Election Day

Fingers crossed, everyone.

Say cheese!

The context: Kevin was readying a document he needed to send to someone, so that they could Do Things with it

<caomhin>

okay, I have Word 97/2000/XP, UNIX text, Windows text, RTF, HTML and OOo

<caomhin>

any other formats you think I should prepare for them? :-)

<Cathy>

no PDF? :-)

<caomhin>

well they wouldn't be able to paste that in see :-)

* caomhin is smurt

<Cathy>

you can still select text from a PDF :-)

<caomhin>

really? Okay :-)

<Cathy>

you just have to be in text select mode :-)

<caomhin>

and PDF :-)

* Cathy is smurter

* caomhin can't be bothered configuring postscript :-)

<caomhin>

or EPS

<Cathy>

no XML either :-)

<caomhin>

:-p

<caomhin>

I could do a Perl script to print it out :-)

<caomhin>

geek! :-)

* Cathy is tempted to blog this ;-)

You know, I was planning on commenting on the ever-so-slight geekiness displayed here. But instead it's striking me that we use way too many smilies when we chat :-)

Things wot have happened

• A couple of weeks ago I bought some thin-cut steak from Tesco, only to find when I got it home that the overlapping bits, in sharp contrast to the bright red meat surrounding them, were a kind of brown/green colour. With six or seven days left on the best-before date, we scooted back to Tesco, had an apology and a replacement from Customer Services.

  Guess what I found to be the case when I got the second lot home.

  Upon returning this second lot of raw steak that was going green, I was firmly told they could only refund this time, not replace it since "there's actually nothing wrong with the meat" — apparently it's due to how the steaks lie on each other, and where the meat sweats a little. And it seems I'd find that "any other shop would have exactly the same". Riiiight.

• The Java program I'm working on at the moment (second coursework) only has very simple things to do at the moment, and is instead being completely stupid and not doing what I'm telling it to. And it's too late and I'm too frazzled to go through with a fine-toothed comb to find the problem — due to a very bad day (including internet dying every few minutes this evening) on top of a horribly hectic week — so at the moment it's all the robot's fault that it can't find its way through a maze. Nothing to do with me.

  Update: When I looked the next day I found in about 10 seconds that the problem was an erroneous "less than" instead of "less than or equals" in my for loop. Bah. Stupid late-night coding.

• Last week I made Kevin's weekend by taking him to our student cinema (well, lecture-theatre-come-cinema) to see WarGames in 70mm print. I think his joy lit up the lecture theatre :-) For my part, it was much better than I thought it would be since Kevin's explanation as to why it's a classic ran something like: "Along with Tron it was about the only computer movie of the 1980s!" So... it's a classic because it existed?

  On the plus side though (from Kevin's point of view) I'm now less scared about being subjected to Tron.

• Yes, it snowed. It seems a lot of the rest of northern Europe did too :-)

• I am duty-bound to reveal that my brother has started blogging. I think the correct welcome is, as Clair put it: "Mwahahaha".