mini-moan: brave new worlds.

I prefer the finer things in life and that means I don't eat that air filled, batch baked, tasteless, mass produced sponge they call bread, instead it's often a freshly baked Tiger Loaf upon which I spread my butter.
 But what really annoys me about a Tiger loaf is it goes mouldy so damned fast, a standard farm house loaf can keep for a week with no problem, but after a few days a Tiger loaf soon becomes home to new civilisations. After a week they've evolved to the point of constructing rudimentary tools, 10 days and they have democracy, poetry and fine art. By the two week mark, out of the corner of your eye, you may notice the occasional satellite orbiting the loaf sitting on your worktop. Fortunately at the 21day mark they've attempted to, but failed to crack nuclear fusion and irradiated themselves into extinction and you can now safely feast upon your Tiger loaf.

daily life: the incident returns.

This afternoon at work I took a much needed break from 'cutting code' and decided to relieve some stress (as you can imagine I am boiling over with stress) by feasting on a variety of blue cheeses and crackers. I wandered over to the fridge located at the refreshment station to retrieve my blue cheeses and butter but to my horror my butter was nowhere to be found. I searched high and low, surely it must be hidden behind something, but no instead I had been the victim of a 'Butter-Thief'.
It isn't the cost of the almost complete butter (£1.40 at your local Tesco) that annoyed me, but instead that somebody had actually stolen it, made even worse by them not stealing my selection of cheeses which in my opinion would have been a greater haul.

So I have contacted my Chinese suppliers, met with a team of industrial designers, engineers and scientists and I can now announce the 'The Guy Who Moans Called Matthew Branded Butter Protection Kit' which is guaranteed to keep your butter safe from potential butter thieves. The kit comes complete with tgwmcm approved barbed wire, a complete set of tgwmcm Model FUC3RZ bear traps and a gaggle of cobras trained by the experts at the tgwmcm Laboratoire. Can you afford not to purchase my 'Butter Protection Kit'?

The kit is due to enter production next week and you can secure yourself one of the first kits to leave the tgwmcm manufacturing facility by sending a Bankers Draft for 'All My Money' made payable to 'The Guy Who Moans Called Matthew' to my Laboratoire and Hilda (Dorris' replacement because she still hasn't recovered from 'The Incident') will ensure you are placed on the waiting list.

technology: (English)Foreign

Yes, it is StyleCop compliant.

I may be English through and through, but I have nothing against those foreign people that come over here and steal our Software Engineer 3 jobs. But what does annoy me is Facebook's relatively new 'See translation' feature that aims to convert all those silly foreign words (and their 4 letter Y's) into good, honest, strong English words. This should be perfect, instead of having to open an external translation engine I can see the words magically transformed before my eyes. Sadly the translations are provided by 'Bing', and we all know how useless they are. As much as I hate to admit it Google just works so much better when it comes to translations.

So I conducted an incredibly scientific test overseen by a team of fully qualified linguists fluent in many types of 'Foreign' which involved translating the following English phrase into a randomly chosen 'Foreign' language and back into English.

I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Google

English -> I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart

Randomly chosen Foreign -> Man labai patinka mėlynųjų sūrių, idealus derinys creaminess ir tortų.

English -> I love blue cheese, a perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Bing

English -> I absolutely love blue cheeses, the perfect blend of creaminess and tart.

Randomly chosen Foreign -> Durke Durke Durk Durkah Durke

English -> Where am I? How did I get here? Please, no, don't do that!

As you can see Google only lost some of the subtlety, if it was a blue cheese it would be an under-ripe Stilton. Bing failed utterly, there is no way I'm going to spread that on my crackers.

daily life: sequence shortened.

For ma birthday a good friend gave me an Origami book which took me by great surprise, I don't think I showed the correct level of gratitude but I actually really like it because the idea is that I'll be able to wile away the boredom and produce something beautiful out of mere paper.

You may have noticed on adverts for iPhones .etc. while proclaiming how easy everything is the words 'Sequence Shortened. Steps Removed' are emblazoned on the bottom of the screen because in order to make the task seem simple they've had to remove 75% of the required steps.
Well this Origami book seems to suffer the same 'Steps Removed' problem. On two separate models I've spent a good 30 minutes reaching the last couple of folds but suddenly I get to a point where it says 'Hold the front wing and fold at a slight angle against the upper fold', and I'm going 'WHAT?', which one is the front wing? Until this point you've never mentioned any wings. After 20 minutes of trying every possibility I've just got a crumpled piece of paper and no model.
So I try another model, it's going well, fold this point onto that point, then fold the model in half. But the picture of you folding the model in half seems to be without performing the previous step, so do I unfold the previous step? Then it says holding the lower right body fold the neck up, again no previous mention of the neck, but the fold shown in the picture isn't possible with what I have in front of me so have I done something wrong or is there a step missing? Again after 20 minutes of rotating, folding, unfolding and twisting I've made no more progress and instead of a swan I've just got a triangle.

If the whole purpose of the book is to teach me Origami then bloody well make sure a complete amateur can follow the steps and if you want me to unfold the fold you've just made me fold tell me explicitly to do that, don't just assume I'll work it out from the picture which because you've used black paper is almost impossible to comprehend anyway.

So in closing, I really like the present, but I want to murder the individual that wrote the book.

mini-moan: dance monkey

Today I ventured into town and paid a visit to my friendly bank, you may remember one of my very first moans was regarding the needless bureaucracy and numerous hoops required merely to pay money into my bank account, thankfully The Halifax have abandoned this archaic system that harks back to the 1940s and I commend the sane individual at The Halifax (I doubt it was Howard) that put an end to the madness.

Now I turn my wrath on the NATIONWIDE!!! (that was meant to be a Wrath of Kahn reference).
As I have moved I wished to update my address, so unimportant documents such as my credit card statement, bank statements, the little things, would actually reach me. I'm silly like that. But I was told I would need to provide proof of my new address, perhaps a bank statement would be sufficient before they could change it.
In order to update my address I need to provide a letter sent to my new address, but I don't have such a letter because I can't get somebody to send a letter to my new address without somebody sending a letter to my new address. If you were able to follow that sentence then you must be autistic. I do not possess utility bills for my new address because I've only just moved in, so what else can I use?
Well I went next door to the Halifax and they updated the address without even asking for my signature, so in a few weeks when my Halifax statement arrives I can show that to the Nationwide and they will gladly update my address.

It's all rather silly isn't it.

And now you have to forget the names of the institutions I bank with as that could be a potential security vulnerability. Somebody will visit you shortly with a mind-melting ray to ensure you no longer remember... anything.

mini-moan: buffer-underflow

There is a new trend lately when it comes to watching videos on the internet. I've already moaned about the various annoyances associated with consuming media via the internet. But the one that has really annoyed me the last few days are video players that only buffer while playing.
For some reason my super fast fibre optic broadband suffers slowdowns on occasion so watching videos online is like trying to watch your neighbour changing through a slat in the blind eating soup with chopsticks.
But that shouldn't matter, I'll just pause the video and wait for it to buffer then I'll be able to watch the whole video without interruption. Hmm, it doesn't seem to be buffering, my connection must be really slow now, I wonder what happens when I hit play. WHAT? Now it starts buffering. WTF!!!!!! (this time three just doesn't cut it).

Has anybody realised that this defeats the only point of buffering? In my mind buffering means to store data before it is required so it would seem obvious that you buffer while the video is paused instead of making me suffer 30seconds of video, then some buffering, then 5 seconds, then buffer and on it goes. Why can't I just pause the video for a minute and let the buffer fill to bursting?

Perhaps I am just too wise for this world, if you need me I'll be lying on the train tracks.

mini-moan: i am the arbitrator

Somebody said something to me the other day when I asked about the bangs (exclamation marks) they had written on a post-it note affixed to their monitor. I asked why they had used only 3 and not 5 and they replied.

Them - 'You can only use 1 or 3!'
Me - 'So you can't use 4?'
Them - 'No!!!'
Me - 'Or 2?'
Them - 'Certainly not!'
Me - 'Only 1 or 3?'
Me - 'Odd!!' (I only used 2 when I made that remark, but she didn't notice at the time).

As much as I enjoyed the conversation, why do humans feel the need to make these arbitrary rules? If I want 4 bangs I'm bloody well going to have them, although lately I'm lucky if I get a single bang!

It's Them against Me.