Posts by Alistair Dabbs 1308 publicly visible posts • joined 19 May 2009
>> You seem to be making fun of a Chinaman. That is not cool dude.
I believe that's what the problem was. I hadn't intended to make fun of the scammers for having Chinese ethnicity. For all I know it could be Russians claiming to be Chinese. BTW I thought "Chinaman" was an outmoded term with Empire-drenched connotations, so I avoid using it. Maybe I am mistaken about this too.
So-called gaelic spellings = affectation. I have no problem with that but recognise it for what it is: play-acting at being ethnic. It's no different than spelling your name in emoji. As for pronunciation, who cares? If Americans say Stooart, all the better! My in-laws address me as Aleess-tear. I pronounce my own name as Allister.
All spellings of Alistair are gaelic: the name is gaelic for Alexander. Hence my Starbucks name is now Alex, which every barista can spell flawlessly. It still amazes me that Aleister Crowley chose the name deliberately to create an air of mystique. His first name was Edward.
I tried the Starbucks order-ahead facility once. I duly chose a drink, picked a cafe from their location list, and ordered. When I arrived later that morning, the cafe was shut. It took another few days and lots of emails to get my money back. Never again.
We experienced almost the opposite in Andorra once. Shop assistants kept turning their noses up whenever Mme D spoke to them in French, so she tried Spanish, and even Catalan, to no avail. It was only when I spoke up in English that they fell over themselves to serve us. They must assume all French and Spaniards are local cheapskates on a weekend outing but someone speaking in English must be a tourist with cash to spend.
We were talking about this at a meeting yesterday. While any old robot can flip a burger, the whole process of cooking meals from start to finish is quite involved, especially in a restaurant - grabbing the right ingredients at the right time, topping up and adjusting quantities as required, tasting and re-seasoning, etc - and it looks as if it will be a long time yet before a robot can do this as efficiently as a human. I mean, you could spend a few billion on an AI to get it right eventually, but cooks do it cheaper, faster and they can do it now. No wonder so many millennials have opened cafes and restaurants.
OK, you all seem like experts on the matter. Lots of modern loos have various combinations of small and big push-buttons to release the ballcock. In some, small button = small flush. In others, small button also depresses the big button = big flush. Perhaps I need an instruction manual after all...
The deputy head at my school once had to contend with an unknown pupil who'd been crapping on the toilet seats, either deliberately or through some illness, disability or whatever - we never found out who was doing it. Anyway, the deputy head made a half-decent joke while giving the mystery culprit a warning at the end of morning assembly: "When making a deposit at the bank, don't leave change on the counter."
"If you are thinking about booking a Briefing & Assessment day as part of an aspiration to join the Brigade, we are sorry to say that the Brigade is not in a position to assess new civilian candidates until early 2019. This is due to the high volume of applications received and which are currently already being processed."
They don't sound like they're stuggling to recruit.
Bosses at the end of the 1990s would announce that we would be doing everything in future "with XML" and hire a twat on £1200 per day to ponce about analysing the business. Two months later, they would vanish leaving behind a half-written DTD and an irrelevant project statement. The boss would then tell you to finish it off without training or assistance, the budget having been used up.
Funny you should mention Baird but I wrote about him with respect to another IEEE Milestone bronze plaque last year: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/30/john_logie_baird_bronze_plaque/
We actually communicate with each other verbally[0], imagine that!
So when you need to meet up after heading your separate ways for shopping, you each stand in the middle of the street YELLING YOUR HEAD OFF OVER AND OVER AGAIN in the hope that one of you hears the other across town?
We now diligently believe the official telegraph. Or should we call it the Torygraph?
It's easier to pretend otherwise but people tend not to believe everything they read, even in their favourite newspapers. They choose what they want to believe. Sun readers laugh at the silly stories in that paper but don't necessarily believe them all to be true.
You may remember when the Daily Mail ran a spread about the Marxist historian father of (then) Labour Party leader Ed Miliband with the headline "The man who hated Britain". It turned out that dedicated right-wing DM readers didn't agree with the story or approve of its logic, and they wrote in droves to the paper to object. No apology was given but the disgruntled editor was forced to back down and his plans to use story as a platform for continued character assassination of the Miliband clan simply evaporated.
A note to pedants. I am aware that the Antikythera Mechanism artefacts were recovered in 1901, not 1900 as stated in my column. I typed 1901. The irony of cyberpixies from the gremlinic dimension turning the clock back by one year in an article that's actually about a clock isn't lost on me.
Last night I was chatting with the karate instructor at my local gym. Now retired, he entertained me with stories of his working days installing network cabling along the Channel Tunnel, among other places. But "network" could mean anything back then. Even in an office, you had to choose from Token Ring, Netware, etc. He described to me some pretty beefy cables with massive dual connectors costing £7 each ... which he duly quoted on and had accepted before finding a supplier in Germany who could sell (the required) hundreds of them to him directly for £4 a pop. These were 1980s prices.
Our chief sub raised this matter with me and we discussed it at length. She suspected that I might be deliberately provoking pedants to add comments on these lines, and she considered adding a footnote to explain that Woman Flu is not a real ailment recognised by the medical profession but a joke name used in this column because it sounds funnier than "ear-ache".
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