test please delete

[BrilloPad]

Evening denizens

I've been shopping

My Windows laptop is now charging for the first time in a couple of years, due to a replacement power adapter from Maplin Electronics, and my MacBook is soon going to have a nice new 250 Gig hard drive

A little leaving present to yourself?

BTW - did they get you a card?

[zeitghost]

I wont ask about your mother then...

Very wise

It only causes unpleasantness.

Turtles are off limits too.

[zeitghost]

Grey in the Midlands, but the rain seems to have stopped

Evening all

[zeitghost]

Byeeee

[NickFitz]

A little leaving present to yourself?

BTW - did they get you a card?

Yup - I figured I deserved to treat myself.

Whether or not spending £130 on Amazon, £120 on two pairs of casual trousers and a shirt, £100+ on hardware bits at Maplin and £100+ at PC World is an adequate level of treating remains to be seen - there's a few other bits and bobs I'd like to get hold of, but I'll be spending nearly a grand on hotels and such going to conferences next week, so maybe further treating ought to wait until the final invoice has been settled

No card, but a few nice emails

One chap said that it had been "an honour working in the same department" as me

A few of the chaps I worked most closely with, including the boss, came down the pub for a couple of hours as well

[NickFitz]

Byeeee

[NickFitz]

Evening

Found some stuff I hadn't listened to in quite a while in the iTunes library on the Windows laptop

[NickFitz]

Boo!

Sorry... couldn't resist startling thee, the denizens, with that

[NickFitz]

Techy post alert

One for Scourer

Techy post coming up...

...although it's to do with a technology that's thousands of years old, rather than all this modern Turing machine gubbins

The FMB bar is quite unusual in that it makes its money predominantly by selling intricately contrived cocktails, yet also sells real ale - and when it first started doing so a year or two ago, and the staff proved unequal to the task of managing the cellar in the necessary way, they sent the relevant staff on a real ale cellar management course

The result is that the relevant staff members could easily run a pub with a dozen real ales on, but still spend most of their time mixing cocktails

Anyway, tonight I went in there and from the first taste of my pint I knew that, although the pint was drinkable, it was the last pint they were going to get out of that particular cask.

I won't bother you with all the intricacies of how cask conditioned ale works, and I implore you not to read the Wikipedia page on the subject, which is the most utterly factually incorrect page I've ever seen on Wikipedia (seriously, it's all copied from some chap's blog and the chap in question clearly knows nothing about the subject, but has fabricated an intellectual edifice around the matter which does not, at any point whatsoever, relate in even the remotest fashion to the truth... it's like somebody saying "SQL is a dialect of FORTRAN that uses a notation originally developed for specifying knitting patterns"... but wronger )

So, harking back to the fact that my pint was going to be the last one coming from that cask, I mentioned it to one of the students who work there - I believe I said something along the lines of "You should let whoever's looking after the cellar tonight know that it needs changing, so they can do it when it's convenient, rather than when there's a rush at the bar."

He did so, and I saw this evening's cellarman turn and glance at my pint (which was clear, but tasted of cardboard, which is why I knew it was the end of the cask), and dismiss me as a fearmonger

About ten minutes later an acquaintance of mine turned up and bought me a pint... and the cask ran out just as they were getting busy

When I finally got my pint I made a point of asking "Had it gone, or did it just need tilting?" (As the level in the cask drops it needs to be tilted to keep the ale fully covering the outlet leading through the line to the tap; in my day we did this by carefully tilting the cask and placing a chock under the back of it once it got to about 60%-70% empty, although I know that the FMB bar have those thingies that do all that automatically by judicious use of springs and the law of gravity.)

He said "No, it had gone..." <long pause> "... you were right "



Maybe next time he'll take my advice

[BrilloPad]

One for Scourer

Techy post coming up...

...although it's to do with a technology that's thousands of years old, rather than all this modern Turing machine gubbins

The FMB bar is quite unusual in that it makes its money predominantly by selling intricately contrived cocktails, yet also sells real ale - and when it first started doing so a year or two ago, and the staff proved unequal to the task of managing the cellar in the necessary way, they sent the relevant staff on a real ale cellar management course

The result is that the relevant staff members could easily run a pub with a dozen real ales on, but still spend most of their time mixing cocktails

Anyway, tonight I went in there and from the first taste of my pint I knew that, although the pint was drinkable, it was the last pint they were going to get out of that particular cask.

I won't bother you with all the intricacies of how cask conditioned ale works, and I implore you not to read the Wikipedia page on the subject, which is the most utterly factually incorrect page I've ever seen on Wikipedia (seriously, it's all copied from some chap's blog and the chap in question clearly knows nothing about the subject, but has fabricated an intellectual edifice around the matter which does not, at any point whatsoever, relate in even the remotest fashion to the truth... it's like somebody saying "SQL is a dialect of FORTRAN that uses a notation originally developed for specifying knitting patterns"... but wronger )

So, harking back to the fact that my pint was going to be the last one coming from that cask, I mentioned it to one of the students who work there - I believe I said something along the lines of "You should let whoever's looking after the cellar tonight know that it needs changing, so they can do it when it's convenient, rather than when there's a rush at the bar."

He did so, and I saw this evening's cellarman turn and glance at my pint (which was clear, but tasted of cardboard, which is why I knew it was the end of the cask), and dismiss me as a fearmonger

About ten minutes later an acquaintance of mine turned up and bought me a pint... and the cask ran out just as they were getting busy

When I finally got my pint I made a point of asking "Had it gone, or did it just need tilting?" (As the level in the cask drops it needs to be tilted to keep the ale fully covering the outlet leading through the line to the tap; in my day we did this by carefully tilting the cask and placing a chock under the back of it once it got to about 60%-70% empty, although I know that the FMB bar have those thingies that do all that automatically by judicious use of springs and the law of gravity.)

He said "No, it had gone..." <long pause> "... you were right "



Maybe next time he'll take my advice

boooo - I want PROPER techy posts....