Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: Personal heaters

"don't be the idiot who fitted an extension block but forgot to wire it up so made a double plug ended cable to energise the extension block"

I once discovered one of those powering the garage when I moved house.

Re: Personal heaters

"the electrics in our building being quite old (building no longer exists)"

Cause and effect?

Re: Trickle-down effect?

"using them like taxis, instead of being something personal"

Good luck with getting your subscription car to take you to work in rush hour when everyone else wants to do the same. In order to guarantee that your subscription will approximate to that of owning a car except for the addition of somebody's profit. Unless the pattern of usage changes the number of vehicles , the need to store them outside of peak demand and the consequent economics won't change.

"You may have noticed that PCs are edging in that direction."

Yours may be, mine isn't and won't.

I've called them Wheelbarrow Wheels for a long time but I realise you've nailed it.

Re: Nice...

You say either and I say either.

Re: Royal Scot

Add Gypsy Creams to the list of the departed. I believe they've been brought back under the PC name of Romany Creams but I've never seen them.

Re: towheaded

Yes, but does it refer to the outside or the inside? Or both?

Do you write a special law naming Amazon (and guess what Amazon would do about that before it even got to Royal Assent) or do you write a law that taxes every company on income even if their expenses exceed that and they're currently running at a loss?

If it was a tax dodge why didn't you adopt it? Too high minded or you took a look at the risks of going freelance and decided it wasn't for you?

Re: he will discuss the “challenges” of taxing giant tech corporations in a digital economy

"The challenge is simply to grow a backbone"

Nothing to do with taxes is simple.

"it also killed small haulage businesses"

And so is now becoming part of an economic problem that even HMG has got round to noticing.

Re: Some rotten foundations and missing bits

For dates, add in the likes of "Friday in the octave of Easter 1312".

But "instant access to cells in spreadsheet files as if it was a database?" - isn't use of spreadsheets as databases part of the problem?

Re: How about weeding the wrong and obsolete technical 'documentation'

At best "weeding" isn't going to bring a RoI in sufficient time. In reality we all know what happens if you chuck out old documentation. Murphy arrives bearing a slightly broken piece of kit you thought had been chucked out but is (a) indispensable and (b) irreplaceable.

Re: Most of the problems have been solved

"the differences between 1/2 and 3/4 are significant"

That sort of thing is the problem. if Xv3 is so different to Xv2 it really shouldn't be Xv3 at all. It should be Yv1. There may still be a market for X to be supplied for some time to come but without the demand that Y be back compatible with it.

Re: Does it work though?

"You'd have to go to BSD to get something less bloated, more understandable, and something you're more in control of."

Size, maybe but in terms of understandable and in control of, Devuan seems to fit the bill.

Re: Address oddities

"Nearby Town"

I think that should be "Post Town". Nearby is not guaranteed.

It's US address formats that annoy me. They seem to always have a line for "City" but, of course, they treat as a world-wide standard address format even where it's geographical nonsense. This even pervades genealogical S/W where it can be historical as well as geographical nonsense.

Re: Photo of a wall re delivery to the wrong address

"Couriers don't seem to realise that whilst their legal customer is the sender the real customer is normally the recipient."

I've had this argument with one courier in the past. The address they'd been given was incorrect. They wouldn't change it on the basis that only the owner of the goods could do that. Just who did they think the owner was?

Dammit. Shoe museum!

Re: Try living in a building...

The house in which I grew up had a name and a number. The name was far more useful. There were only two houses on the lane. Ours was number 16.

Re: Try living in a building...

I have some of that experience. Like most along the lane we only have a name. There are only about half a dozen numbers and several of those are variations:1, 1a etc. There's another lane with almost the same name a few miles.

Re: Ah yes…

"and on one memorable time it was an 80 seater coach"

Ah, yes. Coach navigation. Coach from God's Own County to Victoria coach station. There were two drivers on board who swapped over at a half-way stop. The one who took over for the second leg got into slight navigational difficulties trying to follow the company's official route into the north London stop Golders Green bus station. I overheard a snippet of conversation "Shall I go right way or t'way I know?".

I noticed we came to a crossroads close to the bus station at right angles to the usual approach.

Nevertheless an improvement on the driver who, immediately after leaving Victoria, spread some forms over the wheel and started catching up on his paper-work while threading his way through central London.