Various people have found this article quite amusing… 12 Reasons Why a Geek Will Steal Your Girlfriend in 2008 – also worth reading the quite heated debate going on in the comments section about how accurate it is…
Category Archives: General
A Sad Bit of News
A sad little bit of news today from my parents. This morning they had to have Luther, one of their two Red Burmese cats put down. Considering that back in 1992, Luther who was the runt of the litter wasn’t expected to survive into adulthood, and indeed never grew to full size, he’s had a good long life at fifteen years.
He’s been going steadily downhill for the past few months, and has been suffering with his teeth to the point that he hasn’t been eating much, and only usually when someone is there to feed him, so Mum and Dad have ended up hand feeding him four times a day for the past few months. Eventually yesterday he was barely moving and rather than see his quality of life deteriorate any more they took the decision to take him along to the vets this morning and have him put to sleep.
The picture on this page shows how Luther usually greeted visitors to the house, by flopping over and expecting attention, he also liked sitting on your left shoulder – and note, only the left shoulder – being on the right would generally produce a lot of fidgeting to get over onto the correct side! Like most Burmese he was very sociable, and also could be very vocal at times. He also in younger times would quite happily play fetch and retrieve games – something again that Burmese are known for doing.
Feeling Like a Muppet?
So have you ever felt like a total muppet stood up in front of an audience giving a presentation? Maybe so, but it seems that we should be taking inspiration from the Muppets – or at least from Sesame Street – when giving a presentation. Check out this post from the continually excellent Coding Horror blog.
A Modern Birth Announcement
A few years ago, a birth announcement would come via phone calls, or even a letter – not any more. We’ve just found out that Beth’s cousin has given birth via her uncle Hugh’s Facebook status which now reads “is the proud new Grandfather of Abigail Ware!â€? – and we knew she was on the way when her aunt Helen’s status changed earlier in the day. Congratulations from both of us too!
The Feast of the Pharaohs
Last night was my office Christmas party – this year going along to the Feast of the Pharaohs, this years version of the big party that the Christmas Company hold out at Easthampstead Park every year.
We’d been along to one of these a couple of years ago when the theme was Cirque Noel so it was interesting to see what was different.
The first and perhaps biggest change is thanks to the smoking restrictions that came in over the summer. Even though it is held in a marquee, the same rules apply as to any other indoor event, so whereas last time we knew a number of people who didn’t really enjoy the event thanks to the smokers on adjacent tables, this time it was totally smoke free – well aside from the copious amounts of dry ice of course…
As before you arrived in the bar area, and there was an hour or so of mingling and chatting over drinks before dinner. The curtain was then drawn back on the main marquee which again was over eighty tables surrounding a central stage. The courses of the four course dinner were again interspersed with entertainment on the main stage, and this was again later turned over to the guests for the disco. They also once again had the dodgems – just the kind of thing to settle your stomach after dinner!
Perhaps the thing that didn’t quite work this year was the theme – as someone on our table put it “Do you suppose anyone who planned this has actually been to Egypt?â€? The dancers performed several times during the evening, with routines that had a vague hint of Arabian Nights at times, and then there was a fire-eater that turned up later on. There was a brief moment of Walk Like an Egyptian, but aside from that there was nothing that you could specifically tie up with the theme. In fact it got positively bizarre towards the end with some weird routine with the fire eater that looked like some sort of pagan ritual, and then an even more weird routine with a net curtain… Maybe as a table full of software engineers we’re not the ideal people to judge, but anyway, we didn’t quite get what was going on!
The food was pretty good though, although the goats cheese and spinach starter seemed to be a bit of a love it or hate it option. As before it all turned up piping hot despite the nearly 1000 guests in the marquee needing to be served. We didn’t stay much after dinner, as with it being a Wednesday night, Beth had to be up and awake for school the next morning. However we did manage to get on the dodgems before we went – pictures of that along with the rest of the evening can be found in our picture galleries.
All in all, it was a great evening, and hopefully we’ll get a chance to go along to whatever they put on next year.