David's Blog

Who knew there are so many ways to lace a shoe. My new shoes are pinching a bit, and I think it’s due to the shoe-shop lacing they’ve used pulling the shoe.

It could just be my odd-shaped feet though.

Ian’s Shoelace Site – Shoe Lacing Methods

The World’s Weirdest Engineering Disaster at OddOrama

Sometimes, things just don’t go your way!

I’d read about this before. Quite amazing really, especially that nobody died.

Every now and then, a Pop song catches my ear. This is the latest one.

I don’t know why I like it, but I do!

I have had quite possibly the most physically, and mentally tiring week in quite some time.

At work we’ve been installing a new phone system. Obviously, it has to integrate with the existing system, so there’s been lots of fun getting it to talk with that.

The new system was scheduled to be installed in time for some departments to move into a building that has been refurbished. That didn’t happen though, do to various silly leadtimes of other supporting parties. The end result being, we were still setting up the back-end, and testing stuff, as we were also moving people on to it.

Not good.

It resulted in all sorts of odd problems for people. Me mainly. The process to get a phone onto the new system, and the user’s converted across went roughly like this:

1. Configure the old system to redirect the number, which meant dragging my laptop up into the server room and plugging it in
2. Checking the user’s account was synced up properly
3. Walking round to the refurbished building (with my laptop), finding the number of the phone, and re-assigning it.

In itself, not a big problem, but a LOT of to-and-froing. Not only that, but I spent all week staring at seemingly random numbers, By the end of the day doing that, all these numbers in my head had worn me down big time.

How these telecomms engineers put up with this all the time, I don’t know.

If you’re not in the UK, yet you’re reading this, you might not know what’s going on. 

Basically, the mother of all low pressure systems has deigned to visit us here in the UK, and whilst it was at it, drag 80Mph gusts of wind with it.

Now, ordinarily, this isn’t a big deal. We get wind a lot, and massive gusts like that, whilst rare, do happen.

The biggest problem is when they happen all damn night! I tried to prepare last night by making sure I’d closed down the window to a sufficient degree, to stop the wind rushing in and making the blind flap about.

That may have worked, but what I instead ended up with was a noise like a vacuum cleaner, as the air rapidly whooshed in through the open window. So, I ended up having to get up in the wee hours, and close the window fully.

I have some small vents in the window also, which usually aren’t much of an issue. Last night, they too ended up making a noise – a far higher-pitched whooshing noise than the window on its own, so yet again, I had to get up and close the vents.

More time passes, and now my window sounds like a kazoo! So yet again, I get up, and have to fiddle with the vent to shut it up.

At this point, I should say ‘and then I finally got to sleep’. Only I didn’t. Instead, I lay there, listening to the wind, willing it to shut up, and hoping I’d fall asleep. I’m honestly not sure how long I did sleep, but I don’t think it was long – only a couple of hours. It explains why I’m now headachey, and half asleep.

Apparently, the same is forecasted for tonight. Oh joy.

http://www.gimundo.com/Articles/Daily/805

I saw this a while ago on a documentary about the circumstances around the brink of war. It was quite amazing to consider this one man managed to avert such a hideous disaster. Who’s to say any other person in that situation would have done it all ‘to the book’ and launched a counter attack?

Give this man the Nobel Peace Prize, now!

Interesting article. I don’t know how many times I’ve slowed to a stop, then when I’ve gotten going again, there’s no sign of any sort of incident.

Shockwave traffic jam recreated for first time – tech – 04 March 2008 – New Scientist Tech