Entries tagged 'weird' ↓

Looking through a database today, I noticed a person record containing a "6" in the "LastName" field. I suspected that this was duff data, but it turned out to be this guy.

Wikipedia reveals that he used to have a much more prosaic name.

Today's random bit of weirdness - I just received a letter from an insurance company which quotes my "Age at next birthday" as being "32.5 years".

I look forward to receiving all my Happy Half-Birthday cards... :-)

Jocelyn keeps getting text messages from her mobile phone provider along the lines of "We have reviewed your usage, compared it to our available plans, and come to the conclusion that you are on the most appropriate plan for you. Don't change."  Great, thanks for that.

On a similar vein, I got a letter from my bank today (in an envelope emblazoned with "Important Information Enclosed", which is always a sure-fire indicator of pointless content) telling me that they plan to make changes to my credit card account in the near future, and will write to my again in a couple of weeks with actual details of these mysterious changes. "In the meantime there's nothing you need to do, so please carry on as usual." Great, thanks for that, too. Most useful.

And now I've wasted a little bit of your precious time by blogging about this nonsense!  Well, if I have to suffer... :-)

Oh, here's another quick one - I was on the phone to my car insurance provider yesterday, and the call centre operative kindly warned me that I was "paying for their free breakdown cover" - er, come again?

For those of you with barcode scanners in your kitchen which are linked up to your PC, this site may be of use:

http://grocist.nfshost.com/index.py 

An RSS feed of your grocery list!  Integration with grocery delivery stores!  Imagine the possibilities...

The BBC is reporting that Nicole Kidman was taken to hospital after being involved in a car crash whilst filming her latest movie:

"Kidman's publicist, Catherine Olim, said the star was trying to shake zombies off the bonnet of her Jaguar when the car spun off the road."

Yeah, those damn zombies on the bonnet can be a real problem at this time of year!  At least she didn't also have to contend with the axe-wielding maniac on the back seat, or she'd be in real trouble...

Retailers in my home town are getting into the news for all the wrong reasons this week.

Firstly, a two and a half year old toddler is banned from a shop for wearing a hoodie.  Then today I hear that an 87-year-old former Lord Mayor is asked for ID when trying to buy a bottle of sherry.

Madness...
 

Merry Christmas all!

(Thanks to Colin for passing on that site)
 

Here's something odd, then: On Sunday, in a Tesco car park, I was pushing our trolley of groceries back towards the place we'd parked when suddenly I saw what I thought was my car being driven away from me!  Same make, same model, same colour, and same registration plate!  I was just about to abandon our shopping and hotfoot it after the thieving toerags when I realised that the registration was actually one letter out - where mine ends with "N", this one ended with "M".  Otherwise, they were the same.

 What are the chances of that, eh?
 

I just noticed the strangest thing.  When we moved into our new house in August, it was raining, and it quickly became apparent that we had a slight problem with our guttering, as the rain poured through a large crack between two pieces and noisily landed on the driveway.

I put this to the back of my mind - it wasn't a big issue and I had plenty of other jobs that needed doing.  I figured that soon enough, the noise would drive me to action during the winter months as the rain became more frequent.  But then this weekend, I realised that the noise has stopped occurring during showers.  I went out to take a look, and sure enough, the gap has disappeared - I can only think that some kind soul (possibly our window-cleaner?) has taken it upon his or her self to spontaneously fix our guttering for me.

So, if you're the anonymous North Yorkshire gutter-fixer, thank you very much!

I was just looking through a walletful of recent receipts and found this. I really should pay more attention to the people who serve us dinner...

I know I've been neglecting my email recently, but Outlook has really started to take the mickey:

How curious.  I was just browsing through a supermarket receipt and it seems we bought an 'O' today, for the princely sum of 38 new pence:



I wonder what it was? Does the barcode 977030726700 mean anything to anyone?

I just noticed this BBC News headline declaring that a "German cat gets deadly bird flu" (which, if you think about it out of context, is quite a strange sentence), and I was reminded of something that I had intended to tell you:

Jocelyn and I were in Asda this evening, looking in the greetings cards section at birthday cards, and I noticed that there was a cardboard divider highlighting a section of "Birthday Cards for Cats".  Yes, not only is it possible to buy birthday cards for your feline friends, but Asda deem it necessary to highlight their location amongst the other genres (or species) of recipients.  I was sorely tempted to steal the cardboard divider...

It's a strange, strange world.

As a teenager I loved playing D&D and Warhammer - but to be honest the whole roleplaying and monster-slaying shenanigans came secondary to the sheer arithmetical pleasure of tracking a character's progress on a lovingly-crafted character sheet. Now that I'm pushing thirty and married, with a fun but time-consuming day job, I don't have the time for such things, so I was delighted to discover Progress Quest this morning. Download the software, generate your character, and off he/she goes, slaughtering Orcs and progressing up the levels with no further interaction from yourself. Fantastic! Now there's no stopping Grebgrat the fourth-level Double-Wookiee Shiv-Knight...
 

Wow!  Sunday 29th January 2006 will forever live in my memory as the day I learned how to peel a banana more easily than I have been doing for the last 30 years.  It really works!

Here we go again - permit me to dump all of those "flagged for follow-up" emails and "keep as new" bloglines posts into this entry, and then I can move on with my life:

Transformers Costumes - turn from a robot into a car (or whatever) whilst you're wearing the costume.  Tempted?  Only £2000!

New Zealand Traffic offence letter - kinda long, but well worth reading through.

Magic Ajax.NET - another open source framework for integrating Ajax technologies into ASP.NET apps.

Phil Scott - watch out for Request.Browser.MajorVersion throwing exceptions in ASP.NET 2.0

Firoz Ansari - using TextPad to View Source in IE.

Jeff Putz - how do I copy a List<T> object?  It's a good question.

Daemon Tools 4.0 is out.  DT is an excellent virtual CD-ROM/DVD-ROM emulator, which I use to mount the various iso images downloaded from MSDN.  It's quick and easy to use, and saves me a fortune in blank CDs/DVDs.  The new version has been redesigned from scratch and supports four virtual drives (useful for those multi-disc installs).

Anyone watch American Chopper?  The folks at OCC are now using SQL 2005 to run their operation - watch the video.

The CSS Properties Window is a neat add-in package for VS2005 that makes it easier to edit inline and inherited styles.

Scenarios, Patterns, and Implementation Guidance for Web Services Enhancements (WSE) 3.0 - I must get round to reading this...  maybe during the Christmas holidays :-)

PowerCollections by Wintellect is described as "A Community Project to Develop the Best Public License Collection Classes for .NET".  The results (using the .NET 2.0 Generics feature) are impressive, so I'm using this class library in some of my projects.

 I think everybody's seen this already, but I found it interesting to learn that IE7 and Office 12 will use the same "RSS" icon that is found in Firefox.  Hmm, "Embrace and Extend", perhaps?

ASCII Art of War

Another useful FF extension - Firefox OneNote Power Toy - send clippings from FF straight to a new OneNote side note.

 

Another random bunch o' links:

A November CTP of Enterprise Library has been released.  It's still missing the configuration tool, but it is aligned with .NET Framework 2.0 and is looking pretty good.

Microsoft have bought the excellent FolderShare, providers of innovative P2P software which allows you to sync folders across multiple PCs, share your files with friends, and access (and search) your files from anywhere.  Alas, I'm prevented from using it at work due to a combination of firewall and SuperScout restrictions, so I'll stick to moving my files around using my cute 80Gb Freecom FHD2-Pro and a copy of SyncToy.

2006 H1 will see Service Packs for VS2003 and VS2005.  About time - though to be honest I hope not to still be using VS2003 by then!

An October CTP of the "Atlas" bits for ASP.NET has been released.  This is Microsoft's answer to the AJAX hype, and I really should try giving it a whirl soon.

Scientists debunk the cow-tipping myth.  Shame.

Encrypt your web.config with ASP.NET 2.0 and VS2005 - an eight-minute screencast.

Audiophile - I love this page, which provides links to the most ridiculous "audiophile" products available.  $240 for a plank of wood, anyone?

iLounge buyer's guide - looking to buy someone an iPod accessory for Christmas?  This guide should help.

Wired: History's worst software bugs

Remember when the covers of software books used to show bridges or parallelograms?  No longer - see the exciting cover of  AW's Build Master title.

ASP.NET 2.0 - "Man, it's cool!".  Oh, good grief...

Less hype, more info - a step-by-step guide to converting web projects from VS2002/3 to VS2005.

Security Guidance for .NET 2.0 now available on MSDN.

How to Disable Autorun for your CD-ROM drives.  Wonderful - I hate those prompts telling me that an image exists somewhere on a CD-ROM, hence would I like to launch Picasa?

I love this story, it's so utterly random:

"An unseen, sweet-smelling cloud drifted through parts of Manhattan last night..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/28/nyregion/28odor.html

Sprayonmud is a specially formulated spray-on product for anyone that wants to give friends, neighbours, colleagues or just anyone at all, the impression that they have been off-road or, at the very least, out in the country for the weekend.

 

If you’ve got a 4X4 or off-roader, Sprayonmud will send a message to anyone who disapproves or is just plain envious – you use your off-roader, off the road as well as on it.

From http://www.sprayonmud.com (via BBC News).  You couldn't make this stuff up.

 "Two Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol.

A man, aged 20, and a girl of 17 are believed to have been filming a mock duel when they poured fuel into two glass tubes and lit it."

Full Story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/beds/bucks/herts/4575291.stm

Corn snake, not cornflake:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/shropshire/4512995.stm

Step-by-step guide from 3M detailing how to make a wallet from a roll of Duct tape:

http://www.3m.com/intl/CA/english/centres/home_leisure/duct_tape/dt_wallet.html

Half of me thinks this is incredibly sad, the other half is desperate to get out a roll of tape and give it a go.

http://www.infinitecat.com/

(via Eric Gunnerson's site)

...although admittedly not together, unless you count the way in which these two quirky news stories found themselves nestling next to each other in my inbox this evening:

First, Jez found this corking piece of reportage from The Times on Saturday:

A WOMAN who attacked her 72-year-old brother with rhubarb is facing an anti-social behaviour order after her neighbours complained.

Residents of Askrigg, a village in the Yorkshire Dales, say that Margaret Porter, 50, of nearby Newbiggin, caused “fear in the community”.

Porter assaulted her brother, William Porter, with whom she does not speak, in May last year. He had incensed her by laughing at her. She hurled three sticks of rhubarb that she was carrying at him, hitting him in the eye, which he reported to the police. Porter admitted common assault and returned to court yesterday for sentencing.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-2-1440613,00.html

 

Then Rosie told me about the much-reported news that The Pentagon had considered developing chemical bombs intended to persuade enemy combatants to make love, not war (as long as they could put up with the stink):

Sky News:

 The Pentagon was considering developing a 'homosexual sex bomb' designed to make enemy troops gay, it has been revealed.      

The bomb would release a chemical aphrodisiac that would get the soldiers frisky and make them irresistible to each other.

It was hoped their "distasteful but completely non-lethal" homosexual behaviour would hit moral in the barracks, the New Scientist reports.

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,31500-13282758,00.html

BBC:

Researchers pondered a "Who? Me?" bomb, which would simulate flatulence in enemy ranks. 

Indeed, a "Who? Me?" device had been under consideration since 1945, the government papers say.

However, researchers concluded that the premise for such a device was fatally flawed because "people in many areas of the world do not find faecal odour offensive, since they smell it on a regular basis".

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4174519.stm

 

You couldn't make this stuff up!

Sky News: 30 year old Serbian "chopped his own penis off with a rusty old axe because he was sick of having no money."

http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-13263288,00.html

MS Money 2004 sees me straight, but I guess different people take different approaches to finances...!

More monkey news from the BBC:

"UK researchers have collected the first hard evidence of monkeys using tools, Science magazine reports."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4083517.stm

So, does this mean they're still evolving...?!

Here's a good monkey story (and heaven knows, you can never have enough good monkey stories):

 Highway to be cleared of monkey raiders [BBC]

What I particularly like is the sentence "According to the latest count, some 2,035 monkeys reside along the Kalka-Simla highway".  Who counted them?  How, exactly?  Can you imagine counting monkeys for a living?  "1, 2, 3, hey don't move, 4, 5, shit have I counted you already?  Stop running around..."

"What do you do for a living?"  "I count monkeys."  Fantastic.

Update [2004-12-07]: Hey, my questions are answered - a news article from the BBC explaining how to count orang-utans:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4072571.stm

http://www.marryanamerican.ca - Hey, I'm already doing my bit to save a liberal American from "four more years of cowboy conservatism" - and I'm not even Canadian!

This is utterly brilliant - check it out:

http://neilhetzel.com/blog/archive/2004/10/30/1156.aspx

Is this site for real?  I'm not sure.  Either way, I'm sticking to SQL Server!

Ooh, there's more - read the dress code!

Spotted this neat story on the BBC:

"GPs confused by 'manky' patients

A group of foreign doctors left baffled by South Yorkshire slang are being taught the local dialect so they know when their patients feel "champion".

The seven Austrians are fluent English speakers but were left confused by patients feeling "jiggered" or "manky".

But now doctor-patient relations in Barnsley and Doncaster have improved after the local NHS trust compiled a special Yorkshire language guide."

That's ace.  We Tykes sure do have some odd phrases I suppose, but when you've grown up hearing them you never think to question whether they're standard English.  It's only since I met Jocelyn that I discovered that "nesh" isn't actually in the dictionary.

Jez (who really does need a blog of his own, I think!) has also been scouring the Beeb for funnies today.  He emailed to let me know about this science story:

"You could almost call it Equation Idol - readers of Physics World have voted for their favourite equations of all time. But what do they mean?

Deputy editor of Physics World, Dr Matin Durrani, offers an idiot's guide to the top five equations of all time."

I must confess that I was somewhat pleased to read that Euler's equation came joint first...

No, not me.  This guy.

Via Slashdot: Want more adverts in your face?  Install AdBar for Firefox, possibly the most ridiculous idea for a browser add-in ever.  I especially like this bit:

Jez emailed:

This is very spooky, from today's /.

http://science.slashdot.org/science/04/07/30/110255.shtml

Courtesy of Nat - website of some guy who dug a hole:

http://www.cp-tel.net/pasqualy/hole/page1.html

It's just strange...

Long 450 miles drive home. We stopped off in Inverness for some lunch, and it really impressed me (the city, I mean, not the sandwich - although that was OK too). It seemed to be a cute, modern little town, with all the mod-cons. Just a shame it's so bloody far away...

Finally reached home at about 10pm, and began to wade through the junk mail, junk e-mail, and (somewhat bizarrely), junk ansafone messages. Let the wonders of RealAudio show you what I mean...

 

Message 1 - "We're having a great time..."

Message 2 - "Sorry about that..."

Message 3 - "Is Sylvia there?"

Message 4 - "Hi Syl, it's Peter..."

If, by any chance, you know who Peter (or Sylvia) are, please tell them to stop phoning me...!