Stuck in YVR
April 19, 2008 | Travel, Musings
All geared up for an overnight flight back to the UK last night and sat waiting to get boarded when the plane outside gets closed up and the lights go out…Uh oh ! Sure enough the flight’s been cancelled due to the inbound leg getting struck by lighting as it came in to land…Nice !
So off we trot to the airport hotel and spend the night while some engineers busily fixed the problem (I hope !) and we’re due off just 10hrs or so late.
That’ll teach me for putting my watch back onto UK before I was in the air…I put a whammy on the trip home ! Hardest part’s been not getting back to the family for another day. We explained to my eldest why daddy wasn’t getting home when we said because we’re stuck in the snow and she promptly informed us she’ll come and rescue me and fix my plane…bless !
So…terminal 5’s a duffer then ?
April 13, 2008 | Travel, Musings, Work
Just arrived in Terminal5 on my way to Vancouver for a week’s workshops on a new project I’m taking on and other than the odd bit of hastily erected hoarding to shield one’s eye’s from unfinished partitioning the place seems pretty much done to me !
Firstly and of particular interest to me, is it’s internal scale. In a previous life I once bandied aesthetics and the troubles the human condition suffers in the urban fabric with architects and fellow planners. They (the architects) invariably felt this was of secondary importance to the nature of the architectural statement being made. I argued at length and vociferously in opposition :0) I can’t stand Stansted, it’s amuckle great modernist cowshed of a place with fragments of humanity sloshing about at the bottom of this great container like day old coffee dregs, there’s no sense of scale, you feel (and are in every sense) dwarfed my it’s grandeur and that irks me somewhere deep down inside ! Archtectural statements of this scale remind me of the great state rooms of the modernising Qin dynasty of China designed to awe and demand respect and obedience…maybe there’s something of the rebel in me that illicits these feelings 
Back to Terminal 5 then…it’s light and airy with a ‘just new out the showroom’ smell to it still ! Good range of shops but definitely verging on the pricey side…I can’t recall the last time I felt compelled at an airport to by a £250 pair of Bulgari cufflinks but there you go…I am Scots ! Facilities that I’ve sampled are excellent (sat in the BA lounge atm!) and overall I’m much impressed and not surpried to find that the British press hysterical ramblings are largely unfounded. Having said that I’ll blog again once I get to Vancouver and I have my luggage in my hand !
More soon
Arrived safely in YVR and after a mahoosive wait in line to get through immigration there’s my luggage checked right through from Edinburgh. So much for all the hysteria !
Post-winter lethargy is now a thing of the past - Official !
March 31, 2008 | Exercise, Hobbies
Having a tough time getting my @rse in gear and doing much exercise…time for a change I think !
Next time…read the small print
March 28, 2008 | Computers and Internet, Musings, Technology
Apple has recently polished up it’s Safari for Windows browser codebase into some less reminiscent of an alpha-hackfest (much like it was when i tried their original release on a clean vista machine some months back) and have now slipped it in below the radar on many people’s machines as an automatic download/update on iTunes & Quicktime.
However the disclaimer and EULA you have to sign up for is a beaut…
Now click accept on that in good faith…:0)
hang on…I’m an architect !
March 7, 2008 | Entertainment, At Work !, Comics and Graphic Humour, Funnies
Wow…does anyone really not think this is bad ?
February 16, 2008 | Computers and Internet, WWW (Weird & Wonderful Web), Musings, Government
I’m most definitely not one of those ‘black helicopters’, Areas51 conspiracy theorist-types however the new that some of the worlds largest printer manufacturers have had a document tracking protocol foisted on them by the US staggers me…
This from elReg details the broad-brush picture of the problem.
And this great bit of work explains the implications of the tracking protocol implemented on these printers…
Just amazing…minority report and those iris scanners are only just around the corner….see if they’re not !
Flash lifts it’s skirts now with UPnP vuln.
January 15, 2008 | Computers and Internet, Broadband, Rants, Technology
Sigh…here’s the reason I hate flash ! Got into a huge scrap at work with a colleague arguing our customer-facing offering needed to be Web2.0 and RIA and that flash was the way to go as AJAX wasn’t ubiquitous yet etc etc and I politely pointed out that I personally, on all the browsers I use at home, block flash content.
And here’s why and here’s the original PoC code. Nice bundled-up, serialised SOAP call over an embedded flash object using an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability and UPnP (Universal Plug n Play - it makes those tricky little apps like MSN Messenger and Skype slip through your hardware and software firewalls like a hot knife through butter).
So the ongoing rule is learn to use your hardware properly and configure ONLY those ports on your firewalls that you really, really, really, REALLY need open and go home this evening and make sure UPnP is disabled on your router.
You have been warned…again !
Vista - see ya !
January 15, 2008 | Computers and Internet, Rants, Technology
If this isn’t the final nail in the coffin of this abortive attempt to see off the Leopard advance I’ve no idea what is…
Windows Vista SP1 RC Refresh as it’s been snappily entitled has now been released to a slightly wider audience that those bleary-eyed nerdlings initially supplied with the hyoooge service pack earlier last year.
I’ve got a Vista Home basic on my second laptop at home, it’s fine but I’ve yet to get used to the wholesale changes they’ve made to where everything now resides (maybe if I made the switch and just got on with it !) but this ma-hoo-sive SP is just beyond a joke. There’s no doubt whatsoever in my mind that they rushed this codebase to RC1 last year to avoid a publicity meltdown as this scale of a Service pack is just taking the piss !
It ain’t going to be on my primary machine for quite some to come I can tell you…in fact I’m seriously, seriously considering this as my next machine.
I’m turning to the dark side…no doubt.
Darwin Awards 2007 - And the winner is….
January 14, 2008 | WWW (Weird & Wonderful Web), Funnies
When Tammy Jean (40) married Michael in Texas in 2002 little did she know that Michael (56) had a secret.
Michael was an alcoholic.
Not an ordinary alcoholic but an alcoholic who liked to take his liquor….well, rectally.
The Texan machine shop operator couldn’t ingest alcohol by mouth (apparently due to painful medical problems with his throat) so instead elected to receive his favourite beverage via enema.
Essentially the resultant effect was the same, however when the rest of us have had enough we simply stop drinking (or pass out), however when Michael had had enough (and subsequently passed out), the alcohol remaining in his rectal cavity continued to be absorbed.
Rather than dissuade Michael from ‘drinking’, Tammy assisted him in his pursuits… by supplying (in May 2004) not one but two 1.5 litre bottles of Sherry.
Michael was in for one hell of a party! More than 100 fluid ounces of sweet, sweet sherry….right up your old address!
Tammy performed her marital duties admirably, and ‘administered’ to her husbands every need. Unfortunately, when she awoke the next morning Michael was dead in the bed beside her.
A subsequent autopsy found that Michaels blood alcohol level was (wait for it..!!) 0.47% … 6 times the legal intoxication limit in Texas.
