nothing more than a mild annoyance, the consequence of which would be similar to those befalling queue jumpers - a sigh, some tutting and perhaps some foot-tapping in extreme cases. This case, however, would turn out to be completely different as one of the constituents talked constantly to her friends throughout the supporting act. Again, not the end of the world as nobody could make out what he was singing about, although one number was almost certainly about Shaftsbury Avenue. The group then continued to talk whilst the roadies were setting up the band’s instruments - a process which involved tuning and retuning the same guitar about seven times - and we silently prayed that she would stop when Goldfrapp started.

30 minutes later, the lady Alison graced us with her barefooted presence and the music started. About 20 minutes into the concert, our little foursome was still babbling their heads off - imagine an entire heard of donkeys looking at their back legs in surprise as they separate from their bodies and fall onto the ground with a loud “thud”. My friend, spurred on by sighs, tutting and muttering from other concert-goers within the vicinity asked one of the girls to keep it down as we were trying to enjoy the concert too. She was perfectly polite and was greeted with an Estuary-accented response of “Oh whatever. You’re not even from this country”. Well, said friend held her composure and politely explained that she had still paid money to see the concert, which was met with an incredibly mature response of “Oh, just go back to your own country, will ya?” and she continued sipping her pint.

After having slept on it, the full implications of this girl’s attitude have sunk in and I’m appalled by the racist nature of her comment. Do we have less of a right to enjoy a concert simply because neither of us was born in the UK? Does this mean that we shouldn’t enjoy the full value of a ticket? Are we expected to settle for whatever we can get just because our accents are different?

At least they don’t whitelist their own sites…

Remember that dodgy area I keep having to walk through? Well, this evening I decided to walk home and went even further into scary poop-people-land and I walked around a corner to find a gang of about about 6 12 - 14 year old boys. They had one boy on the ground with his arms and legs at his sides and his entire body bound in duct tape. Another boy was holding a mobile phone over the boy, presumably taking a video, with the other kids kicked at him and generally pushed him around. The kid on the ground didn’t look too distressed about the situation at all.

As the group noticed me, they all scattered, leaving the duct-tape bound one lying directly across the cycle path. A cyclist came along and he made a half-hearted attempt to move out the way, but the cyclist had to swerve to avoid him. At this point, the kids were nowhere to be seen, except for one who was hiding behind a bush with a camera.

I looked straight ahead and picked up the pace, pretending that there wasn’t a kid covered in duct tape and lying across a cycle path. I don’t know if they were playing a very dangerous game or if the kid on the ground was really in trouble but I called the police anyway. I figure I either saved one of the kids or got the whole lot into big trouble.

I hope they’re all grounded.

When $boyfriend walked in last night wearing a t-shirt proclaiming “You had me at ehlo”, 2 of my friends looked slightly confused and enquired as to its meaning.

After much conversation and many explanations, the following conversation ensued:

$guest1: You see, when mail servers talk to each other, they use “ehlo” as a greeting

$guest2: Oh, ok.

$guest3: That’s silly, why don’t they just say hi?

…

I got wine up my nose and the 2 geeks collapsed into helpless fits of laughter. My friends are awesome!

I’ve just discovered Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and simply cannot get through the comics fast enough. To optimise my comic digestion rate, I’ve taken all the comics off the site, for my own personal use, using the following chunky little script I’ve written:

for k in `seq -f”%02g” 02 08`; do for j in `seq -f”%02g” 01 12`; do for i in `seq -f”%02g” 01 31`; do wget -c “http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20$k$j$i.gif”;done;done;done

Yes, I’m awesome. Well, I think I am anyway.

I’m making bagels. It’s made me realise that yeast is fairly amazing stuff. It grows on food and spoils it and it grows of people and causes great discomfort. Yeast also, when mixed with some warm milk, water and sugar, it ferments to create a frothy mix that when combined with flour, forms the basis of all things bready. Leave this mixture untouched and covered for an hour after adding flour and you’ll find that your startchy bacteria monster has double in size and is bubbling. Yes, bubbling.

The aerating mixture can even push a wet tea-towel up - that’s some pretty determined fermenting happening on your mixing bowl!

PS: After the news of Lehman’s collapse and the markets looking like they did in 1929, somthing’s got to rise.

PPS: The bagels are a failure I guess I spent too much time staring at the rising bread and not enough doing bagely things;

I’ve finally managed to download and install Google’s shiny new browser, Chrome. Well, in all honesty, I actually downloaded it and installed it last week but running proved slightly more tricksy

I can forgive the problems I had with the page simply not executing the download. After all, most of the geek population would have been furiously downloading the suspiciously Opera-like application at the same time and it’s not like Google’s infrastructure can handle all that load. Oh, wait…

I can also forgive the all the security exploits that have been recently noted. The application *is* in beta and I know of other applications that have had worse issues on the first beta release. Hell, some of them are “Production ready” and they’re still throwing up really embarrassing errors.

The annoying thing is that when I first installed it, I got an application error. A big old “The application failed to initialise properly. Click OK to terminate the application” with a cutesy little sad face in the browser. Well, what a letdown! After a good few minutes of bitching about Chrome with the rest of the team, I left the install to die quietly on my machine, relegated to that usage status of “never” in the Control Panel, and cultured a mild dislike of Google’s application development standards. I’ll spare you my rant on acceptance criteria, quality expectations and deliverable reviews for now.

However, all is not lost. Apparently all one needs to do to resolve this is append “–no-sandbox” to the application path when you’re launching it. For example, C:\Users\yourName\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –no-sandbox for Vista and C:\Documents and Settings\yourName\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe –no-sandbox for XP.

Well, that was simple. Why on earth didn’t I get that in the first place?

It looks like I’ve fallen into that typical blog trap of deciding that a blog is a marvelous idea, writing 3 posts and then forgetting that it exists. Well done me! I could come up with all those excuses that I use to avoid going to the gym, like my favorite “I’m too busy”and then the less-used, but still satisfying “I’m trying to save my energy for bigger and better things”, but unfortunately, unlike the gym, the evidence that my new-found activity has been abandoned is still there.

Anyway, back to it then.

I’m starting to realise why those people back in dusty, old bible times were so excited about the promised land. You know, the one that was supposed to be filled with milk and honey? It all seemed a little strange to me at the time, what with me being fairly indifferent about the events back then, but it’s recently come to light. I mean, have you ever tasted milk and honey? Perhaps if the people in charge had thrown some vanilla essence into the mix they would have had an even greater following. That drink could stop wars, mainly by sending all the main players straight off into laa-laa land but it could stop wars nonetheless.

I’ve learned a few valuable life lessons in the past couple of weeks:

- Tax returns are a bitch
- When they say ’shiny side in’ on the recipe, they really mean it
- The Atkins diet, and any derivative of it, including the Total Wellbeing diets, sucks. Completely.
- Crunchy peanut butter beats smooth any day. Ever.

That is all. As you were.

Do youths have any idea how terrifying they look when they gather in groups on street corners? I walk from work to the station through a very unsavoury neighborhood, thanks to Serco’s building management fuc^w capabilities, and on the way I typically enounter the same two groups.

(whoops, I’ve just walked straight into a baby’s pram. Walking and blogging ftl)

Walking past these groups, I always see them watching my approach and there’s generally a comment or two as I pass. Sometimes, it’s something as benign as a simple “hello” but it nevertheless makes me feel terribly uneasy.

Why? On the surface they’re just being polite, sort of. Having been brought up in South Africa, I have an understandably inherent fear of strangers in groups and London’s knife crime statistics do very little to ease that. Walking through a dangerous neighborhood and feeling threatened by large groups of men is perfectly natural, right? Having said that, these groups have never appeared openly threatening to me, so why do I fear for my life each time I pass them?

I suppose that a touch of uneasiness is just the catalyst my brain needs to combine sensationalist news features with a stereotype to create a healthy dose of good old blind fear.