You’ve usually got around 2,000 horsepower. Put your fucking foot down!
Addendum: following this freight train, we remained stood at the level crossing for 13 minutes before the barriers raised. No other train went by.
Who remembers the internet back when ‘Broadband’ was an amazing marketing opportunity at 512Kb/s? Now, who remembers 56Kb/s modems being all the rage?
Here at Brayford Quay, modern, plush student accommodation with en-suite sit-down showers, a desk and 6 complementary power sockets, over the wired network, I am pulling downloads at an amazing, awe inspiring, jaw dropping… 4KB/s (Or, for the technically minded people who spotted that one is bytes and one is bits, around 32Kb/s). That means (And I’ve checked this) it would be faster for me to write a letter back home (On real paper!) asking my parents to download the files I want, post it, wait for it to be delivered, wait for my parents to download the files, and wait for them to be mailed back to me on a DVD. That’s including the weekend.
Why is Adobe incapable of designing sensible, coherent and consistent user interfaces?
Photoshop and Premiere, whilst being very powerful, rely on you having attended a large training course and having a reference manual next to you in order to find the bloody feature you’re looking for. Sometimes that feature may or may not work, based on a small change you made 3 weeks ago in trying to make something else work properly.
Adobe UIs suck.
At the risk of feeling the wrath of the Drama Society presidents, I feel obliged to comment about some of the acting.
With less than a week to go until the first performance of our Pantomime (As an aside, we still don’t have all the sets painted, and I don’t know what I’m doing!), some of the roles would be better played by Keanu Reaves. Now by training I am a techie with lighting as a specialist subject, but I have walked boldly across enough stages in my time to say that I could do a better job in some of the roles. I sincerely hope to God that this is only due to the lack of stage and audience, because if not the production will be ranked somewhere between Gigli and the icky black stuff on the bottom of our still-drying flats.
All that said, if you don’t mind a mildly poor script with a spattering of highlights and are happy to drink sufficient alcohol that you’ll find the endless penis jokes (Yes, I’m looking at you, the American Football team!) funny, then come and see it. Posters are around the Uni, tickets are on sale, and to be perfectly honest you’re not going to have anything better to do on a Monday/Friday/Saturday evening before the clubs open.
Editor’s Note: Yes, I know the above paragraph is phrased so it sounds like the American Football team are the penis jokes. I’ll leave it to other people to work out how valid that statement is.
The network here at Brayford Quay - provided by a company called MCW - is abysmal. Disgustingly bad quality. Slow. Unresponsive. Faulty. Inherently flawed. Badly configured. In short - I get better internet access from my iPhone.
It’s been 10 years and had countless official inquests and investigations. For the love of God, just accept them.
We’re now at the point with some people who believe that the whole thing was a conspiracy that any official report to the contrary is obviously a government-influenced cover-up of the truth. Since you will refuse to believe anything which doesn’t say “Yes, MI5, MI6 and Philip had everything to do with it and it was all an evil plot!” is there any point in pushing for more inquests?
Get over her people. Seriously.
No, I’m not dead. I’ve just not posted in a while because… well… there’s not been much to talk about and I can’t be bothered posting about random little things. I’m waiting for results on 16th August (When there will be a post saying what I got if it’s not too embarrassing, where I’m going to uni and all that jazz), but that’s about it. Oh, and I still can’t find a job. Anybody knowing of one in the Leeds area for the remainder of summer, please let me know.
Woah, it really does just work
In other news I’m now one of those Mac users, having decided to give up on windows after my bloody printer was playing up. You’ll be pleased to hear that on my MacBook Pro, my printer worked first time without so much as an “OS X needs to ask your permission to display a window to see if you really want to continue to the confirmation screen to install this driver”. I would have written about the whole moving-to-Mac process and had a Flickr collection of the unboxing, but there are enough out there by Mac obsessives who think the rest of the world is really that bothered about how their instruction manual was packaged.
Still, if anybody knows how the damn home and end keys are supposed to work, mostly with regards to getting to the beginning or end of the line I’m on and not the entire document, I would be really glad to hear it.
Oh, and Keynote makes PowerPoint look like a child’s toy. Seriously.
Google Maps
I’ve also been playing with the Google Maps API for a boating holiday later this year (October), and it’s making my head hurt. Anyone with experience in making the info windows a fixed width, and moving between locations by firing JavaScript at it, again I would love to hear from you.
My printer (A fairly old yet reliable HP DeskJet 1220C, a huge A3 printing beast) has suddenly decided to uninstall itself from Windows. Well, I say the printer uninstalled itself, it’s probably more a case of Vista deciding I don’t use it enough and ‘helpfully’ uninstalling it.
Either way, I now can’t reinstall it because Windows can’t find the drivers. Worked fine first time I installed it. Go on, where have they gone? Have the driver gremlins been eating them again? So, I unplug the parallel cable (You younguns probably won’t know what one of those is) and switch to USB. “What the hell,” I think. “It must work, USB is Plug-’n'-Play”. Not a chance in hell.