...eventually...

Waider 1, Windows Networking zero.

I cannot say enough about how crappy the Windows Networking Model is. Especially when you read "hints and tips" which tell you flat out that "sometimes things disappear off the network for no good reason". And have an anonymous Microsoft engineer back them up on that. There are nice things about Windows Networking; I have yet to see as easily managed a security model (ha, yes, Microsoft and security, but no, really) with its trust relationships and domain control and the like, but the crap, especially the legacy crap that should have died in the fires of hell long ago, is just PAIN and AGONY and WRONG WRONG WRONG.

And now to bed.

slice of dreamlife

A big party, evidently celebrating Ireland's qualification for some soccer tournament or another. Some misguided folks are singing a song about Dion Dublin, who plays for an English Premiership team, and wouldn't qualify as an Irish international player. It's really crowded; there seem to be a lot of people from my college days here, including my brother and a bunch of his friends. At some point, I'm out on the dancefloor (dancefloor? are we in a nightclub?) talking to someone and I turn around to see a girl I have some interest in (exgrilf? protogrilf?) dancing with a guy I used work with. Lots of shocked looks, they disappear out the door, and her friends come over and make soothing noises and apologise. Apparently I had some connection between the song playing and the interesting girl, and everyone's shocked that guy would dance off with girl during song, if you follow. They're arguing over it now, and I'm trying to tell them that look, this is my problem, I have no claim to either the song or the girl, etc.

Then the alarm went off. Why I set it for 10:30 is beyond me.

Most of the above has parallels in reality, funnily enough, except the bit about the song having some special meaning. I had a song with special negative meaning for a while, but the circumstances which led to it are so convoluted that you'd think I was dreaming again. The guy I used work with went out with a girl in the office after she'd broken up with me. Ireland have qualified for several soccer tournaments, and I've been at several resulting parties - usually impromptu affairs in the pub where we all watched the crucial game. Oh, and one of the machines I was working on until 4am this morning is in the same city as the University I went to. I guess old mister brane got a bit stirred up.

d'you take sugar in that?

I just read possibly the funniest non-technical thing I've seen amidst jwz's writings, and it brought to mind the following conversation:

Ralph: how d'you take your coffee?
Waider: Black, no sugar. Student coffee.
Ralph: same way as JC's keyboard, then!
Waider: *much laughter*


See, I used share a room with JC in college, and JC had an Olivetti 286 that Ralph and I used occasionlly borrow for hacking on. Ar, we were poor, but we were HAPPY, etc. Anyway, we also had a toastie maker and a kettle in the room, because the last thing you want to do when you're hacking is go downstairs and do the whole food-and-drink routine. Oh, and no pissant 100g jars for us; we'd buy the 500g jars, being the nearest thing to industrial drums we could get while still getting coffee you'd actually want to drink. And one day, in an incident involving tricksy fingers, a good 250g of instant coffee powder found its way into the keyboard on the Olivetti.

Of course, we poured most of it back in the jar, but forever after the keyboard was a bit squidgy and smelled WONDERFUL.

East vs. West

I watched "Scrapheap Challenge" last night. Start of a new season, and the first task was to build a flinging device for an ostrich egg which would send it the furthest distance without breaking. Much to my disappointment, noone built a trebuchet. One crew built a mediæval slingshot, the other built a Heath Robinson device involving a 45-degree chute, a cable, a flywheel, and a motorbike. In the end, the slingshot won out, but only because the kludgey guys flubbed their last shot, which went a startling 1.5 meters. Throughout, the presenters gave fun - and occasionally scathing - commentary on the goings on, and it was an altogether entertaining programme.

This evening, I caught an episode of "Junkyard Wars", which is what SC becomes when it crosses the pond to the left of Ireland. Strangely enough, it was another challenge involving ostrich eggs; these guys had to build a rocket to get the egg up as far as possible and land it intact. The show was, on the whole, far more irritating for me to watch. Very little entertainment from the presenters, and lots of self-congratulation all around before anything had actually been done to test the devices. It's basically that cliché of "there are no winners and losers, it's important just to be there" which is frankly nonsense in a show like this. Really. If you don't win, you SUCK MIGHTILY and you should be told that in no uncertain terms by the presenters.

It's how we do things here in the Polite Continent.

You guys really need that show where you get to build a flash car of some description given three days, a workshop, and some quantity of money, at the end of which the losers have their three days of work summarily trashed before their eyes. And I mean LITERALLY, not FIGURATIVELY. Now that's soul-destroying stuff.

Whew. That's quite enough of that. I'm just killing time while this up2date finishes.