Cambridge in Colour

This guy's Cambridge photos are fantastic. I hate him...;-)

Orkneyjar - The Eynhallow Riddle

Orkneyjar - The Eynhallow Riddle

Eynhallow strikes again... (My machine in DCS Glasgow was called Eynhallow - I only just resisted calling it 'Craggy').

Lamp post outside Trinity 

King's at sunset 

Statue at St. John's 

Phone boxes, market and bikes 

chmod

More coffee, more tales of daft customers - Huw's this time, several years ago on a Unix helpline. There's a Unix command called chmod which is used to change the permissions on a file, e.g. to stop other people from reading/writing a file belonging to you. It also allows you to say whether or not a file is executable - you need to set the executable permission on a Perl script, for example, before you can actually run it.

Anyway, someone phoned in to say that, worried about the idea of people fiddling with file permissions, they had chmod-ed chmod so that it wasn't executable by anyone. Thus rendering it completely useless. They eventually had to send out a new copy on floppy disk.

This is exactly why I was always glad nobody ever gave me the root password...

Gliding. 

And now, to follow up too many cat photos: too many swan photos... 

Both swans. 

Close up. 

Swans hiding in the pond. 

Swing and trees in the park. 

Peeling chute. 

Climbing frames in the dark 

More Bookshop Tales...

I was having coffee with Alasdair yesterday and the conversation turned to the stupidity of customers in shops (although we both admitted that we're doubtless frequently stupid as customers in shops). Anyway, here are some more comedic situations from Waterstones a few years ago:

Phone rings, Alasdair answers it...
A (politely): Hello, Waterstones, Alasdair speaking, how can I help you?
Customer (angrily): Who are you?
A (confused): Alasdair.
Customer (abruptly): What company do you work for?
A (even more confused): Waterstones.
Customer (irately): What's your problem?

Nobly resisting the temptation to reply "You are", Alasdair managed to ascertain that this guy had dialled 1471 to see who had last called him and just dialled the number it gave him. And then not paid any attention at all.

Another day, another eejit...

Customer: I'm looking for the exotic books.
A (with a fairly good idea what the guy means): The exotic books?
Customer (shiftily): Aye.
A (untruthfully): I don't quite understand. Do you mean Sci-Fi, or books on exotic travel destinations?
Customer (getting more agitated): Naw - the exotic books!
A (stirring): I'm sorry, I don't know what you mean.
Customer (shouting): WHERE ARE THE DIRTY BOOKS?!!

And finally, on a particularly fraught Christmas Eve, after wrestling with various technical problems and preventing customers from wrestling with each other...

Customer: I'm looking for a book.
A (at the end of his tether): I'm sorry. We don't have any.
Customer (fortunately possessed of a sense of humour): I asked for that, didn't I?

Although, admittedly I did once go into a newsagents carrying a violin case and ask if they had any Tunes. Don't worry - the violin case just contained a machine gun.

My current position re: The Herald Crossword. 

Fork 

Screwdrivers 

Brethren - paws... 

Still enraged 

Whiskers 

More chess 

Pyramid 

Pointed. 

Purple. 

No doubt all you cat fans out there have been feeling deprived by the lack of Wimsey photos in the last few days. Or maybe not. Here are a couple of new ones anyway... 

Trying to hide behind her own fur (and almost succeeding). 

iPod Flea

This sounds ideal for my brother, who goes in for the OCD approach to music (pick a really irritating song, and listen to it repeatedly for months).

Habithat

Apparently there really is a Habithat (the company Father Ted ordered a bunch of new priests' house rugs and whatnot from, before Mrs Doyle mixed it up with a consignment of Nazi memorabilia Ted had inherited from another local priest). Disappointingly though, they don't seem to sell items for presbytery interior decor...

Wimsey waiting for her dinner. Note the alarming glowing eyes...