SlashNot

May the tongues swell up, the skin blister and the bones snap of the lowlife / lowlives who smashed the car window, costing me £75 and netting themselves £0.

Vindictive? Moi??

I can now see out of the front room windows, across the garden and onto the road.
There are no longer 15' high trees growing out between the paving slabs, though there are a couple of stumps that are pretty good trip hazards.
The rose "bush" that was half blocking the pavement is now mostly cut down.
Much of the berberis that was running riot is now under control.
We will be able to park the car in the drive and open the doors fully without being spiked by the roses on both sides.
The path round the side of the house is broadly accessible, though there's still a rosemary branch and a fuchsia over it (at this stage, it would kill both to move or trim them).
The debris from most of this is in a skip on the drive. A *very full* skip on the drive.
I ache.

Hopefully the glaziers who are fitting the double glazing tomorrow will now be able to fit it without being savaged to death by my garden.

ihobo has now released the player satisfaction model I mentioned some months back. They're now looking for people to complete the survey. If you play (video)games, please take 5-10 mins to complete the survey.

Me? I'm a seeker-socialiser, apparently.

There's a post over at International Hobo's blog asking for responses. Normally I don't re-post requests for survey participants, but I've known Chris for a long while, respect his research techniques and suspect I know where he's going with this.

If you ever enjoy feeling fear/terror, please head over there and comment. Please do not comment here.

Happy birthday bytepilot. Not that you read this :-).

This is the fastest way I know of getting opinions from the tech people I know :-).

Anyone used a Kindle? We're thinking of getting a couple, and I could do with a chat to someone to see whether they *actually* do what we want.

[Gordonbrown] yells: LFM economy heroic need banks and dealers

(Apologies to the non-Warcrafters out there, for whom this will make no sense whatsoever)

Idea courtesy of e_lizard_beth - thanks love!

You may have seen the recent damage to a wind turbine (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/lincolnshire/7817378.stm). In an interview, the founder reckons that something the size and weight of a dead cow could have done the damage.

We reckon it's http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YV0LGMGuLN0 - was bytepilot testing his new trebuchet at the time?

I was roused at 05:30 by the sound of cats yowling. Got out of bed, across the landing, down the stairs, chased out the foreign cat, gave our three a snack each, up the stairs, across the land... and put my foot straight into some particularly gooey, cold cat shit in the middle of the landing.

Eww.

Oh well, as I was then *very* awake I thought I might as well clean it up and try to work out which one has the squitters. No point e_lizard_beth blundering into it as well.

[Bekkie - not sure this beats your recent days, but I think it gives you a run for your money]

Humorous sign of the day. "Yorkshire College. Enrol now in our English Language courses."

I can just imagine it. Peter Sallis in front of a class saying "Aye, lad, we'll teach tha t'speak English reet well."

As I've posted before, I believe that Remembrance Day is a time to remember war. *All* war. Yes, by all means remember the "fallen heroes" - but remember that the other side had their "heroes" as well, even if you would regard them as villains. And remember *all* the dead. The shell-shocked conscripts who were shot by their own superiors for cowardice when they refused to go over the top. The conscientious objectors staffing the ambulances that got shelled. The civilians who get caught in the cross-fire in all wars. And the deaths that are happening now - which Illiad says far better than I ever could.

... Natural Born Killers leaning against a wall, with the caption "Natural Born Pillars."

The regular reader* may have noticed a stony silence from here for some months. I was waiting to see whether the latest set of utterly crap decisions from LiveJournal Inc. meant that I wanted to get my content off here as fast as possible - it's not easy to export.

As it is, it *looks* like LJ are back to being more inclusive in their decision-making (the product manager who announced the poor decisions left "for personal reasons" within a week of the user backlash hitting), and it *looks* like they're continuing to supply Basic accounts - for now. I'm back - for now.

* I must have one somewhere...

How the other half lives... on my way home today, I passed a gentleman touching up the white paint on his rendered walls. With Tipp-Ex - the whole tiny bottle, tiny brush thing.

Er... what?

Why oh why, when I saw this, did I think "Ozzard*, Wailo** and Moofoo*** after a particularly successful tanking run"? Too much Warcrack, mayhap?

* My feral druid on Kilrogg/EU
** Ntrophi's feral druid on Kilrogg/EU
*** Belin's feral druid on Kilrogg/EU

(gasp) (splutter) Must remember to (pant) use less Hot Chilli (wheeze) Powder...

One of the best photos for a caption competition I've seen in some time.

http://dodgyjon.livejournal.com/6127.html

I hope it's better than 2007. I don't think I can take another 2007.

... you're leaning over the innards of one machine* to hear a reasonably loud triple bang from the office. You go in, and smell Magic Smoke.

On investigation, you find that a cat** has pissed on one of the many 6-way multiplugs at ground level. Clearly cat urine is sufficiently conductive to cause short circuits.

Luckily*** it only took down the ADSL router, the uplighter and the already non-functional wireless hub.

Bah.

* My brother's Christmas present. Until this morning, it wouldn't recognise the CPU. Now, after a BIOS upgrade, it won't start Windows off the CD. Joy.

** No, we don't know which one. It's at times like this that I know just how frustrated the police are when a driver gets off a speeding ticket with the we-don't-know-who-was-at-the-wheel defence.

*** For some value of "luckily".

You know that the day is not going to get better when there's this sudden silence instead of the low rumble from the watercooling pump that there's been for the last several years... then there's a beep... then your desktop box shuts down.

Luckily I already have the parts for a rebuild.