21 Dec 2009

Season's Bleatings

An acquaintance, Sam Brewster is doing me a poster at some point. Here's a festive sample of his:

1 Dec 2009

I Received This At Work Today So Now I'm Stealing It

"I received an email from you earlier, entitled The Use of Unfair Means in the Assessment Process. While, in general, it seems sensible, there is one sentence which is seriously wrong. I quote: Because the use of unfair means is such a serious offence (it amounts to the theft of ideas) ... This is legally illiterate. Theft is dishonestly appropriating things with the intent to permanently deprive. Copying other peoples' ideas does not deprive them of those ideas, not even temporarily. To be clear, I'm not arguing in favour of unfair means, just that it is silly to describe it as theft of ideas (just as it would be silly to describe it as grievous bodily harm of ideas). It's not theft, it's legally entirely unrelated to theft, and one gains nothing useful by thinking of it as theft. It should not be hard to write a legally accurate account, which does not contain this incorrect statement, but which is nevertheless appropriately forbidding."

26 Aug 2009

Hydrogen Is The Answer

At work, a package arrived address to the 'conseil general' of where I work. Inside was a booklet like this:


Also attached was a letter, that seemed to suggest that I should photocopy this booklet and distribute it freely:



It was written by a French Canadian called Claude Deschennes, who has a bit of a thing about religion:



Not only that, he seems to LOVE rubber stamps, and using them:



He is also keen on drawing diagrams about how he views the world. I liked this one because of the distinction drawn between 'Plants', 'Beasts' and 'Humanity'. To the left, you'll see he's also written "Posters, please, for the classes of biology", as well as more rubber-stampage:



In case you weren't sure, this emphasises once again the importance of Hydrogen:



There's also frequent references to the 'Nebula' as demonstrated by this diagram (and more rubber stamps):



Claude has included a photocopied picture of (what I guess to be) himself:



And thankfully, on the rear, he explains the purpose of the book:



There's so much dense handwriting, rubber-stampage, religious critique and references to the importance of Hydrogen that I can't really do it justice in this blog, but consider this post Claude's first foray onto the internet, as I couldn't find any reference to him when I searched.

Hi Claude!

9 Feb 2009

Cake Log 2009

In one of my workplaces, there has been a creeping trend of frequent and regular cake consumption. In previous years, its tended to happen on birthdays (not really that surprising), but from around last summer, staff have stopped giving reasons and bring in cake anyway.

I don't mind - I like cake.

The news of the cake is delivered by an email sent to all employees in the building, and thankfully, I'm well versed in reading emails as soon as they arrive. In fact, sometimes I can 'sense' an email being delivered, and I brace myself ready for its arrival.

This year, I figured I would take a more scientific approach to these emails, and I created a spreadsheet called Cake Log 2009, and saved it somewhere underneath about 8 digital trees worth of subfolders.

The log includes the date and time of the cake offering, the name of the bringer, the cake type, marks out of 10 and extra comments. So far there's just 3 comments on there:

"No staff were available to sample X's debut effort, but we're pleased to see a young pretender to the cake throne."

"Good moist texture, and well balanced by the icing" 8/10

"My judgement was possibly skewed by my consumption of strong coffee and a Mars Bar prior to the eating of the cake. A light fluffy sponge well complemented by the sweet creamy filling." 7/10

Hopefully, once I've collated more data, I will be able to provide statistics about who is the greatest cake-bringer, and which time and day of the week is the more likely to have cake involved.

I need a new job.