sonofsanta

This is the very saddest of days. Easily my favourite author, both the greatest satirist and the greatest storyteller of a generation. As @Dos_Box says, knowing there'll never be another Discworld is a very strange (possibly turtle-shaped) sort of hole to suddenly have in my life. They have been a constant in my life; it wasn't Christmas if I didn't vanish for a day and a half after unwrapping the new Discworld book, re-appearing only once finished to open the rest of my presents. I think I'll read a little more of Truckers to my boys tonight at bedtime than I need to, not for them to fall asleep, but for me to say goodbye.

Nokia Windows Phones are really, seriously nice bits of hardware - my wife has the Lumia 930, all of £23 a month for the top end device, and it's gorgeous. WP is a surprisingly slick OS as well; yes, the app store is nowhere near the size of Apple/Google, no, you can't configure the phone to the same extent you can an Android, but out of the box it is very slick and usable, and the hardware really does feel premium. Android... I love Android, because I like to tweak, but my Nexus 4 has been out of contract and I can't decide what I actually want. I like pure Android, but the Nexus 5 isn't enough of an upgrade to be worth the money, the Nexus 6 is too flipping huge & pricey, and no-one does the Moto X (which looks really lovely) on contract, and I'm not spending £460 on a new phone I don't actually need, only want. Samsung/HTC/Sony/LG etc. bog their phones down with too much cruft for my liking, and it only slows down updates - the HTC One M7 only just got Android 5, for example, about 3 or 4 months after my Nexus 4 did.

The battle in question was probably about 15 years ago, under WFB 4 - the box with the High Elves and the Goblins. I remember 5 coming out (Bretonnians & Lizardmen) and after that, it's all modern nonsense to me. Last 40k I played was 3 - when they first introduced the 'everyone moves 6"' nonsense and streamlined all the character out of the game. Clunky as v2 was, I never could get into v3.

I once played a game of Fantasy Battle against a friend, my Dark Elves versus his Empire, and it got to the shooting phase of his first turn and he started measuring between my units, then started measuring from his artillery to some of my units... "Hang on a minute," quoth I, "you can't measure for your cannon, you have to estimate it." "Oh I'm not targeting your crossbowmen," he said, "I'm targeting your Corsairs, and using trigonometry to work out how far I should estimate." Fortunately he was rubbish at maths!

We've been Avaya for nearly a year now, solid system, good IP phones, been completely reliable. Management is straightforward enough, in that "we know only IT people and engineers are going to look at this software so it's ugly as butts" way. Key point for us was the length of time the Avaya systems are supported for - they have a long lifecycle on purpose, so support should be good for a decade or more.

SwitchShop were better priced than LinITX when we checked, and they're generally a fantastic company - their engineers are superb. We've used them for lots of networking things at this point - core switches, fibre, room cabling... They also send you a bar of Dairy Milk at Easter

I hope the planes you fly are all powered by Intel. Can you SLI jet engines? I assume, as well, you're only going to fly 787s or other top-end brand new planes - no point in being cheap after all. Seriously, though, good luck - I can't imagine it's going to be easy...

I don't think the wind pushed him into the track wall - from what I gathered, it pushed him slightly off-line, onto the astroturf, at which point he lost grip and crashed off. Agreed that it's an odd angle and an unusual amount of secrecy around it, although that latter could be a habit of Ron Dennis's that he can't break.

Others know more/have said more about the security said than I can, so I'll go for the public speaking tips instead. PowerPoint - keep to no more than 4 bullet points per slide, and 4-5 words per bullet point tops. That's a 20 word limit on each slide (excluding title and header/footer guff). If you have lots of words on your PowerPoint, people will immediately start reading it as soon as your slide comes up, not be listening to you, and then when they're done, they've either got no idea what you're on about because they weren't paying attention to you, or they're bored because they've just read everyhing you're slowly talking through. Bullet points are basically sub-headings that give structure to what you're saying, and should never be a full explanation - in a way, they should only make sense after you've said your bit on that topic. Look at the audience. You don't have to make eye contact with a person, but sort of... look into the middle of a cluster of people, like you're making eye contact with the group. You're never really looking at any one person so it doesn't get awkward. For the love of God don't turn your back on your audience and talk to your slides. Don't pace either. Use a remote/slide clicker. Apart from the fact they're useful anyway, they give your hands something to do. They help avoid too many hand gestures and what The Thick Of It called "the invisible tits". Talk slower than you think you need to. Especially when nervous, you'll go faster than you realise. Slow down enough so that it just about starts to sound odd & stilted in your head, and it'll be natural and easy to follow for everyone else who isn't in your head. Most of the above boils down to: fake being calm. Force yourself to smile and, weirdly, your own body believes the lie and relaxes a bit. Pretend to be calm long enough and you'll start to actually be calm. And as nervous as you get, don't think there's anything wrong with that: they're there for a reason, because they sharpen you and prepare you and build you up ready to face it. Accept them, don't fight them. A weird thing happens with public speaking: the steps up to the stage will feel leaden and heavy and full of portent, but once you're up and talking, you hit some kind of weird plane of calmness and peace, and all the nerves that threatened to drag you under five minutes before vanish like mist in the sunrise. By the end, you'll actually be enjoying yourself - especially if it's a topic you know something about and enjoy yourself. Good luck! You'll be better than you know. You'll be amazed what you can get away with - all the fatal errors and missteps and mistakes you think you've made go completely unnoticed by people. It's all just a confidence trick. EDIT: questions! Questions at the end. When someone asks you something, repeat it back to them slightly rephrased, for three reasons: (a) it means you can check you've understood their question; (b) it means everyone can hear the question when you repeat it, as otherwise questions from the audience tend to be lost on the audience; © it gives you a moment to think of where to start your answer.

Sometimes you can really appreciate why people think we make all this technical talk up.

Can't see them competing with anyone this year, with Caterham out. Everyone else is a step ahead of them in the midfield at least, let alone the fact that they're running with a tweaked 2014 chassis and a 2014 engine (which is therefore 80bhp down on this year's Ferrari engine). Think I saw somewhere that Giedo van der Garde might be the other driver, in one of the articles on him suing Sauber. Alonso had a bit of a Hot Crash Time Machine moment at test 2, it seems: Fernando Alonso 'could not recall the last 20 years of his life after testing crash' | Sky Sports

Hey, did you know that Ctrl + W opens up an easter egg in Internet Explorer?

Took me a moment... touché.

It's new up there, with lots of new options, but it's been about elsewhere before - I think Little Miss Purple is a couple of years old, from an old BETT theme that @Little-Miss didn't want to lose. I think. I quite like the normal blue, though. Feels kinda homely...

GW was the crack cocaine of my adolescence, as it was for so many middle-class-ish nerdy boys in the 90s. I had Chaos Space Marines for 40k (2nd edition, SO MANY CARDS FOR EVERYTHING) and Eldar (Alaitoc) for 3rd edition, and I even painted up the latter, some 1500 points worth - got 'em out on a shelf in my man cave, where they annoy my mother-in-law by collecting dust. I still have piles of other random WFB/40k crap clogging up my loft as well (Dark Elves, Dwarves, Orcs & Gobbos, misc. other rubbish). Every time I go in to clear it out, I come over all nostalgic and end up packing it all away again, with promises to myself that I'm going to do some painting again soon because I miss it, and I should arrange some battles with some friends again, and and and... ...and of course I never do. I don't have the spare time to paint anymore, and I don't have the spare cash to fund the habit - particularly not at contemporary prices, and I thought it was bad back in the 90s, sheesh - and if I'm entirely honest, I never really enjoyed the big battles anyway. I always much preferred the smaller gang games - Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Mordheim (upcoming PC game for that one looks good) - as they were shorter, faster, and had that thread of continuity and story in the experience & injuries. Ain't no ganger like a crippled specialist ganger you've had since his Juve days. Sure, he may move 2 inches a turn, fill his pants at the first sign of trouble and occasionally go mad, but you never see him miss, do you...

Related, and about two or three hours of lost productivity as you read through: History of the Amiga | Series | Ars Technica Fantastic set of articles. The Amiga really was one of a kind, born of a different world. We'll never see its like again

Notepad++. I used to use plain old Notepad - I did my final year project in it - but the colour highlighting in Notepad++ is life-changing. Makes reading code much, much easier.

The only servers you shouldn't AV are your virtual hosts - or if you do, make sure you get every required exception into the anti-virus, as scanning the virtual guest folders can really drag everything down. There's some MS TechNet articles about on which folders to exclude for Hyper-V, at least, I presume VMWare have similar info available.

I do miss EVE terribly sometimes - ain't nothing scratches that space itch in quite the same way, though I need to give Homeworld Remastered a look in - but my life has changed too much. I started playing when I was single and unemployed, and could spend all those hours a day playing (thank god for downtime, I'd never have gotten showered otherwise), and even once I was gainfully employed, I could go home and spend 6 or 7 hours a night just chatting away, casually missioning/floating about nullsec with a small group. But once you have a wife and kids, all that free time starts to shrivel up, and if you can't give EVE the hours it needs, you just end up spinnin' ships with nowt else worthwhile to do. Gaming isn't as high a priority on my free time as it once was, either - I'd rather spend more evenings writing, and only game the odd night or two, but that doesn't really fit in with "your corp is relying on you". Which is all a massive shame, because I loved that game like I've never loved another. We had corp meetups, and PVP frigate tournaments, and I was FC for a few trips around our local area (we were based up North, in 5Z), and I was always good for cash after destroying a low-sec pirate boss at the end of a missions chain and getting a billion ISK pirate battleship blueprint (and, miraculously, getting it back to high sec in one piece)... but EVE just doesn't fit around my life anymore Though one day, I may get a cheap month's resub from one of their offers and sign up for Red v Blue, if that's still going. I'd have to relearn so much, though - it must have been over 5 years now - and it'd frustrate me no end knowing that I used to know how this worked, and I used to have the appropriate reactions to EW, and I used to know the intimate details of what laser crystal to use when (tbh, "Scorch" and "all the time") - so I don't know as I'd actually enjoy it all that much. Now I'm all sad and nostalgic

Apparently there were some web filtering rules on the Fortigate 50B, which when cleared out, fixed everything. Whether it was those, or something else that got cleared out/reset as part of the process, I don't know, but it's once again been a problem in a system I didn't control directly, so I think I need to bring the firewall in house as part of a Smoothwall UTM so I know what's going on with it. I'd rather be to blame and have the ability to fix problems of my own causing than be at the mercy of someone else's config.

Or: Windows Key + Pause/Break opens up System Properties. Even quicker

White and gold, at least on this poxy old 17" TN monitor. But I can see how horribly unbalanced the colour is, and looking at the images in the linked article, the blue/black combo looks correct - as in, you can see the background, and everything there (people etc.) looks correct, whereas the white/gold image is overblown. Related thing about how weird our eyes/brains are with colour: McCollough effect - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. By all accounts, that can break your colour perception for up to three months, though I've not been brave/daft enough to try it.

My recommendations are all kinds of messed up from kids films (when we can't be bothered to switch to the kids profile because goddammit if Cars isn't on RIGHT NOW someone is going to explode) and from my teenage daughter's Roku (which can't switch profiles). House of Cards: Kevin Spacey gets promised that if his party wins the election, he'll get Secretary of State, but when they get in the new President goes back on his word and says he needs him where he is. Mr Spacey goes right, stuff you all then, no more playing by the rules, I will make my own way to power. The following two seasons are a dictionary definition of "ruthless"; I presume the third will see some hens coming home to roost, to much dramatic payoff. One of my favourite shows ever. It's just done so well. Everything about it is polished and crafted and beautiful and dark.

Not half as glad as I am. I've never been so stumped by something, because I didn't even know which system I should be concentrating all my efforts on. If it hadn't gotten fixed on Wednesday evening, when I was on my final, desperate theory, I don't know what I'd have done from there. Quit my job and let some other sucker deal with it, probably. What I'd give to be in a beer garden in this sunshine right now. I've run out of week before the week has.

Bloomin' fantastic - Kevin Spacey is magnetic. Such an utter bar-steward, but so compelling and charismatic at the same time. I reckon you could get through all three seasons in a trial month of Netflix, it'd only take an episode a night to manage and would be well worth the effort. Of course, then you'd have to keep Netflix for Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul...