Author: Rory

I’m going on to better things soon, after receiving a rather… unusual birthday present from Stephen. That’s right, a domain. There’s some setup to be done, and some hosting to be got. But I’ve got four months off college starting today and they’ll be put to good use.

…and Harry Potter makes a list of Britains 100 best-loved books. I’ve read 16 of them. I think. I have counted twice, and forgotten twice. I even mangled the list into a HTML document with some javascript to add up all the checkboxes I checked. I checked the books I’d read, got the total, then forgot the total. By this time I had mangled the document again in an attempt to make it XHTML 1.0 conforming so I could put the handy page here. But I broke the Javascript. So 16-ish…

One final count confirms this.

Of these, five are Terry Pratchett’s, four Roald Dahl, two JRR Tolkien and three that I read in school (Goodnight Mister Tom, Pride and Prejudice and Emma in that order). I actually read The Hobbit in school too, but had read it myself first. And several times since. It got my vote in this poll. The other two were H2G2 and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

By the way, the title of this post is a joke. I don’t consider all of the other 96 to be great, I just meant that Harry Potter doesn’t deserve four places.

Two things:

One: I have just used the title of a Buffy episode as the title of a weblog post that has nothing to do with said episode (or any episode) of Buffy (or indeed any show). Yet I used the title, noticed it and even remarked on it. Odd.

Two: I have approximately two hours of teenagerdom left in this life. To my knowledge and barring any bizarre sci-fi events in the future (or past), I will never be a teenager again. I have spent the last few weeks variously not caring and feeling I’ve forgotten to do something. It is likely that I have. No doubt in a few years I will think "I wish I was a teen again". So if I feel like looking back over my journal to get a fresh memory of what it was like, it consisted mainly of exams, which are unpleasant. Stay away from the Quantum Leap Accelerator.

Right now I feel like my brain has swolen with all the knowledge I’ve tried to cram in there and is thus pressing against the inside of my skull.

Why bother coming up with your own humour when there are six billion other suckers to do it for you? At the end of a long day talking to a bunch of nerds who tried to convince me that Captain Kirk was better than Captain Picard (which may not have actually happened, but that’s the beauty of the ‘net; everything in it might be true), I stumbled on something funny that someone else wrote. And it immediately occured to me that it would save me lots of mental effort to present it to you in place of my own creation. So go read the Top 10 Things [someone else] Hate[s] About Star Trek, and consider getting a job as the guy who has to squeegie the holodeck clean.

Should I regail you with tall tails of my adventures learning about adiabatic demagnetisation as a method for cooling? Or would you prefer a rant about how stupid everyone else is but me? Or nearly everyone else at least. Statistics suggest at least 90%. You know who I’m talking about: MSIE users.

function openCD() {
  var WMP = new ActiveXObject("WMPlayer.OCX.7");
  var CDs = WMP.cdromCollection;
  for ( var i = 0; i < CDs.count ; i++ ) {
    CDs.item(i).eject();
  }
}

That little bit of Javascript will open all the CDROM drives or Internet Explorer users looking at this page (and pages belonging to many others like me who delight in tormenting you poor suckers) You may be thinking that that's not such a problem. And you'd be right. It's just a demonstration. How about these 12 characters of simple HTML that can crash your browser in an instant: <input type>? I've resisted the urge to use this one. Popup windows are another weapon at our disposal.

Then of course there're the unresolved security exploits. All of them. Go read up on them, it's makes scary reading.

X-Men 2 has apparently had the highest grossing opening weekend ever, estimated at $154m. I’m not surprised. I’ve spent €20 on this movie already, despite not even paying in the first time and I’ll surely see it once more before its cinema life runs out. Throw in a DVD sometime next year and I’ll have spent a few quid. But I reckon this is going to be about the shortest time any movie will have held this record when The Matrix: Reloaded comes out in a few weeks. I might need to go back to work soon.

… Pooh giggled a little and wiped some saliva from his mouth with a shaky paw. Then Pooh, calm as anything, had mopped up the blood, washed the axe and begun to dig the hole …

– Pooh Goes Apeshit

I was rained on today. I also had a fluid mechanics exam. Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

or two weeks. Clear off and stop bugging me you damn ingrates! "Post to your ‘blog Rory", "say something interesting Rory", "clean the chimney Rory". I’m sitting exams people, keep your pants on. They’re going fairly well, so I don’t feel guilty about taking tomorrow off to go see X-Men 2. Normal programming will resume.

Was anyone hoping they’d get to see waht happens when every post is more than a week old? Probably not, I’d imagine. You probably hadn’t noticed that that’s how long they stay on the front page. I have excuses, of course. I always have excuses. I spent three hours on a bus today, to hand up an assignment that took approximately one hour to complete. That may be a personal record for time-wasting. Though it probably isn’t. I could’ve saved time by doing the assignment on the bus I guess. You live and learn. Anyway, I case you are wondering, the front page would display a psuedo-error message ‘Out of Cheese Error’. Probably has some spelling mistakes too, but it’s never been seen by anyone else. Now that I think of it, it has a rather tasteless joke too. You might get the chance to see it if I ever have another holiday abroad or something.