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Mar. 20th, 2010
I love the modern world
Mar. 20th, 2010 11:04 amMy laptop battery died - it was only keeping charge for about 15 minutes, but taking hours to charge up, which basically tied me to a wall socket. So I googled for a new laptop battery, found a bunch of sites offering them, picked one of the cheaper ones at random, and *bam* it turns up a week later, from _Singapore_.
I was chatting on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lebeautemps journal about sugar-free cooking, and kasku recommended Smuckers sugar-free products, as they use sucralose as their sweetener (unlike lots of diabetic things which use polyols or seem to think that fructose doesn't cause an insulin reaction). Smuckers don't sell through shops in the UK, but 5 minutes of googling found some of their sugar-free apricot preserve on ebay, with the result that I am having jam on toast for the first time in about 5 years.
A few months back, Warren Ellis posted about some comic he'd been influenced by back in the 80s. Long out of print, of course, and utterly uncollected. Thirty seconds on eBay, nevertheless, dug me up a copy belonging to someone in the USA, and 5 days later it arrived through my front door, so that I could could read it once and completely fail to be blown away by it.
I'm sure that to many of the privileged people of the modern world this doesn't feel amazing at all, and that they are currently nodding their heads and muttering "Why, yes, the motor car _is_ capable of travelling faster than a horse drawn carriage." but I still feel a vague sense of awe at how a bunch of loosely connected systems (manufacturing plants in the far east, comics collectors in America, jam importers in the south of England) can be joined up by the internet to bring useful and interesting things in through my door at the touch of a button.
I was chatting on
lebeautemps journal about sugar-free cooking, and kasku recommended Smuckers sugar-free products, as they use sucralose as their sweetener (unlike lots of diabetic things which use polyols or seem to think that fructose doesn't cause an insulin reaction). Smuckers don't sell through shops in the UK, but 5 minutes of googling found some of their sugar-free apricot preserve on ebay, with the result that I am having jam on toast for the first time in about 5 years.A few months back, Warren Ellis posted about some comic he'd been influenced by back in the 80s. Long out of print, of course, and utterly uncollected. Thirty seconds on eBay, nevertheless, dug me up a copy belonging to someone in the USA, and 5 days later it arrived through my front door, so that I could could read it once and completely fail to be blown away by it.
I'm sure that to many of the privileged people of the modern world this doesn't feel amazing at all, and that they are currently nodding their heads and muttering "Why, yes, the motor car _is_ capable of travelling faster than a horse drawn carriage." but I still feel a vague sense of awe at how a bunch of loosely connected systems (manufacturing plants in the far east, comics collectors in America, jam importers in the south of England) can be joined up by the internet to bring useful and interesting things in through my door at the touch of a button.
Last night, flying between two locations in WoW I passed over something odd that I didn't recognise - a luminous figure standing on a mountain top. I only saw it for about two seconds before I was past it, but on the way to our next quest Julie and I rode past those mountains, so we detoured, and Julie found a way up to the top.
Where we saw this:
The Orc body on the left turns out to be the beta character of Michel Koiter, one of the Blizzard illustrators who died while working on the project.
And then I read the comments on the entry on WoWHead for that site, and discovered this this memorial is one of several dotted over the world:
I found it very touching.
Where we saw this:
The Orc body on the left turns out to be the beta character of Michel Koiter, one of the Blizzard illustrators who died while working on the project.
And then I read the comments on the entry on WoWHead for that site, and discovered this this memorial is one of several dotted over the world:
I found it very touching.
Playing with code
Mar. 20th, 2010 02:21 pmGod, I wish we had the latest version of Visual Studio at work.
I spent the morning playing with C# code after reading this article on brevity in code.
Trying to find something that I preferred over the Ruby code that did this:
and eventuall ending up with:
The main thing that would be nice would be a simple sort keyword that could be used if only one variable was being operated on, and likewise not needing a select if there's only one item being dealt with.
I spent the morning playing with C# code after reading this article on brevity in code.
Trying to find something that I preferred over the Ruby code that did this:
“”.methods.sort.grep /index/i
and eventuall ending up with:
from methodName in "".MethodNames()
where methodName.Grep("index",RegexOptions.IgnoreCase)
orderby methodName select methodName;The main thing that would be nice would be a simple sort keyword that could be used if only one variable was being operated on, and likewise not needing a select if there's only one item being dealt with.