Well, it appears that The Mill was right on target. Well, sort of. On 29th October, 2005 (Do we hear wedding bells?), we reported that Paul and Will were head to head in the race for matrimonial bliss. Recently this head to head race has progressed a little with Paul announcing his proposal to Trish privately with me on Friday. This was followed up by a public announcement on his blog.
Whilst full details of the engagement are yet to emerge, such as when, where and how, Paul’s recent trip to Singapore most likely suggests that he may have indeed taken the advice of The Mill’s article on 2nd November, 2005 (When To Propose) regarding when to propose. Reports suggest that an actual ring still needs to be purchased and that a fancier proposal needs to take place. Please post your proposal suggestions.
With an estimated two years until the actual wedding (which suggests that it isn’t a shotgun wedding), Will may find the necessary time to play catch up. In the meantime, preparation has already begun for Paul’s bachelor party (which will likely resemble a LAN party with strippers).
I’ve started thinking today about programming a new version of the good ol’ fortune program. Not so much because it doesn’t do its job, but I think that a plain text backend has certain limitations.
I will be releasing the source code once I have it at least partially working (that is, not feature complete, but roughly working).
Features I’m looking at are:
- SQLite Backend*
- Ability to tag individual fortunes (so one fortune can belong to many categories and more advanced filtering could be performed)*
- Ability to import old fortune files (pretty much a necessity)*
- Addition of individual fortunes from the command line.
- Mimic all the basic fortune functionality.*
- New XML import and export standards.
- Global and user-overriding fortune preferences.
Only the features with the *’s will be included in the first release.
I’ll be writing it in Python. Feel free to leave some comments as to what sort of features you’d like to see in a modern fortune application. In the future, additional database support may be provided.
While searching for how I could get Windows to work with my Dvorak Keyboard (not hard-wired, just re-arranged keys) I came across this most unusual resolution to a problem in Windows 2000. (KB223056). It’s resolution was (when setup doesn’t recognise your Dvorak keyboard):
To work around this problem, press keys until you find the appropriate key that maps to the standard US-101 layout for that key.
Yeop, that’s what I want to be doing, pressing random keys when installing Windows.
Ok, so I’ve been thinking a bit about people’s actions in public toilets recently. This was partially spurred on by a post on the Dilbert Blog (Hi Jean). Over the last couple of months I have seen a number of public toilet actions that I found to be unacceptable.
- I have overheard two mobile telephone conversations (neither was in english, but both were quite loud and from inside the cubicle. I would hate to be the person on the other end of that phone call.
- I have seen countless people use a cubicle without closing the door. (Number 1, not Number 2). Now whilst I’m all fine with the notion of urinals, I believe that an open cubicle door screams out vacant. Before you know it you are about to walk into a small confined space with a man holding his penis. Now, that is a situation you don’t want to be in.
Fortunately only one person has broken the “don’t speak to anyone when they are in the bathroom” rule (perhaps this should be made a commandment). This rule is important because typically one would rather feel invisible in a bathroom.
In this light, I am going to finally change the poll (since it is clear that Will will wed Michael D. Cameron (or Alison if MDC turns him down)) to discuss first whether you would be inclined to leave the cubicle door open or closed and later to see how far you would go with your mobile phone.