Boardmad

One of my guilty pleasures has been a love of sci-fi for more years than I care to remember ( I still recall the painful tug when I finally binned my almost 1k collection of 2000AD’s !)

One story line that ran was a great little series called Zenith, detailing the trials and tribulations of the son of a pair of 60’s super-heroes who rebelled from their creators. This was a brilliant storyline mimicking and adding to the US comicbook XMen series in a curiously British style. Still it was always comic-book stuff…stories for kids or adults with maturity problem (a la comic book guy in the Simpsons !)

What’s changed then to let this genre become mainstream and produce
something of the quality and depth of Heroes. A friend in London has a buddy in the states who’s encoded the entire first series and been dropping them on his server for viewing - I got them off his Vaio after a recent visit and have been devouring them ever since.

The UK now has them on BBC2 each week and the 6mths worth of episodes I’ve had the pleasure of viewing will take too long on terrestrial to come in I think. If you haven’t tried it yet give one of the programmes a watch, see what you think….I love it.

Well TimeSwappers has been up and running for a couple of weeks now and we’ve had a number of posts in the East Lothian yahoogroups page for TimeSwappers and in parallel with this I’ve been getting the Organisation homepage updated and online too. Latest content is now a detailed breakdown of information required to go ahead and start a local TimeSwappers group for your own community and what some of the pre-requisites for managing it are.

Much as I despise ads on sites I visit I’ve decided to add in some very inocuous Amazon books to the TimeSwappers homepages in order to see if we can develop some click-through revenue and hopefully have the domain pay for itself sometime down the line. If you’re mortally offended by this then by all means use Firefox and the AdBlock extension - I really don’t mind !

In the meantime we’ve also had great coverage from local activity groups in the area and are already heading up our pages on Google and Yahoo. Not too shabby for a couple of weeks online activity !!

Tomorrow evening I’ll be having a few drinks with colleagues and friends I’ve known and worked with over the last 4 years at my current employers. My wife was asking me how I was feeling about it given that I was basically a week away from leaving my job for good…I had to admit that i wasn’t sorry at all !
Shame…I left my last banking role with a fair degree of sadness not only because I enjoyed the work but I was saying goodbye to such a good team there. They worked hard…very very hard, but being as this was the 90’s in London we played damn hard too…all topped off by the fact that in each of our respective project teams we were left alone to get on with things, managed at the top of the food chain by one of the most idiosyncratic managers I’d ever worked with. Anyone reading this…think ‘Tin tin’ haircut, boyish face, hyoooge and a surreal taste in suits !
Well I’ll shortly be back working for him again so we’ll see if age and experience have mellowed him any - given my last run-in with him over a breakfast meeting a month back when he clasped my head to his ample midriff and rattled his knuckles over my scalp shouting ‘Scotty…ye wee Scottish f##ker!’ loudly enough to startle every diner in the room - so no…probably not.
Roll on the end of the month and my startdate…can’t wait to get stuck in !

I had a bit of a snort at this morning’s PVP when I checked in after my customary breakfast. I kind of understood the ‘throwing the goat’ reference, loved the urbane, diffidence from Butler but had to go look it up properly to check I was getting the connotation right…turns out I was ! Very funny !

How to “Throw the Goat
How NOT to “Throw the Goat”

Well it was funny to me at the time…and bizarrely while looking it all up I’ve come across a reference to Wil Wheaton of Star Trek TNG fame which I’m running down and reading up now.

I’ve been watching the frankly hysterical reporting that’s followed the recent discovery in London of the attempted car bombs and the Glasgow Airport Flaming ram raid with increasing levels of surprise and incredulity then I read this post on ElReg by a ex-bomb disposal Johnny…makes funny and grounding reading.

The world is NOT about to end…don’t be complacent but similarly don’t imagine you’re imminently going to be engulfed in some Jihad-ist conflagration. Sigh…just glad no-one was killed or badly injured by these mis-guided idiots.

I’ve been a fan of the word Bork for a long time now…in the context of the Swedish chef from the muppets crashing around singing ‘Bork, bork, bork’ at the top of his fuzzy little head while wildly brandishing a meat cleaver, to the use of the word to describe errant hardware, cocked-up software or release implementations that have gone awry.

However I’ve now found it’s successor…mborc. This stands for Matters Beyond Our Reasonable Control and while the etymology and usage isn’t exactly right I think it’s more a fitting usage of the language to describe when something has been ‘borked’.

I’m thinking i’ll use it something like ‘embarked’ but with the ‘o’ not the ‘a’…must rememebr to use in meeting from now on - see if it catched on. Heh heh.