What is or are “Thamls”? Predictive text obviously thinks it or they are very important because it prioritises it/them over the word “Thanks”. A cursory search in the usual places didn’t shed any light on this burning issue. Meanwhile it remains a right royal pain in the “appe”. Thamls a lot predictive text.
This is taken from an interesting blog post from a couple of years ago by one of my favourite authors - Douglas Coupland. He of Generation X, Microserfs and J-Pod fame.
For reasons that are explained in his blog, he spent a dry-mouthed week personally chewing up the pages of a copy of Generation X and using the pulp to create his impression of a wasps’ nest.
The point of bringing it to attention here, aside from the geeky appeal of Microserfs, is to say that there really is no substitute for, and nothing quite as exhilirating as, pure, original, lateral creative thought.
When you work in finance you form a bond with money. You look after it, it looks after you. But, as spoonman might have hinted at, I like things to be clean. And money ain’t clean. Let’s face it when was the last time that you had a fiver with a bit of backbone to it. They’re all limp and pathetic and, frankly, very well soiled. Last week I tried to put one in a pay and display machine to pay for my ticket and the machine spat it out. I wasn’t surprised, I wouldn’t eat it either.
Fortunately with BACS and CHAPS and all that there’s not a lot of cash running through my well manicured fingers. But there’s always a downside isn’t there. Expenses. Specifically, receipts.
I think everyone who claims expenses makes sure their receipts have been strained through a tramp’s underpants before they staple them to their claim. And I’m supposed to thumb through them all to check the amounts and the VAT and all that.
I’m contemplating a number of solutions - photocopies only, scanned in receipts, even laminated receipts. All good but pretty expensive.
So, I’m doing it CSI style and buying a box of latex gloves.
The spares will come in handy should anyone over claim for anything.
We lost a Blonde friend 
Will be so hard to replace (but cheap £1.49!)
Nice, simple, relevant idea from the Leith guys in a putting something back sort of way.
OK, they are, but our company being blessed with the name it has gives some very interesting search terms leading to our blog.
One in particular caught my eye: “blonde shows nice arse off”.
They must have been so disappointed when they ended up “At home with Mr Dearson“….
OK, perhaps just a teensy tiny bit of sensationalism in the title there… it’s hardly SkyNet or HAL but this little snippet (courtesy of the beeb) made me initially think “grr spammers” then “interesting software/wetware mashup” before settling on the title of this post…
Assuming I’ve understood how it works properly, it goes like this:
1. You get a virus/trojan/adware/malware on your computer by some means (dowloading “interesting_screensaver.scr” off an email attachment perhaps)
2. This trojan runs a script which tries to create a dummy Yahoo! account for evil spam purposes, but gets blocked by the CAPTCHA
3. The script then pops up a picture of a stripper, along with the captcha it’s been given by Yahoo! and says it’ll give you another picture if you enter the code.
4. Being silly enough to get the trojan in the first place, you’ll enter the captcha which the script fires back to Yahoo! and bingo, a new spam email address is born from which more people are spammed with the virus and the cycle continues.
Now, not having been infected with one of these things I’ve no idea if the trojan fulfills its promise by showing the next picture, but if it did it’d ensure its already engaged user would continue to provide free CAPTCHA-breaking services…
So we have the human user enslaved by the promise of scantily clad women (instead of the classic “threat of extinction”) providing services for a malicious script in order for it to replicate itself throughout the web…
Tis’ but a short jump to human battery cells powering gigantic killer robots, no?
I’m actually only writing this blog post to move that picture down the page a bit.
(The blog’s our default virtual host so at the moment any time we set up a new website we get a picture of Rhys Ifan’s arse until the virtual host is configured)
But anyway, today we’re taste-testing new coffee for our coffee machine:
We’ve had this thing for a year and I’ve decided we should try some different types of coffee to make sure the stuff we’ve been using is up to scratch (so far, the verdict is “yes” - the incumbent has won two bouts… one more to go)
Programmers are machines for turning coffee into code. The better the coffee that goes in, the better the code you get out at the end (or possibly the more liable to caffeine-induced psychoses your techies are, details details)
Either way: none of that brown gravel stuff here, thank you very much.
