When I was a young lass I wanted to know
If Elves could be physicists, and if so
Whether I would meet them if I went to University.
So I travelled far into to the Realm of Faerie
Where dwelt a Unicorn of SCIENCE!

Oh, you can take the word of Unicorn of SCIENCE!
Upon his theories you can place reliance
Well, at least at speeds below that of C
He'll know whether there can ever be,
Such a thing as an Elf of SCIENCE!

( Read more... )

Notes:

• If anything the robot voice reading out the urls of people I bought things from was even more indecipherable than normal. I think she would be more comfortable if I actually used my credit card to shop physically in actual meatspace or something. It was so indecipherable I had to press the button to be transferred to India.


• 'The computer is down. You'll need to call back later'. Actual quote, from actual Indian call-centre guy. If it was really true, lord that must have been embarrassing thing to have to say. If it wasn't true they should have thought of a more innovative and original excuse for him to use.


• I get the impression that the thing that set the robots off this time was me buying multiple games from Steam in multiple transactions. On the Steam account I've always used.


• Of course it was the transaction after those that got (incorrectly) clobbered, a regular payment that always happens for that amount, every single month on exactly the same day.


• Since they seem to be determined to keep the Antifraud bots employed, they need a 'pending check with card holder' state for online credit card transactions, rather that just declining and then leave you to clear up the resulting payments mess. Maybe they do, maybe nobody uses it.


• It's not news that the Antifraud Robots are dumber than a box of rocks. But I'm beginning to suspect that they're actually just a random number generator programmed to pull the transactions to decline out of a hat.

You should pipe the names of all your members through an Umlautify filter prior to attaching them to a Bill. This makes things much more Metal when the Bill is referred to in the Press.

Hmmmm, a TV commercial just appeared on my TV, advertising TV commercials.

Oh dear, the Federal Reserve appears to have decided that my whacky financial wheeze of a few days ago, is like the bestest thing ever, and is actually something they should be doing.

Clearly, I have now (extra) doomed us all!

Muuuuuahahahahaahahaha.

So I gather that the world economy and all of us with it, is going to seize up with rigor mortis by the end of next week (if not sooner) because everyone and their dog is calling in their short term loans to anyone who isn't the Federal Reserve or the ECB or someone similarly central banky, reducing the interest rate they offer on the loans to those central banky people to virtually nothing at all whilst pushing up their short term rate for everyone else up to a level that WILL NUKE THE SITE OF ALL BUSINESS and OUR JOBS and THE NEXT PAYMENT OF OUR WAGES EVERYWHERE from ORBIT. That's if they're prepared to still lend at all to average schmoe companies that actually do real stuff in the real world.

If that's so, why aren't the central banky guys taking advantage of this arbitrage opportunity of a lifetime by taking up these offers of loans to them at such cheap cheap prices and then turning around and lending it all back out short term to those average schmoe companies at somewhat less than the LUDICROUS KILL THEM ALL rate, but still more than they had to pay? Wouldn't that make us all (with our taxpayer hats on) some dough on the interest rate spread, whilst simultaneously saving the world BY RE-ORBITING FINANCIAL MARS TO BECOME A NEW EARTH at the same time?

Or is that what they mean when they say they're 'injecting liquidity'? Or was that what the bailout thing, that didn't pass because everyone hates it for being the slush fund of a guy who looks very undead, and also being seven hundred billion hectares of taxpayers money long, was for?

Clearly I don't really get it. Or SOCIALISM or something.

So I took delivery of an Eee PC today.

And indeed it is indeed very cute, and very Pearl White, and my fingers are are just about small enough for the UK layout keyboard complete with '£' sign, and it has the renowned stupidly large black bezel around the screen and everything!

But ummm, well the out of the box text editing experience lacks just a little something for we English speakers here on the right hand side of the Atlantic Ocean.

( Read more... )

So my first impressions of the ASUS Eee PC...?

It is *indeed* 'Easy to Lean, Easy to Work, Easy to Play' for those values of Easy that involve dicking about at the Unix command line, understanding file permissions and ownership, what sudo is and does, reading man pages and online HOWTOs that assume you know your way around the default filepaths of an OpenOffice install so don't tell you what actually they are, and a certain dose of sheer bloody-mindedness. Or alternatively Easy for those of you in English speaking countries where they prefer spelling ASUS without the 'U'.

:)

...without be accosted every 50 yards by advertising boards pimping -- in association with a chain of bakers not actually open at this hour -- The Edinburgh Evening News's Free Doughnut promotion.

Aaargh.

..repeatedly and urgently telling people not to panic in heavy tones of reassurance, just causes even more people to freak out and panic.

Sheesh, already. It's not rocket science, all you officially reasurring people.

So today's entirely unoriginal early morning hypnopompically induced blinding insight, destined to evaporate into 'what was I thinking?' within a mere three hours, is:

"You know all that political 'debate' stuff? Yeah, well it's entirely, exactly, completely the same as class balance and current and future and desired patch 'debate' on a MMORPG's official boards. Only with like, more real world implications man! And vice versa!"

Yep, obviously I'm in dire need of an urgent coffee infusion or something here, before I go and do something really stupidly embarrassing like start posting on TerraNova.

...but, nevertheless, watch out for the eternal floating PvP vs PvE balance flamewar. It been really very very nasty recently, and it's now getting to the point where instead of just driving you insane, it'll drive you insane, spit you out and then kill you dead.

Literally.

Even for those of us lucky enough to be playing current FotM classes on the stable servers.