Daring Driving and Meeting Levity

Drove to Doncaster for a meeting today. It was foggy. And the world is full of idiots. I wanted to drive at a safe speed, i.e. appropriate to the conditions. The idiots around me wanted to go faster and kept whizzing past me into the thickening mist. I was therefore forced to the conclusion that I had to drive the same insane speed as all the mad people just to avoid them crashing into me. There is probably a metaphor here somewhere. I'm just glad nothing untoward happened, otherwise I'd be starring in a traffic report about now.

On a digression, the terms they use when crashes happen always strike me as strange. They say things like "..the car went out of control..." which implies that the car has a will of its own and decided to head for the nearest tree or "...the driver lost control..." which is even more odd and makes me think of the driver going "...is it in my wallet?, or perhaps on the sideboard? I'm sure that I had control here a minute ago..." just before they pile into the river. What all these euphemisms usually add up to is "the driver did something stupid" but I guess this doesn't read as well on the reports and can lead to litigation.

Anyhoo, thanks to my satnav I arrived near enough on time, and in one piece. The meeting was already deep in intense discussion when I entered and lots of earnest discussion was in progress. At one point a bunch of reports were dished out and everyone was saying things like "I've got the Business School Report, can you pass me Integrated Technology?". I like to think that I lightened the atmosphere by asking for Mr. Bun the Baker.

Increase your word power

We all went out for a meal tonight. I asked Jackie to have the Beef Stroganoff because the menu said it came with a "Timbale of Rice" and I wanted to find out what that looked like. I think it is latin for "cup full" or something. Anyhoo, the meal, conversation and wine were excellent. Ian and Jackie are moving away soon, and so we only have a few months to work our way through the rest of the strange words on the menu.

I'm up for it....

Nothing Therapy

Not had a cold for ages. This week I've been finding out what I've been missing. I woke up this morning feeling awful and number one wife just about stapled me into the bed to stop me from going to work. There is something very restful about being forced to do nothing of consequence for a while. I suppose this is what holidays and weekends are for, but they never seem to work out that way in our neck of the woods. I've spent half the day in bed and the other half footling around, doing nothing of any great importance and keeping warm.

And I feel much better.

Scrapyard Coding

One of my must watch TV programs recently has been Scrapheap Challenge (stateside it is called Junkyard Wars). Anyhoo, a bunch of engineers are given an impossible task (for example build a man powered airplane in a couple of days) and then turned loose. The results are always amazing, especially if it all goes wrong. My personal favourite was when they had to build a device to throw a Mini car as far as possible. One team made a trebuchet (a kind of catapult) which flew apart in the throwing action in a most impressive way.

I was wondering if you couldn't do something similar with programming. A team of coders is given something to produce, say an invoicing system, and then sent out into a software scrapyard to grab the bits and bobs that they need to finish the job. The commentary would be great:

"And that's a terrific start for Team Hardcoders, that disused COBOL print formatting routine will make a fantastic interface to the barrel printer that they found earlier. But what's this? The other team seem to have discovered a stash of unused GOTO statements amongst a pile of punched cards. Noooooooooo!"

Boom Boom!

I was telling number one wife about a new film, "Mrs. Henderson Entertains". It is all about the first "erotic revue" which opened in London around the time of the Second World War. The revue exploited a loophole in the law which meant that it was OK to strip for the stage - as long as you remained completely still. The film stars Judy Dench and pop idol Will Young, who at one point has to get his kit off to persuade the girls to join in.

Number one wife was intrigued. "When is it out?" she asked.

"About half way through" I replied.