I am a full time protector of the English language as you know and I have just scored 10 out of 12 in an online quiz being hosted by The Economist newspaper: why not try it yourself? Here's the link: http://www.economist.com/diversions/quiz.cfm?quizname=stylequiz
DW
I took a walk into town today and as I set off, on foot, I spotted a young chap from the house almost opposite. I have not been introduced to the man so we don't know each other. It takes around 20 minutes to walk into town and after about 5 minutes he started looking over his shoulder at me and suddenly speeded up. I thought, this Eastern European looking chap thinks I'm the secret police so I'll play along and I speeded up too. He then put on a fair burst.
He rounded a corner and by the time I got there he had put around 30 metres between us. I kept up and crossed over to the other side of the street where I think he lost sight of me: lots of trees! He then slowed right down and I think he was shocked to see me out of the corner of his eye level with him. However, I carried on at the pace I'd got up to and arrived before him at the road crossing. As I started crossing the road I noticed that he had got to the railings around 10 metres from the crossing and was standing stock still, waiting for me to cross the road and make the decision: which of the three possible forward directions would I take?
Since I was really minding my own business I carried on and haven't seen him since.
Bit of a lark that! Wonder what he'll say when he gets back home?
DW
In an advert in last week's Economist newspaper, there is an advert for some educational materials. The materials look interesting and if I were in the mood I would buy them. However, this is what caught my eye:
Please send me ... which consists of 24 half hour lectures ... They then add, '12 hours in all'.
Do you get the impression that Fermat's last theorem, Fibonacci numbers and the Pythagorean theorem and geometry of ellipses might be a bit beyond someone who needs to be told that 24 half hour lectures equates to 12 hours?
DW
Now all of these weak minded people who are hell bent on mashing our language are calling powdered baby milk FORMULA.
It makes me so frustrated to listen to these supposedly educated people on Radio 4 hurtling their way into speaking AmerEnglish. What they fail to realise is that the version of American they are importing is the language of the uneducated American. If they cared to listen to and read work by educated and professional Americans (not journalists, I should stress, since they are as bad as ours) they would see that they do understand prepositions, they do use adverbs and they don't use street slang in the way that our journalists are doing.
Last week one of these clowns even said that a politician should fess up ... for goodness' sake.
DW
A couple of years ago I went to the Isle of Lewis with son Andrew, Sister Susan and her husband Neville.
I took a fair number of photos and a lot of video footage. I spent a lot of time editing part of the video film and saved it all to my hard disk and then onto CD. I gave a copy of the CD to Susan and Andrew and kept one myself.
I needed that CD at the end of last week only to find that my computers said it was BLANK. Oh beggar! Of course, I blamed myself.
Then at Susan's house over the weekend, I borrowed her CD and dropped into the laptop ... hers was blank too. I then took it to her desktop and it worked ... not empty at all. I smartly dumped everything onto my memory stick and then back on to my laptop. I backed it up again as soon as I got home.
Gates? I wouldn't pay him in washers to be perfectly honest.
DW
This is so good it's a simulcast
The Economist reports this week on a French company that is updating an 18th century technology so that we really can leave the camera at home and rely on our camera phones to do all we need as far as taking snaps is concerned.
Rather than making solid (eg glass or Perspex) lenses, the French company called Varioptic is working on liquid lenses. The Economist article says:
... To make a solid zoom lens zoom, you have to move the individual elements relative to one another. In a liquid zoom lens, by contrast, you only have to change their shape. That means a liquid zoom can be much slimmer than a glass one.
Varioptic's zoom is not quite there yet. The prototype is 27mm (just over an inch) from front to back, which is a bit deep for a phone and it can manage a zoom magnification of only two and a half times, which is not even as good as the threefold magnification of current phone zooms. But this performance is likely to improve soon and once liquid lenses work as well as their solid counterparts their other advantages will become apparent.
The first of these is speed. A liquid lens can shift its magnification in milliseconds. Mechanical lenses are much slower. Liquid lenses are also cheaper. A liquid zoom should cost around $25, whereas the existing mechanical zooms cost $'00.
Liquid zooms are sturdier than their solid counterparts, a particularly important advantage for mobile phones ... Since a liquid lens has no mechanical moving parts there are, quite simply, fewer things to break in it. And despite their being liquid, the minute size of the droplets that compose the lenses means the surface tension between the two fluids is so strong that they stay unstirred, no matter how violently they are shaken ...
Marvellous!
DW
I was talking to Young Master W about his life at University and his financial management skills. He offered to do a deal that would have led to him, I said, ending up with scurvy. Well, many a true word! He told me about a friend of his from school who went to University and lived on margharita pizzas: nothing else and he had them delivered so there was very little effort involved. He ended up going to see a doctor who had to consult a book of symptoms and said, 'According to this book, you've got scurvy. In all my years of practice I've never seen a case of scurvy before.'!
An old friend of mine used to tell us a story of a friend of his, also at University, who spent all of hisgrant one term on a marvellous music system. This lad then lived on porridge ... until he got scurvy. At that time, it was thought to be the last known case of scurvy in England ... well, not now!!!
DW
Thought you'd like to know
DW
Know your user name but forgotten your password?
It asked me a question to help them to help me, it asked: What is your password!!!!!
I'm stuck!
DW
When I see a Clarkson, or Archer, book for sale in a bookshop I find a way
of covering it up either by moving it to another shelf or display and
ensuring no one can see it or simply by turning the thing round so that name
and title are hidden.
Another reason for taking this action is that, in spite of their selling in
droves, I find Clarkson's drivel not in the least bit funny and definitely
not entertaining. Therefore, I believe I am saving weak minded people from
themselves.
As for Archer's tripe: he is not a pleasant person and I have never and will
never read any of his tripe and don't see why anyone else should either.
DW
The Shame of their Shame
Given my links with Kazakhstan I was really pleased to see that the winner of two stages of Le Tour de France was from Astana in Kazakhstan. I was gutted for the country to see him going home in disgrace following an illegal blood transfusion. When will these sportsmen learn:
Your compatriots feel the shame of your shame
You will get caught
High Temperatures
I see a lot on the news at the moment about blisteringly high temperatures in Central and Eastern Europe. I am currently in Al Ain, Abu Dhabi and as I came back from work at 2100 hours today, the temperature was 38 degrees C ... imagine the daytime temperature. Do you hear anyone going on about it here?
How to look after a Thumb Drive
Was it three years ago that I bought my first thumb drive? You know, those little USB things that can store massive amounts of data in something the size of something very small. I started its life by leaving it stuck into a computer. Handily, someone responsible found it and had it put away safely for me. Well, I used that drive until recently when I gave it away ... bought a new one last week with 2 Gb of space. Happily using it until last night when I left it in a computer lab that all and sundry might use. I realised early today when I'd done and called the man I'm working with there and he found it and put it somewhere safe for me.
What is it with me and those thumb drives do you think?
DW
As one moves around, one often notices things with more acuity than otherwise. On Friday, I was travelling around again and mode notes of the following:
Is Britain the only developed country that has no idea how to clean and maintain toilets in public areas? They usually stink, to say the least.
It rained quite a bit yesterday and as I got to the roundabout that takes me on to the A404(M) coming from Henley, there was a road closed sign. Two thirds of the road around that roundabout was under relatively deep water. Confusion reigned and I thought, even though I've allowed four hours for this journey (one should be enough) I couldn't contemplate the thought of turning back. Cars were cutting across lanes, going the wrong way round the roundabout and one BMW 3 series had clearly tried to get across the roundabout but had flooded his engine. I sat still for a while until a Transit type van and a Land Rover navigated the waters and saw that at worst only three quarters of their wheels were covered ... I decided to follow their line and give it a try. I drove slowly along the line I had plotted and made it through without let or hindrance to the other side. That other BMW driver must be stupid: having thought about the structure of my engine, the only thing that could possibly have hurt would have been water getting into the cabin (didn’t happen) or up the exhaust pipe. I think he went so quickly that he just swamped the entire car.
The road was then clear until the next major roundabout at Junction 4 of the M4. Getting off the M4 there to go to Terminals 1, 2 and 3 immediately led to very slow moving traffic. It took 45 minutes to crawl about a mile and in the end, having parked the car and got the bus to terminal 3, I could see no reason for the movement to be so slow as things were OK at the airport, the tunnel leading up to terminal one wasn't flooded ... I think I was lucky in the end that my one hour or so journey only took the two hours it did.
I sat near some foreigners on the shuttle bus and they simply couldn't understand our systems ... how can the buses, trains and the underground grind to a halt in the way they had. What about using big pump to drain the water? I have to say that it just takes a few snowflakes, leaves and drops of water and we are absolutely ruined aren't we?
Then again, I watched the news in the departures lounge and would like to record how astonishing it is that as soon as there is any surface water, someone has launched a dinghy or a rowing boat ... where do they come from? Is there a rowing boat fairy or something who dishes them out at the appropriate time?
Finally, was amused to see that in first class, they have monstrously big televisions to watch but they are encased in wood effect surrounds! An ultra modern Boeing 777-300 with wood effect televisions! It looks odd to me anyway!
DW
I was watching Waking the Dead on BBC 1 last night which was partly set in Heathrow Airport as part of the story line. Two characters were wandering around airside when in the background there was a RyanAir aeroplane ... nope, can't happen as they don’t fly to or from Heathrow!
Tut, tut!
DW
Oh, meant to add some good news.
I planted some strawberry plants last year and this year they are a bit bigger and stronger but not fully established yet. However, I picked one yesterday before the birds and slugs got at it and it was absolutely magnificent. If you can, plant your own and forget the supermarket rubbish. Even if you only have strawberries a few times during the summer, it will be worth it if they are your own.
Mine are organic too as there are no artificial anything being sprayed or spread anywhere near them!
DW
Today it's 15th July ... the middle of SUMMER in the UK. I am looking out of my dining room window to see cloud, greyness and gloom.
DW
I heard on the radio last week that Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, is currently on sabbatical leave. I thought, hmm, nice work if you can get it ... never having had so much as a sabbatical week. So I checked and found that Williams has only been in the job since 27th February 2003.
I don't remember any other Archbishop going on sabbatical leave either ... please correct me if I'm wrong.
DW
Move Office 2007? Don't Bother
When I installed Office 2007 I did so on an external drive DELIBERATELY. I did that partly to save internal hard drive space and partly because I need to keep Office 2003 going.
The other day I decided I would move Office 2007 to the internal hard drive and set System Mechanic off on the job.
I started it and when it got to just 40% completed when I had to go out, I paused it. Got back in and set it off again whereat it whizzed along to 60% complete fairly quickly. Then it stuck at 60% for a long time and I let it run over night ... got up on Friday morning to find it had made some progress but was still only 60% complete.
Let me cut a long story short and tell you that after 48 hours the thing stalled at 60% complete. I stopped it and am now no further forward. I had to stop doing various things because System Mechanic was "moving" things around so I lost some productivity. No surprise though in this modern day and age where one buys software that promises so much and then delivers so little.
I will now do what I was going to do before I got System Mechanic in on the job: uninstall and then reinstall Office 2007. The only thing that's worrying me really is anything to do with Outlook since I do rely on it for a lot of my communications.
What a waste of time. Reminds of the last time I went to see my GP.
Visiting the GP
I was ill last week as you know and I talked to my GP by phone and after he'd promised to write out a prescription for me, which he did, he said I should go and see him on Friday afternoon, 48 hours hence.
Friday afternoon came and I got to the surgery: it was still a bit of a struggle for me and I was drained when I got home. Anyway, as I was in the waiting room I was summoned to the receptionists' desk and they thrust a form at me that asked me to agree to being filmed during my consultation as the good Doctor was filming all of his consultations this afternoon. I agreed, ever keen to become a star in any way that I can.
I got into the consulting room and it was a bit tidier than normal, well I didn't notice any books and files all over the floor anyway. The Dr even had a clean shirt and tie on!
He let me start and I told him this and that and that I was sleeping but not resting and then described a dream I kept having during my illness. Well, he latched on to that and we spent quite a while as he tried to analyse my dream.
Now, given that I'd had a fever and had a serious ear infection, I just want to tell you that at no stage did he take my temperature and neither did he look into my infected ear to check on the efficacy of the antibiotics he had given me ... which is why I thought I'd gone there in the first place.
Given the way that I manage my life and business affairs, I left the place with the feeling of being glad that I'm moving to another part of the country soon. I know people who would have ranted and raved and insisted on an examination. Not only am I moving house and region but I knew that I was seeing the ENT specialist in Oxford within a week and I was confident that the tablets were working. I'd also bought myself a good thermometer too so I knew that my temperature was now well within normal limits.
I despair and am jealous of anyone whose GP is even just a bit better than the one I am describing here.
DW
