Haiku

cat purring on lap
I type with only one hand
she demands them both

Oscars

I was going to say something about the Oscars, but someone else said it for me.

Bad Habits to Lose

Note to Self: Being pedantic is not endearing.

Of course, large chunks of my brain are now trying to decide between "pedanticness" and "pedanticity"

Mmmm

Cor blimey, I taste like Tea. I am a subtle flavour, quiet and polite, gentle, almost ambient. My presence in crowds will often go unnoticed. Best not to spill me on your clothes though, I can leave a nasty stain. What Flavour Are You?

Joking about it

There's very, very few incidents I can think of where I didn't hear a joke about it remarkably shortly afterwards. Humour seems to be a natural defense mechanism to isolate ourselves emotionally from events that we really don't want to think about.

Both the Challenger Explosion and the Herald of Free Enterprise happened when I was in school, and there were jokes circulating the day after they happened. I heard Diana jokes within 24 hours of her death, and I've heard jokes told in Auschwitz by people who lost family there.

The only time I haven't heard jokes after a disaster was the Dunblane shootings, and that may be down to the fact that I live less than 10 miles away from there, and people I know knew people that lost family there.

Which is why I was glad to hear that jokes and slang are springing up for the WTC tragedy. Humour's definitely part of the healing process, and it's always good to hear of people's recovery.

Dynamic DNS rocks!

Due to the fab people at dyndns.org and my router (which not only does really simple port forwarding, but also knows about dyndns), my own machine is now available.

How cool is that?

The coolness of having your own Webserver

I use VFP a lot. It's a fantastic database, and I I use it occasionally to extract reports for some people in Kent who use it to keep track of neonatal care on a system I wrote, some years back.

I was getting some data off just now, and wanted to check I was pulling off the right info. I wanted to get the SQL output to them, (and was chatting to the person who wanted it over MSN), but couldn't think of a super easy way.

Until I remembered that VFP has a 'save as web page' option, that saves SQL output in a dead simple HTML table. So I saved it into the web directory, checked the URL worked, pasted it into MSN, and they were able to look at the data 3 seconds later.

This is fantastic. I can do RAD a lot easier if the people down there can check my results as I go along. Saves me pulling off tons of data only to find it's not quite right.