venta

On Saturday, ChrisC scooted down to Ealing Shopmobility for me and collected a manual wheelchair. They offered me a self-propelled one, which I initially tried to decline as I assumed that meant powered. However, self-propelled just means "big wheels", of the sort you can use to propel yourself around when you're sitting in it. The clue's kind of in the name, I guess.

It seemed a little peverse to be borrowing a wheelchair just as I was feeling like I was starting to make progress in the walking department. However, I remember an important lesson learned from a friend at WGW some years ago: a wheelchair is just a tool, if it makes something easier, use it. I still recall her rolling cheerfully across the floor, declaring "I feel way less disabled in this chair than I usually do trying to stand up".

So I borrowed a wheelchair because on Sunday afternoon we had an important dancing mission.

( All around the world, around the world )

Yesterday was the annual F5-fest of Glastonbury tickets going on sale. Which was made considerably more protracted because Seetickets were having "technical issues" for the first 30 minutes of the sale period.

I was also watching #glastonbury on the twitters. Lots of people berated Seetickets for their poor timing in having "technical issues" the day Glasto tickets go on sale. Er, y'know? I don't think it's coincidental. I think we, the Glastonbury punters, pretty much are the technical issues.

From the numbers I've seen, there were a million people registered to buy 135,000 tickets. That means a lot of disappointed people. And that's not Seetickets' fault. Once the issues were resolved, Seetickets were churning through 3000 ticket sales a minute on servers that were being hit by many times more people than that. Servers really aren't my specialist area, but I'm pretty sure that's not a trivial problem to solve. Compared to a decade ago, the ticket sales are incredibly smoothly handled.

( Does anyone know much about large-scale servers? )

Hmm. LJ's stylesheets for individual journals seem really quite broken this morning. Looking at venta.livejournal.com, the headers seem to be all over the place (and all the cut-tags have Collapse added next to them, though they still seem to work as normal).

I presume other people are seeing this, it's not just me? (Some people's journals look fine - I'm guessing that S2 styles are OK, and everything else isn't? Haven't tested exhaustively.)

Edit: whatever it was has gone away.

Yesterday, ChrisC was reading a news story entitled something like "Iceland meat pies found to contain no meat at all". The story basically ran that the beef pies were being checked for horse meat content, and were discovered to be entirely free of meat from any kind of animal at all.

At this point, I can't see the URL the story is coming from, but I feel I know where I am. This is a satirical story about the frozen food emporium, Iceland, and their low-quality meat pies.

Except it's being touted as an actual, genuine news story about the large, bankrupt, volcanic island, Iceland, and their mysteriously vegetabley meat pies.

I'm pretty sure that not being able to distinguish between actual news and satire is a sign of the end times.

When writing last week's BAYD post, I did what I always do: put up an mp3 (of Try This At Home) for download. Later on, when I wanted to refer in passing to Reasons Not To Be An Idiot, I just linked to YouTube.

And then I thought: why do I do that? Why don't I just link to YouTube for my BAYD posts? Unless it's something really quite obscure, it'll be there. Do people care that much about downloading an mp3?

And then I thought: er... good question. The answer surprised me. I first started BAYD as a regular thing at the beginning 2005. At that point, YouTube didn't exist.

( It wasn't even thought of... )

I rarely, if ever, write LOL. When I do, it tends to be in emails to people who understand that when I write it, it's a shortcut for "I actually am actually laughing out loud". In other situations (most recently, in reply to a comment of sammason's, which quite caught me off guard), I feel the need to spell out that whatever they've written has actually made me laugh. Out loud. If I haven't caused at least three colleagues to turn round and look enquiringly at me, it just ain't LOL-worthy.

( Laugh? I nearly did )

Do you laugh out loud a lot reading the web? Do you LOL?

You know those times when you find something on the internet, and it's an idea that's really silly, but somehow it just grabs you?

I've known these videos were around for a while, but today I had cause to revisit them and thought that - just in case you haven't seen them - I should encourage you to turn the sound up and ask yourself:

Where the hell is Matt?



http://www.wherethehellismatt.com/

I've noticed, of late, that I've been getting worse at filling in captchas correctly. I think that they're getting worse, and harder to read - but possibly this is just the equivalent of declaring as you get older than all your friends have started mumbling.

This was today's particularly troublesome specimen:



Is it just me, or is the second word hard to read, and the last letter just a splodge?

Is captcha-reading software getting better, forcing captchas to become ever more illegible?

Or am I, in fact, slowly devolving into a spam bot?

Thanks to j4's recent post, I know now that there is a thing called Google Scribe. Which tries to second guess you as you type.

If you put in one word, then just begin accepting every auto-completion it offers you by hitting 'return', it generates ( rubbish )