Tuesday 30 November 2010

Ponies Of The Apocalypse


Ponies Of The Apocalypse by ~carny87 on deviantART

Thursday 25 November 2010

Move Window & SendTo Menu

I'm not sure why but I'm forever finding Windows just at the edge of the screen so I can't see what's on them... a quick Google always find a solution but in the interests of not making Google my brain I've decided to write down here the solution:,/p>

  1. Hold down the ALT key.
  2. Press SPACEBAR.
  3. Press M (Move).
  4. A 4-headed arrow will appear. When it does, use your arrow keys to move the outline of the window.
  5. When you are happy with its position, press ENTER.

Another thing I keep having to Google is the location of the SendTo Menu, so here it is:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

Nuff said about this!

The other thing I need to remind myself is the SendTo.

It's relatively easy to get a Visual Studio Installer to create a shortcut within the SendTo menu directory (see above), if a little convoluted but to get that shortcut to show is less easy... in fact it's a bit of a killer! Which is where Orca comes in handy (Orca - The Killer Whale... geddit?).

Open the msi, select the Property table and add another row with a Property of DISABLEADVTSHORTCUTS and a Value of 1. Save and exit and the next time the installer runs then the shortcut will appear in the right-click context menu.

Tuesday 23 November 2010

20/10/2010

My weekend watching:

Skyline: brilliant special effects but a story with more holes than my Dad's vest and characters you can't care about. If you've watched Independence Day, The Matrix and Cloverfield you've seen it already!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1: Miserable as sin but not as much fun! Felt like an obvious lead-up to the last film. A filler like The Empire Strikes Back was a filler - can't be blamed for that though - Part 2 wouldn't be as cool as it's promising to be without it. Life is a narrative and sometimes the middle act needs to be a bit boring and mundane.

Predators and The Tournament on DVD, both marvellous in their own way. Predators was a astoundingly well-made homage to all the previous films and managed to make me forget all the other, less-well-made sequels to the original film. Whereas The Tournament was a non-stop, action-filled exercise in gorgeous sillyness! Excellent and worth a watch!

Thursday 18 November 2010

Devilishly good!

Got this for an early Xmas present and used it yesterday with #3 son. We only had cheese and veggie ham with some veggie worcester sauce (what’s going on with the spelling there, I thought it was Worcestershire – it is!) or cheese and prosciutto with some baked beans and coleslaw - but it was lovely. One of the things I miss about living on dry-land is the lack of mains electricity, no Microwaves, toasters or sandwich toasters (or TVs for that matter) but this makes it all okay as I can still have toasted sandwiches! Yay!

It comes with a leaflet full of recipe ideas but I can’t bring myself to do the sweet recipes… toasted sandwiches should be savoury and not sweet! As should, thinking about it, French toast – though Wikipedia doesn’t agree. I find there is little better in life that French toast covered in Ketchup or Brown Sauce. I’ve a theory about the age of children and their taste in French toast condiments: when they’re young they invariably choose Ketchup but you can chart their maturity by the propensity to opt for HP. I’d be interested in your opinion of this theory as I’ve a limited dataset with which to work.

Also finished Doctor Who: Evacuation Earth yesterday. A lot like the Professor Layton DS games but with somewhat easier puzzles, which is why it only took me a couple of days to complete it. Didn’t like the Sliding Puzzles though managed them, more than likely due to brute force attacks rather than any strategy.

Wednesday 17 November 2010

Not Kitkat

Pub quiz score = 30/60... valdy poor!

Knew I'd seen this advert just not where... knew it was advertising something long, sticky (as in stick like) and brown and thought it was Kitkat or Pepperoni... forgot about the chocolate fingers!

Arse!

Sunday 14 November 2010

Web Designers vs. Web Developers (Infographic)


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Wednesday 10 November 2010

Windows 7 hosts file

So Windows 7 uses the hosts file like nigh on every other OS and, thanks to lots and lots of messing around with servers, my hosts file was messed up. All I wanted to do was set up localhost to point to 127.0.0.1!

I use Boxer but every time I edited the file and tried to save it it wouldn't let me, telling me that Access was denied!

I guessed that this was down to not running Boxer as an administrator so instead of using the nice shortcut I usually use to launch Boxer I found it in the Start menu and right-clicked it as chose "Run as administrator", this let me save properly and now localhost points to the IP address 127.0.0.1! Yay!

Monday 8 November 2010

Brain not working

I'm not sure why it is but my brain has crashed today. It could be the weather (which is dull and wet), or the odd Camelot liqueur that my Ma brought me back from Ibitha. Whatever it is, my brain's just not working! Woke at 7:30 after going to bed at 21:30 last night and I'm still tired! That after getting up at 10:00 yesterday morning!

Shame really as WordPress is defeating me - or should that be that my previous hacking of wordpress is defeating me when I'm trying to rationalise a theme I'm working on - ohh woe is me!

Did hear something interesting over the weekend though... someone said, "put a backslash on that". How cool!

Saturday 6 November 2010

Luke’s Parrot

Professor Layton and the Unwound Future has some cool Parrot mini-games. After getting stuck I did some research and found these images (Thank you Isenet via this post):

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Tuesday 2 November 2010

Disposable Panda

// The instance field Name pertains to an instance of a particular Panda,
// whereas Population pertains to the set of all Pandas:

public class Panda : IDisposable{
  public string Name;                     // Instance field
  public static int Population;           // Static field
  public Panda (string n){                // Constructor
    Name = n;                             // Assign the instance field
    Population = Population + 1;          // Increment the static Population field
  }
  void IDisposable.Dispose(){
    Population = Population - 1;          // Decrement the static Population field
  }
}

static void Main(){
  Panda p1 = new Panda ("Pan Dee");
  Console.WriteLine (p1.Name);            // Pan Dee
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 1
  using(Panda p2 = new Panda ("Pan Dah")){
    Console.WriteLine (p2.Name);          // Pan Dah
    Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population); // 2
  }
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 1
  Panda p3 = new Panda ("Zi Chi");
  Console.WriteLine (p3.Name);            // Zi Chi
  Console.WriteLine (Panda.Population);   // 2
}

I'm working through the examples in C# 4.0 in a Nutshell, Fourth Edition and I got to thinking about how to erase an instance of a class... using seemed to be the way to go so I implemented the IDisposable Interface and now I've got disposable Pandas!

Appraisal

Now after years of working in the NHS the idea of an appraisal fills me with dread. I worked nights, you see, and no one could be arsed to appraise the night staff. Every so often some nice, well-meaning, newly-appointed and probably almost terminally-naive DCN would suggest checking how I was getting on.

What with my great hatred of getting there earlier than I needed to (except, of course, to give me enough time to make a coffee and have a fag before hand-over) - and their soon-waning desire to stop later than they absolutely needed to in order to listen to my rants - I very rarely left work in the morning with a new set of aims and objectives.

Cool ehh?

That is/was the case anyway… except when something had gone pear-shaped… then I was bombarded by enquiries about how I felt about the job (hated it), how I felt I was getting on (hadn't killed anyone, so not so bad) and, every-so-often, what I wanted out of the future (NASA has unfortunately stopped taking applications from balding, fat Yorkshire men who drink like fish and smoke like chimneys so I'll be waiting until the aliens come before I can visit space shall I? (I did say about the ranting above)).

All very usual really… but now I'm in a job I enjoy and the idea of an appraisal fills me with dread for a different reason… what if they ask me how I feel about the job (love it), how I fell I’m getting on (flashes of pure genius and then long periods of slog (everyone who's worked with me will know how much I swear at the computer and then, every-so-often, how I wake up from introspection and declare myself the GREATEST!)) and what I want from the future (more of the same but with shorter periods of slog and more flashes of genius - ohh, and the raise in retirement age isn't a problem as I'd happily do this forever)?

What if they say they need to speak to me because, horror of horrors, something I’ve done has gone pear-shaped (surely not, I now check everything I do in IE6 as a matter of course)?

But it was all actually very civilised, they did just want to know what I’d enjoyed, what I’d not enjoyed. What they could do to make things better and all that sort of stuff… I left feeling as though something had been accomplished rather than as if someone had had an awful thought in the middle of the night and realised that the night staff hadn’t been appraised for the last five years… and what would the Care Quality Commission think of that?

I’m not sure how long my dread of appraisals will last though, I think it’s going to take a fair few in order to get over my phobia of them and for me to appreciate that they don’t just happen because someone's got a bee in their bonnet or because something’s gone wrong.

We’ll see.