Tangential Ramblings

Route: a slightly extended loop of Battersea Park plus the outward and homeward legs
Distance: 6.45km
Time: 31m 15s
Extrapolated 10km: 48m 27s

My good lady wife bought me a box-set of the entirety of Seinfeld episodes for Christmas. I'm watching them sequentially whenever I have a few spare moments. I'm currently almost halfway through the first of two sets of disks.

Anyway, Jerry gave his address in a recently-watched episode: Apartment 5A, 129 West 81st Street, New York, NY, 10024–7207. (The zip code I looked up on the USPS website.)

Now I'm sure there are lots of people who live or have lived in Jerry's apartment block. Bully for you. Here's a new competition: who has had multiple addresses, the average location of two or more of which is closest to Jerry's apartment?

I'll kick things off with two of my New York addresses: 7½ West 75th Steet and 189 West 89th Street. The midpoint of these two addresses is at the eastern end of Park West Hospital between 82nd and 83rd Street on Columbus, 110 metres from Jerry's apartment. Can anyone beat that?

B&Q has a bizarre delivery charging policy:

• Up to £100 spent: £5
• Up to £200: £10
• Up to £300: £15
• Up to £400: £20
• Over £400: free

I have no idea why the additional spend incurs additional delivery charges, but that these are suddenly waived once you top £400.

A couple of new adjectives learnt from Andy last night.

Prolix means tediously prolonged or tending to speak or write at great length. And captious means tending to find and call attention to faults. I hope I can't be described as prolix, but I'm certainly captious.

I watched a programme about child geniuses last night. Channel 4 has ben tracking them as they grow older, and they're all around 13 now. With the odd exception, they were all annoying little shits. One girl and her family, who I remember from the last catch-up (their family celebrated 11 plus results as oposed to birthdays), was too busy with exams to partake this time. (I actually think the last episode left the poor girl so ravaged by bullying because of the fucked-up life her parents had engineered that they chose not to partake.) One other kid, Dante (what hope did he have in life) needed to be smacked so hard into next week, but his parents had no intention of questioning any one of his disrespecful, precocious ways.

My daughter picked up and ate a Cheerio (several, actually) for the first time yesterday, at the age of 12 months! I've written to C4 today to ensure she's included in the next episode.

Imagine my surprise in walking into the room to find that my daughter had arranged her new bricks in her toddle truck such:

My wife does our food shopping on Ocado, a nice man arriving every two weeks with bags full of goodies. With each such delivery, a few bottles of Robinson's cordial arrive, my wife wanting to capitalise on their being on special offer. (Buy one and get the second half price, or something.) The trouble is: the bi-weekly quantity purchased always exceeds the bi-weekly consumption.

Last night's delivery brought our stock-pile up to 19 two litre bottles, plus the one that's currently on the go. If there's a war, come round to ours for soft drinks.

Our fire alarm test happens at 10.30am each Friday. A woman's booming voice shouts over the tannoy, starting "May I have your attention please".

I tell you what: it scares the pants off you (not literally) when you're in the bathroom at 10.30am on a Friday. I speak from first-hand experience.

(As an aside, the subsequent message to evacuate the building comes from a man. Not sure why the woman is deemed incapable of supplying this information. Maybe there's a fear that no one will listen.)

Pretty shit day in the office today. Some of which has been offset by listening to Take That's Shine on the bus. Oh. The Ramones' Baby I Love You has just kicked in. All is forgotten.

Lots of people hate YouTube. If you're one of them, please bear with me, and trust me when I ask you to watch this video. (Huge thanks to Elise for pointing it out.) I've watched this video twice. The first time I was blown away. The second time, it only got better. Six minutes and 14 seconds of your life. Twelve minutes and 28 seconds if you watch it twice like I did.

It's absolutely mind-blowing. Having watched it twice and typed a blog-post, I'm still grinning like a Cheshire cat.

David Blaine's latest stunt is to stay awake for 1 million seconds, or a little over eleven days. It triggered me to work out other decimal birthdays.

If you're very, very lucky, you'll get 41 significant birthdays in your lifetime. Significant here means a power of ten, in either seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months or years.

Your first twelve occured during your first day on the planet (one second, minute, hour, day; ten seconds, minutes, hours; 100 seconds, minutes, 1,000 seconds, minutes, 10,000 seconds), another seven before you were a month old, and a further seven up to and including your one year birthday.

Another seven takes you to your ten year birthday, including 100m seconds shortly after you're three years and two months old. Another five take you to your billionth second, at 31 years and eight months.

Thereafter, you've got to wait until you're a little over 83 years old to celebrate your 1,000th month alive. After the queen marks your trivial 100 year birthday with a telegram (or does she send an email nowadays?), you'll be lucky to hit your millionth hour, at 114 years and one month. Only six men have ever lived to that age, and only two living people, both women, have made it that far. The third, Gertrude Baines of Los Angeles, will reach that milestone on 4 May. Next up would be 100m minutes, aged 190. No one's made it quite that far.

The award has to go to the implementation team behind Microsoft Word's Reading view. It's the default view in which documents open in recent versions of late, unless you find the tick-box in the options menu that saves you from the pain.

I'm genuinely hoping that the technical implementation missed the mark by a long shot, because getting the technical implementation so woefully wrong would be way more forgivable than anyone writing such dreadful business requirements.

I opened a twelve-page document today, which displayed across 154 "screens", the first two of which were visible on opening the document. The first screen was entirely blank; the second contained a single word, wrapped over two lines.

Dreadful.

Any gig you can get to by boat that hasn't got a beach is wrong.

Noel Gallagher

Today I shifted close on two tonnes of gravel. I cleared into bags the majority of the now green Cotswold Buff that adorns our back garden. And I shifted this morning's one tonne delivery of loose Cotswold Buff (all beige, bright and lovely) down the half a dozen stairs at the front of our house, and through the house to the back garden. Rewarding, but hugely tiring.

Today was the first time I've had a haircut in which they've trimmed my inner ear-hair as well as my scalp-hair. (They often buzz off the downy hair round the ear's helix (the outer bit).)

According to the BBC's detailing of HMRC's VAT guidelines in relation to biscuits and cakes, the following rules apply.

Biscuits
No VAT applies on chocolate chip biscuits where the chips are either included in the dough or pressed into the surface before baking. Nor does it apply on Jaffa Cakes, nor on Bourbon and other biscuits where the chocolate or similar product forms a sandwich layer between two biscuit halves and is not continued on to the outer surface.

VAT is levied, however, on wholly or partly coated biscuits including biscuits decorated in a pattern with chocolate or some similar product, gingerbread men decorated with chocolate (unless this amounts to no more than a couple of dots for eyes) and chocolate shortcake.

VAT is levied, however, on "Snowballs" (without the base described for marshmallow teacakes above), partly or wholly chocolate-covered shortbread and cereal, muesli and similar bars with honey or other added sweetening matter.

Google is doing what AOL tried to do a few years back. They're working on providing stuff that will keep more and more of your internet viewing time within the confines of Google. But they're going about customer engagement in a very different way.

Take Google Mail. This was a great introduction. But besides threading, a slightly more appealing user interface and a greater level of storage, it had little to tempt a Yahoo! or Hotmail user across. So they developed Google Apps, allowing you to fully control your own domain's mail through the same interface. Oh, and you can then manage all of your domain's email accounts through that same interface. And it's integrated with Google Calendar. Sweet.

Aside from email, what else do people do a lot of online? Ah, read stuff. Google Reader enters stage left. Now you can read the stuff that you generally read within a single interface, all in a single place. (I often wonder whether I'm losing out because of the resulting blandness of the peripheral experience. That's an aside.) Oh, and then there's news, catered for by Google News—news reading is just not suited to Google Reader.

Why limit things to traditionally online activities? Now we have Google Docs and Spreadsheets, taking albeit a tiny proportion of viewing hours away from Microsoft..Slowly they're drawing us into a Google world, one which you may or may not like, or indeed approve of.

AOL tried to do the same five years ago, but there is a key difference between the two approaches: Google invites you to join their world; AOL foisted everything upon you the moment you inserted that wretched CD into your machine. The browser itself, email, shopping, messaging, everything was AOL branded and unless you had a certain amount of technical ability, an amount that most people are devoid of (not a dig, just reality), you couldn't escape from the resulting AOL-branded hell-hole.

I like what Google's doing. I enjoy using their products, and I feel that they add huge value to my online experience. I despised AOL with a passion, and whenever I used my parents' PC (brought to me by AOL), the hatred raged further while I hunted for the uninfected IE shortcut on the desktop.

Whenever things are foisted upon a user, whether they're good or bad, there is an equal and opposite reaction by the user, Newton's fourth law, I believe.

Geez. Tonight saw training run 3, despite runs 1 and 2 being far in the distant past. It hurt, and wasn't at all impressive. Below are the vitals:

• Distance: 6.32km
• Time: 32 minutes and 30 seconds
• Extrapolated 10km: 51minutes and 25 seconds

That's assuming I could have continued for another 3.68km.

More training needed. But right now, my calves hurt.

This evening, I sat on a left-hand aisle seat on the upper deck of a crowded, homeward-bound 87 bus. The lady in the window seat next to me had something bulky in her right coat pocket (a George Costanza-style wallet/purse, I'd wager), which was preventing my not-overly-sizeable arse from sitting comfortably. I shuffled a little, trying to sidle far enough over to allow fellow passengers to pass down the aisle, while trying not to offend her too much despite her encroachment into "my" space. (Not MySpace, I hasten to add.) She rose in a huff. I rose in response, moving back down the aisle to let her out towards the steps and off the bus. I didn't detect that her intent was to move further towards the back of the bus to find a smaller-arsed person to sit next to. Daft wench.

This was the statement from John Loughrey, the guy who resigned from his job and got up at 5am every morning for the last six months to attend every moment of the Diana inquest.

He followed it up by saying "It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a portrait of me hanging in Kensington Palace in 100 years' time".

Sorry to bring you down to earth, mate, but no you're not going down in history. As for your second point, and only if you analyse the negatives very carefully, neither would it me.

Overheard in Whitehall

Suit on cell: nothing is 110% stable, especially with Vista.

I just turned on BBC1 to a programme entitled Casualty 1907. I wonder whether Charlie was in it back then.

If you're on holiday in a tourist place without a decent map, take a digital picture of one of the display maps you find around the city, the ones with the "You are here" arrow.

In a single picture, my Ixus 75 seven megapixel camera had the entire thing captured in ridiculous detail, and I had a point of reference for the rest of the day.

(Note: ignore the "You are here" arrow after the picture has been taken.)

I saw the beginning of a Thames TV programme earlier today, along with its powerful ditty (D crotchet, G crotchet, B crotchet, G crotchet, C crotchet, B quaver, G quaver, D minim, I believe) and its PowerPoint build-like reveal of the London skyline.

As a boy, I associated this logo and feem-choon with second-rate ITV fare. And as a boy, I also believed the skyline to be a true representation of London's skyline (complete with a pixel-perfect reflection in the Thames).

Only today did I combine sufficient attention with the more intimate knowledge of London that I now have to realise that Tower Bridge, St. Paul's Cathedral, the Post Office Tower (as it was then) and Big Ben are not positioned to make the above picture possible without some clever photoshopping.

Obviously, Photoshop (I believe the noun warrants a capital letter, the verb does not) was not around back then, so how they did it Lord only knows.

Article surfaced on the BBC website:

Naomi bailed after row on plane
Supermodel Naomi Campbell is bailed on suspicion of assaulting a police office at Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5.

Yesterday I assisted in the decommissioning of some data centre kit. One of the tasks was for a colleague to read out (by torchlight) the serial numbers (initially typed "cereal". Yikes!) of each of 450 pieces of kit, and for me to capture that data. Quite a mundane task, but one made far more enjoyable by the military-style use of the phonetic alphabet in relaying the information. It wasn't entirely for enjoyment—it was made necessary by the significant background noise of servers and air conditioning.

There is something strangely satisfying about knowing (and knowing that other people know) the phonetic alphabet. And there's something similarly satisfying about using it. Quite likely a boy thing, one possibly confined to the more geeky among us. But that's fine by me.

Is it *$$? If not, it should be.