Archive for October 2005
A little too late... - 2005-10-04 20:13:47
Following is a partial list of new words and their definitions being entered into this year's edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
...
Metadata (noun): data that provide information about other data.
The Metadata® Company can't be happy about that.
My thesis work involved lots of metadata stuff, you have no idea how tedious it was checking to make sure that you spelt metadata wrong just in case a lawyer was having a bad day...
Off by one - 2005-10-14 10:09:23
The elevator in building has been behaving strangely recently. It's controller was clearly implemented by a first year programming monkey.
We are on floor 3 of a 5 floor building.
You leave our apartment and pushing the down button outside the elevator in order to get the elevator down to the ground floor (walking down the stairs with the pram just isn't fun) and nothing seems to happen. Though you do hear the normal elevator noises.
Actually something does happen, the elevator goes to the fourth floor and opens there. So you run up the stairs and doors close just before you get there. Pressing the button on the fourth floor to get the doors to open again causes more elevator sounds and for the elevator to open on the fifth floor.
As you might guess when inside the elevator pressing 2 usually gets you to floor 3. I haven't yet tried calling the elevator at floor 2 to see if that gets it to open at floor 3.
The UPS man bringing his large trolley of packages didn't like this much. He got dumped on the fourth floor trying to bring my above average weight package to me, and then had to navigate his trolley down the stairs.
I just want a coffee... - 2005-10-16 16:45:21
So far in this coffee-forsaken land I've managed to have two different coffee places tell me "The espresso machine is broken". Something that happened to me a total of 0 times in a decade in Sydey.
And then to top it off a couple of days ago I was informed "I'm sorry we don't have any skim or full milk left, is soy milk OK?". I gave the wrong answer and had the most disgusting cup of what they still bravely called coffee you could possibly imagine.
This was at 4pm on Friday afternoon... how you manage to run out of milk and not go and get some more is simply beyond my imagination.