My problem is trying to reconcile my net income with my gross habits… Erroll Flynn
Month: February 2013
Another reason not to like Macs
I had an interview last night and they asked me to do a coding exercise on a Mac with no mouse, a custom trackpad layout and an Australian keyboard layout. It took me longer to figure out how to use the damn thing than it did to do the exercise. I have come to the realization that using a mac is like driving a really, really shiny car with a manual gearbox that has only one pedal. It looks good on the outside, but you need to throw out everything you’ve learned about driving a car out the window because if you want your pedal to be a clutch, you need to use the indicator stalk and if you need a break pedal, you need to wiggle the wiper stalk.
The new facts of life for the snowflake generation
Bill Gates once gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair – get used to it!
Rule 2: The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won’t be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it’s not your parents’ fault, so don’t whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent’s generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools, they have abolished failing grades and they’ll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters.. You don’t get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you’ll end up working for one.
Pope Palpatine resigns!
Drink! Feck! Arse! Girls! BRICK!
Cautiously optimistic… waiting for the anvil to drop :)
The news is … good? That can’t be right. I’ve had a couple of face-to-face interviews and I have some more lined up. I’ve had my first official driving lesson and that went surprisingly well. We’re getting the upstairs floor fixed and re-carpeted soon. Things are going well. Why am I waiting for something bad to happen???
Send out the clowns
Katy and I (along with a bunch of office folk) went to see Kooza at the RAH this past Sunday. I have to say, it’s not the best Cirque du Soleil show I’ve seen. I agree with the Guardian review I’ve included below. The individual acts border on brilliance. The clowns though… are simply BLOODY IRRITATING!!! They’re not funny. They take center-stage for waaaay too long, and they’re bordering on inappropriate for the target market. I do not need to see a clown humping a man’s leg or being spanked in the balls. Masturbation-based slapstick belong in a frat house, not in a Cirque show. Still, as I said earlier, the individual acts are amazing, but the whole packaging lets it down. I’m happy to have seen it for £35. I would have been pissed off to see it for £100.
Another new year, another Cirque du Soleil juggernaut rolls into town. This one – which has toured worldwide (the £10 programme comes in three languages) – may be new to the UK, but the formula remains the same. There are lots of costumes in easy-on-the-eye autumn hues, which make the performers look like indistinguishable aliens on their way to a Venice carnival. There’s an abundance of shopping centre-style muzak. There’s a great deal of symmetrical choreography, which lends the whole thing the air of a May Day parade in a minor authoritarian state, and the show is padded out to last three hours with clowns so deeply irritating that they are no laughing matter.
Strip away all the bombast and soft-focus window dressing, though, and you’ll find some truly remarkable circus acts on display. The main thrill is the wheel of death, performed with a devilish nonchalance by two men who seem to be out-running the grim reaper in the way they hurl themselves around and over the fast rotating wheels. There’s an impressive handstand act performed on a tower of chairs that never wobble, and you can’t help but admire the bravery of the teeterboard segment on stilts. Definitely not the sort of thing you should try at home.
Add to that a double high-wire act on bicycles and a swinging trapeze with triple twists, and there’s no doubt you are watching some of the most skilled performers in the world. So it seems all the more of a pity that the presentation deliberately strips away all personality and robs the performers of their humanity (there’s not even a cast list in the programme).
It makes for an evening that is impressive, but almost entirely soulless.
Original link: The Guardian
tap! tap! tap!
Is this thing on?
Update: that’s better… stupid facebook API.
How true…
New bus manager
The Bean is becoming a chatterbox on the bus. His favourite spot now is in the first row just behind the door. That way, he can have a running conversation with the bus driver and say hello to everybody as they come on the bus.
Also, this morning, he basically ran after a random Sanger researcher (who was actively running away from him) and latched on to their arm until I had to rescue a them from a Bean in a silly mood. Oy.