bunn

I have a bit of a cold, so when I walked Rosie this morning, I went for a gentle stroll, congratulating myself on how she has over the last year or so turned into a much easier dog to have about the place: she's generally confident and happy and even comes when called.

I had not taken enough note of the fact that she was walking firmly ahead of me at the very end of the lead, with ears in 'don't talk to me' configuration.

She wanted to go into a field we sometimes use, so I let her in, and since that field is very nearly secure apart from a bit of a gap under the top gate, I let her off the lead to sniff for bunnies and wandered up to the top to stand by the slightly dodgy gate.

After a while she seemed to get bored and went to stand by the bottom gate, so I wandered back down, at which point she changed direction, charged up to the top gate and shot under it, leaving me to stagger back up the hill after her, unable to shout due to sore throat, and set off in achey cold-ridden pursuit.

Fortunately she only went through the hedge into the other field we often use (that field is secure in the summer, when the nettles are tall, because she doesn't like nettles, but they've died down now). She then did the Saluki Prance and led me all around the fields, never looking at me, but always somehow at least ten paces ahead... Grrr. Still, she did get tired of it eventually and came to me to complain that her feet were wet with dew. THAT IS NOT MY FAULT, ROSIE ROO.

My god it is long.  And slow.  And long.  I don't think I've ever been to see a movie before when by the end I was thinking :

1) JUST GET TO THE END ALREADY.  Everyone die, I don't care, I just don't care, I will shoot them all myself, just let it be over.
2) no wait, that ending is as irritating as an ending could possibly be.
3) thank god that is over.
4) I would pay at least £50 to never watch that again, or to be let out of the cinema early if I should stray in.
5) (in retrospective shock) So many lingering shots of the backs of people's heads!
6) thank GOD that is over
7) the more I think about the ending, the more I hate it with the fire of a thousand suns

If you are running a database with an API that other people have to connect to and pull data out of using scripts they had to write, you don't just RANDOMLY CHANGE THE FIELD STRUCTURE AND CAPITALISATION TO MAKE IT PRETTIER!

Without any notice, or information, other than just updating your own documentation, so that bunn, staring blankly at code she wrote months ago, has to go and look at the documentation, and stare as if seeking enlightenment at the data coming out of the database, to finally figure out that, oh yes, all these fields that were named like this, are now named like that!

RAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!!

Are so bloody annoying, with their eyes and noses.  Eyes are the worst. One small blob of paint in the wrong place and BAM. Squinting Troll.

Maybe I should just focus on painting squinting trolls from now on. 

Bought a pile of Tesco socks, despite my objection to Tesco on their strategy of absurd drama-mongering press releases, like the Marmite thing. Honestly, Tesco always run that kind of story and people always fall for it and share the latest story that is 100% calculated to catch the eye by being zeitgesty and a bit controversial,  support the Tesco brand narrative that they are the champions of cheapness and then softly and silently vanish away afterwards like a boojum.  All Tesco news stories are boojums, except for the odd one that they'd prefer you not to know about, involving accounting scandals.

Anyway, I went to the women's sock section, and it was full of small, elegant and often rather frilly or decorated socks.  None of them looked warm.  You could buy plain black ones, but they were thin and clearly designed for wearing with Smart Womanly Shoes, not stomping through mud in boots.

So I went to the mens section again and stocked up on thick, warm socks in attractive shades of blue, purple and green, for noticeably less than it would have cost me to buy thin chilly Woman Socks.  Fortunately I am blessed with relatively large feet.

FEET HAVE NO GENITALS, TESCO.   I really don't understand why all socks are not presented in one row, going from Very Small to Very Big. I don't object to the existence of thin socks with sparkly kittens on, but I reckon that at least 80% of dogwalkers I meet are female, and there was not a single sock in the 'women's  section' that was well-adapted to that sort of life.


ETA: yeah, yeah, I know.  Don't give them money and then go away and moan about them on the internet : take the money elsewhere to someone who does it right.  But I'm SO lazy and also I have this internet right here to whinge into! 

That infuriating moment when you realise that, once again, the reason it didn't work is not because you don't understand and are clueless and should give up and go away,  but merely because you made a really stupid syntax error, which you did not spot because you assumed the problem was you were Doing Everything Wrong.

I need to have more confidence in my general comprehension skills, and much less confidence in my punctuation and basic error-checking. 

I'm so sorry 2013. I'm afraid I still hate informational web video.

Video on the web is great for entertainment, to show off things that are visually spectacular or comic in a physical way. But PLEASE! How much of my life must I spend sitting through:

"Click. click. Great! Sooooo, ahhhhhhh, welcome, everyone.
Um, um, this is a showcase of [thing that I have already read on the screen six times while you have been umming]
I'm going to be shooooooooooooowing you [description of thing I am now already bored of] aaaaaaaaand ...[click] let me just start with some introductions. I am [name I ALREADY READ ON THE SODDING SCREEN, OK???] and I hold [job I already know about BECAUSE IT'S ON THE SCREEN] and also joining us are [people whose names I've read and I don't CARE about because how long do I have to wait for some actual informational content around here???]"

Grrrrrrrrr. Just put your notes on the web in text form! Honestly, my eyes are so much quicker than your voice!

ETA : it has just occurred to me that the word 'Showcase' in internet terms means 'Superficial and uninformative'. 

How many people really want to read this article I desire about crime in Roman Egypt, published 1963 - and are able to do so?  I'm guessing maybe 6, but I think that might even be an overestimate.  And there isn't even a way to pay an exorbitant fee and get access to the bloody thing!   I know it is there, but it might as well be sealed inside a capsule on the bloody Moon.

I was reading a 'success story' article today about someone using Google Adsense to successfully monetise content, and it occurs to me that rather than stick all these bloody paywalls everywhere and make it next to impossible to get through the sodding things, it might be a better thing for everyone involved if they just bunged them up - past a certain date in the past maybe - as freeware on cheap hosting, and ran a really good properly structured set of ad campaigns against them.

Is it over-suspicious to suspect that universities wouldn't like this as it might mean people actually learning stuff and drawing conclusions without their expensive mediation...?  Or is is just OMG, advertising!  That's like... TRADE!  OH THE HORROR!!!  We'll be knighting the grandchildren of mill-owners next and then where will we be?

IE6 is 10 years old.  TEN!   And it was never very good.  If YOU or any of your family or friends are using IE6, please consider using software that isn't approaching puberty? It's safer!  It's better!  It's all round the Right Thing to Do! 

I have someone reporting a site not displaying quite right in IE6. I don't consider this an error.  I consider this to be a form of public service.  

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

I do wish it were possible to exclude screenshots from computer games from image searches.  I'm trying to draw people galloping about on horseback and to do this, I would like actual photos of people on horseback, rather than:

1. Screenshots from Civilisation
2. Total War screenshots
3. Wargaming miniatures
4. Mount and Blade screenshots
5. More Civilisation screenshots
6. Lord of the Rings Online screenshots (not the film, the game)
7. More bloody Total War screenshots

I wouldn't mind if ANY of these games actually featured realistic looking horses (or people) rather than weirdly deformed Uncanny Valley horses and people with joints in places where no human being has joints.  Maybe the game designers can't actually find any real horses to copy?

 I'm not sure, either, why genuinely attractive photos of real animals tend to get posted at less than 500 pixels across, making it hard to see detail, whereas screenshots from games are posted at 2000 pixels+ across, even though the game screenshots don't have as much detail to be lost in compression. I suspect though that gamers are better at text tagging than horsy people, and post images on busier websites, thus getting a comparitive advantage in search engine terms.