Matt's Blog » Funny

Use the attribution, Luke

Matt — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 18:26:04 +0000

Here’s a Star Wars style credit roll of the current public users in the OpenStreetMap planet dump as of 2008-10-15.

The full 37Mb version of the animation is here.

Los Angeles

Matt — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:40:17 +0000

Apparently the traffic there is infamous. I transferred via there on my way back from the States and even at the aeroplanes were gridlocked. This really annoyed the guy sitting next to me, presumably because he might miss his transfer. While he rushed off the plane, I waited for everyone else to get off (my transfer was in six hours) and then got off almost last. He was waiting outside in the jetway for them to unload some of his luggage that had been too big to fit in the overhead locker on the rather small aircraft, looking like he was going to explode. The moral; sometimes you should just check your luggage in, like normal people.

Breeding

Matt — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:15:23 +0000

I’ve been ill for the past week or two, with some sort of cold & flu thing, which has been incredibly annoying. Not only that, but it makes the commute into work that much more unpleasant because I know I’m one of the people in the carriage who is infecting everyone else. And I hate it when other people do that. But I got thinking about the network of transmission; a DAG of disease sweeping through the population. I wonder if the clique would be commuters, on the tube, meeting every morning and evening to cross-breed their germs. Gathering new specimens and training them against their immune systems and drug regimens, selecting them for greater virulence and tolerance. The next morning, they’ll be back on the tube to try out their improved strains. On me (cf. Catch-22).

Its a bit like Petz (TM), but you don’t need AA batteries.

Pilates

Matt — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 20:27:25 +0000

So… some stuff has happened since I last blogged; I moved in with my girlfriend, quit my job, got a new job and joined a gym. This post is going to be about that last item – I went to my first Pilates class earlier this evening, and it was really hard.

I’ve been getting less and less fit since I was about 18, when I started shunning the daylight for the phosphor glow of a CRT. My posture has suffered and, according to Rachel, I now look like Mr. Burns… The time is right to do something about it.

Having joined the gym and had a “workout plan” to increase general levels of fitness, Rachel and I decided it would be good to go to a Pilates class (apparently this is good for “core” strength) as well. We looked over the timetable for a suitable class, i.e: a beginner level one for me, since the closest I’ve ever come to Pilates is watching that Yellow Pages advert with James Nesbitt…

Long story short, it turned out to be an intermediate or advanced class, which was far, far too hard for my puny body. (The beginner class probably would have been tough enough.) The instructor complimented both of us as we left the class, but in my case she was probably just being polite.

The moral of the story is, its not just a load of old ladies going “hmmmm…..”, but also some flabby blokes going “aaarrrgh”

Advert

Matt — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 16:57:34 +0000

The new Burger King advert is quite funny:

Eat like a king. Not a clown.

While I like the sideswipe, I can’t help wondering which king they mean. Possibly Henry VIII – obese, syphilitic and wife-abusing?

Incompetnce

Matt — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 23:39:39 +0000

This book is very funny, if a little close to the bone. The plot is basically a sort of spy thriller and in that respect its not particularly good. The real genius is setting it in the near future where, by European law:

No person shall be prejudiced from employment in any capacity, at any level, by reason of age, race, creed or incompitence.

Rob Grant, one of the guys who wrote Red Dwarf, envisages a world where it is impossible to get anything done, with many Kafka-esque situations of extreme idiocy in feedback mode… He also picks up on the modern tendency to invent “syndromes” and “disorders”. For example: NSS or “Non-Specific Stupidity”, for those people who are stupid, but none of the other syndromes or disorders is applicable. They then get equal opportunities for jobs and promotions, meaning companies have to employ a certain percentage of “stupid” people.

Wonderfully farcical.

XML Hackery

Matt — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 02:19:39 +0000

I’ve been doing quite a bit of XML over the past month and learning a number of things that are, perhaps, too arcane to ever be useful. Not to say that XML isn’t powerful, because it can be an extremely good tool in the right circumstances. Take, for example, XSLT, a markup for describing how to turn some XML into differently arranged XML, which seems quite benign and useful. Maybe its just my paranoia, but does it have to be Turing complete? Will XML become self-aware and take over the world?

Will we be able to type ?

Glamorous Business Travel

Matt — Sun, 16 Oct 2005 22:55:15 +0000

So, about this time last week I was getting ready for the wonderful opportunity that is Travelling on Business. Having fun, drinking beer on the Company’s round, seeing the world… Oh, could I have been more misguided?

Obviously, I was wrong.
Nothing to do with the Company, though… but to do with some (possibly retarded) baggage handlers at Bristol “International” Airport. Basically, we were flying from a tiny speck of an airport (Bristol) to another insignificant regional airport (Bremen) and had to get a connecting flight through Amsterdam, or travel at 3am.
But there were “administrative errors with the paperwork”, or some other bollocks excuse (maybe that a large ‘X’, accepted as a signature across the West Country, isn’t good enough for international air travel) that meant we were delayed taking off for an hour and missed our connection. We were flying in a tiny little Fokker 70, I might add. Its true what Neal Stephenson says in Cryptonomicon (a book which everyone should own, read and re-read) about not dicking about with anything smaller than a 747…
So, we missed our connection and had the choice of a 4-hour drive to Bremen, getting there just after midnight, or staying in Amsterdam and getting on a plane at 6am to Hamburg and driving 2 hours from there. For some reason that I don’t remember, we stayed in Amsterdam.
The next morning, having got up at 4:30am local time (thats 3:30am UK time…) with just 3 hours of sleep, we were driving from Hamburg to Bremen. However, Bremen was having some sort of annual fair and the roads were a complete nightmare, so the 2-hour drive became a 3-hour drive. But at least I managed a nap in the back of the car…
I don’t blame the carrier for this, they helped as much as they could, but the damage had been done.
The moral of the story: always, always, always fly direct!