No blacks at Microsoft Poland

Over on a certain less than savoury message board someone recently posted up this interesting observation. Take a close look at the Microsoft USA/World and then the Microsoft Poland pages for business productivity.

Notice anything?

For those of you reading this in the future, when Microsoft realise they've been rumbled and hastily pull the images, I put together this animation. Enjoy.



Note, you may say this is simply the USA branch of Microsoft over-reacting to some Affirmatve Action law. Whilst it's possible that's true, take a look at the hand of the magically changing man. Looks pretty dark to me.

Xx

Edit: Someone's beaten me to the next step of my idea: http://microlove.ytmnd.com

The Hardest Escape Game You'll Play

This is one for the obsessive puzzlers amongst you:

Escape the room

Don't give up too easily, this game takes a while but there's nothing stupid in there and it's amazingly rewarding when you get to see this glorious, glorious sight:



Don't bother trying to decipher the Russian or Spanish text over the page - it's irrelevant. Enjoy. Try not to hate me too much.

Xx

The Midget Manifesto

Do midgets have night vision?



Above we see four perfectly reasonable and apparently common searches regarding midgets. Google's 'intelligent' prompts aren't always quite so useful though, as highlighted in this thought provoking and witty article oversized image dumped on a shockingly bad webpage.

That aside, it's extremely hard to find a concrete answer on the Internet to the original question. Wikipedia doesn't explicitly say one way or another, and I can't find anything in the Lego Bible about it either.

The Orwellian (Swiftian? Swiftish? Swift? Quite fast really?) Midget Manifesto states that night vision (along with subservience and non-intelligence) are desirable traits for midgets, but until someone explains to me the point of the gladiatorial midgets described in that dystopia, I can't take the manifesto seriously.

I feel this post should resolve with a dramatic and fun-filled climax. Oh well.

Xx

Thompson Turkey

This is the best recipe in the world:

Thompson's Black Turkey

Not because it produces the nicest food (it may) but simply for how hilarious the ingredient list is, and how detailed the process; which includes full instructions on when and where to drink, during the preparation of this turkey.

"About this time I generally have my first drink of the day"
"About now it seems advisable to switch drinks. Martinis or stingers are recommended.."

..and so on.

This isn't just an excuse to get drunk though. The whole thing tries to put any prospective chef off with its immense list of ingredients - but when I have 15 friends around for dinner and a lot of spare cash, I'll be trying this.

Final note: Like the author of that webpage, I found this recipe originally in The Time Traveler's Wife. Great book, but I think the film could really be awful.

I Went Diving Today And It Was Awesome

Please note the word is diving and not driving. Don't congratulate me on not hitting any cars. Don't tell me about your driving test. Don't wish me luck with mine. Practically everyone on the Internet I've told about my diving adventure has made this mistake so far.

..and back to the point.

Diving is awesome. I wouldn't have believed a short stint in an empty swimming pool could be quite so thrilling. Underwater super slo-mo Frisbee is the best (and most dramatic-looking) sport in the world. I think I've found my new hobby (although I'm off skiing next week in case that's even more fun).

It wasn't all fantastic; I failed the 'take your mask off underwater, then replace it' challenge quite spectacularly - as soon as my nose was free from the mask I decided to try and breathe through it. This is not recommended when underwater. Diving centres need much clearer signage on this matter.

Diving is awesome.

Xx

--

<sub>I have to mentally struggle to restrain myself from filling the majority of this blog with meta conversation about grammatical conventions, phrasings and related minutiae. For example, the previous sentence was ambiguous - did I mean 'grammatical phrasings'? Probably not, given the end of the clause, but that's no consolation to the intrepid reader skimming from left to right. I could have rephrased the sentence, but the flow and intended structure would have been lost.

You see how bad this is? I started this sub-paragraph to talk about capitalisation in the title of the blog post and already I'm off on a tangent. I think I need to get back into editing and copy-writing and vent some literary steam there.</sub>

Making XKCD Slightly Worse

For some time, one of my favourite collections of comic strips has been Garfield minus Garfield - a brutally harsh and beautifully depressing cacophony of loneliness and angst.



In a similar vein, from the XKCD fora, comes the joyous Making XKCD Slightly Worse. I can't do any better than their introduction:

"It's time to find that little piece of magic that makes xkcd so special, and kill it."

Here's two I've lazily plucked from the first page of that thread (there's 99 pages, and many, many gems - click around for an hour or so then put it on your bookmarks for later):





And, here's my first effort, amalgamated from comics 208, 419 and 620:


_{Clicky to enlarge}

Victory

I'm eating a coconut.

Many of you will have done this before. It's possible you've even opened your own. It was easy, you used the right tools, the right techniques, there's really nothing to it..

Screw you guys. I got to use an axe. I had fun.

Here's the final armoury of tools I required to get into my coconut:


_{How could I lose?}

The first step was to get the milk out. I didn't have a vice or a clamp, so I figured my legs would suffice. The fun bit was when the drill bounced off the shell and I had to activate pneumatic mode:


_{A bit closer to my testicles than the B&Q safety manual recommends}

The knife was a complete disappointment in most respects, but did serve well in lieu of a hammer when I needed something to bash the chisel with. We don't have any pics of that scary moment, so here's one of the knife disturbingly close to my fingers:



And, finally, success:



In other news my housemate has swine flu.

Xx

I Want To Learn Something In A Day

Help me.

There are 18 days left until I leave for the excitement of London life with a new job; working every day and playing every evening - I don't plan on having much spare time. Right now however, I've got literally nothing to do and, given that there's only so much time I can spend staring vacantly at Jeremy Kyle and Flash games before their appeal ever so slightly starts to dim, I'd like to learn something.

Something, anything - I don't know what. Some skill, ability or trick that I didn't have at the start of the day, but I'll have at the end. I don't want to start learning something; to learn the fundamentals of an activity - I'd like this to be a complete exercise.

There are limitations. Something which requires a group of people will be very tricky, but I'm amenable to the prospect of having to get some resources/equipment first. Obviously, things I can get quickly would be better (I don't want to wait around for Internet shopping) and cheapness would be preferred. Something which would involve me visiting a specialised location isn't ideal, but could also work.

So, ideas?

My Favourite Bridge

On the slim off-chance that any residual coolness from my university days is still lingering about the place, here's a blog post about a toll bridge in Bath. Not that toll bridges aren't immensely cool, but still making blog posts in 2009? Seriously?

On with the joy.

On a recent trip which in no way involved Bath, I happened to be in Bath for a couple of hours. Those of you who've made the thrilling journey from Bathampton to Batheaston (fabulous naming scheme by the way) will know exactly what's coming up, but let's build the suspense a bit for those who haven't yet had this life affirming experience.

I want you to imagine that you have a pressing, burning desire to get from Bathampton to Batheaston (the reverse is rarely true). You're sitting there, nearly in tears at the thought of having to take the A4 all the way to Bath proper, only to come back on yourself along the A36. "There must be another way", you cry, "I just can't bear this".

Enter the ruthless, inspired, creative genius that owns The Old Mill, together with its bridge. This man (it can only be a man) lets people drive across his private bridge for the princely sum of 60p, if it's sunny and he can be bothered turning up to work. If not, there's an 'honesty box' for you to contribute your fare, so the automated barrier of invisible karma can rise.


_{Click on the picture for an amazingly large version. Seriously.}

This bridge, this beautiful, tiny bridge, can only fit one car along its road surface. This leads to long queues in one direction, and then the other. The reason for this? Two excessively wide stretches of pavement (never used), one on either side of the bridge.

Finally, in a desperate bid to be accepted by the bigger kids over on the M6 and on the Welsh border, the masterminds behind the Bathampton toll have now got a list of charges for various types of vehicle. So, a car (crossing time, 5 seconds) will cost you 60p, but a car with trailer (crossing time, 5 seconds) will cost 90p. Dare to bring a caravan (crossing time, 5 seconds) and you'll be up to £1.20. Bring a lorry and it'll be about £100 for recovery I imagine.

If all this wasn't enough to sway you, I should point out that this bridge is really pretty. Really, very pretty. Unfortunately, in the 5 minutes of queueing to get on it, all you'll see is an Audi's exhaust pipe. In the 5 seconds of crossing it, you'll be too busy worrying about the narrowing at the other side, and the exceptionally high chance of losing some of your paintwork.

Xx

Original Documents

I'm moving to London. Exciting.

Less exciting, however, is the process of doing this. Specifically, dealing with letting agents and a new landlord. I don't mind the letting agents stealing my wallet every time I enter their premises. I don't mind that the landlord is trying to slip a clause into the contract saying everything I move into the house becomes his property. I don't mind that all amounts in the contract are actually written in an obscure currency which has a symbol nearly identical to £, but means I pay triple what I expected - this is all fairly standard fare.

What I do mind, is the constant requests for 'original documents' and 'paper proof'.

I don't have any bank statements. I don't have any bills with my address on them. I don't have any 'formal letters' (whatever they are). I use the Internet* for everything. On the off-chance someone does send me something in such an archaic format as paper, I generally throw it in the bin unread.

Whilst we're on the subject, I don't have a fax machine. I don't want to print off the attachment you've emailed me, sign it and then fax it back to you. A fax machine isn't more secure than a scanned email. A digital signature is legally binding. The 80's are dead.

Frankly, the past couple of weeks would have been a hell of a lot easier if I just forged a document every time someone asked for one. I wonder when someone's going to notice I've just Photoshopped the signature from my driving license into every document they asked me to print, sign and scan. I wonder if they do notice, if they'll question quite how ridiculously insecure an unwitnessed signature is.

Finally, I get annoyed that 'insecure' next to 'unwitnessed' looks horrible. But I still don't think we should standardise anything. Except power supply connectors.

--
_{*And I'm still cool enough to capitalise the 'I'}

New (Old) Phone

Finally, I've upgraded from my, frankly awful, Sony Ericsson w890i, which has been a thorn in my eye since I got it just over a year ago. This phone took up a to a minute to boot, the battery died quickly and, second-worst-of-all - it crashed.

A lot.

I mean, I read reviews online that said the w890i would crash, and laughed at all the idiots who couldn't use a phone properly. It wasn't until later that I discovered the little red light on the back of the phone, next to the camera, serves only one purpose. It's there to tell you your phone has crashed.

At the point when the designer is adding a 'your phone crashed' light, you've got to wonder how robust the rest of the design really is..

Worst of all, however, is the phone's complete lack of resilience to being covered in seawater and sand. A light drenching (more on that later) and the thing simply shorted out and corroded - an obvious design flaw if ever there was one.

As such, I've upgraded back to my beautiful old Nokia 6230:

Now, this phone has a screen so poor you can barely view any form of image on it. The speaker itself constantly makes that little interference noise you get when you put a ringing phone next to your speakers. It can only store 100 text messages before having a fit and making you either delete them all, or painfully remove messages one-by-one.

But. It can take a beating. I've proven this in the past by

1. Simply throwing it at a wall (the back sometimes falls off),
2. Setting it on fire (there's now a small raised area on the back cover) and
3. Putting it through the washing machine (that last one, I admit, was accidental).

I'm debating getting something a bit more modern but first, I need to know, is there anything out there which can pass the three stage test above?