nocto

bizarre uses of technology, episode 3467:

A German priest has found a way to brew beer in his washing machine. Michael Fey, of Duisburg, built a computer interface into the machine to let it run an automatic brewing program.

[found via cafe au lait]

i’m quite pleased with getting as high as 152/200 on this vocabulary test where you have to pick whether a pair of words are almost the same or almost opposite in meaning. for every pair of words that seemed obvious to me there were two or three pairs that had me scratching my head in bemusement.

scientists have some more ideas on why we get hiccups. but it doesn’t really look like they are any closer to answering the question. or to figuring out how to stop the damn things.

we all know that the internet has exploded in enormous proportions over the last few years but this quote i found whilst perusing uk.telecom.broadband put the whole explosion into perspective for me:

At risk of sounding like the bloke muttering at the back of the bus,
I’ve got more Internet bandwidth from here at home than the UK had, in
total, circa 1992 (1) and I’ve probably got more Internet bandwidth in
my pocket with GPRS than the UK had, in total, circa 1988 (2).

i got on the net in october 1990 which seems to be just when

UKnet upgraded the UK link to Amsterdam (the link to the rest of the net) from 9600 to 64K

i’m flabbergasted. for me the net will never be as fast, as exciting, as mindblowing as it was in 1990. and summers will never be as long, hot and sunny as they were in childhood either. (though in my defence on the latter point i was 4 years old during the drought of 1976 which probably colours my perception quite a lot.)

it takes royal & sun alliance “one of the world’s oldest and most well-established insurance groups” thirteen entire weeks to move from the “hello, i’ve had my car stolen” conversation to sending the “here’s a cheque” letter. i am very happy that this stage of my life is over and i’m not going to dwell on how appalling their service is.

one year ago, two years ago.

i feel i ought to say something to keep up the tradition. loquax turned five years old on saturday (sort of, we seem to have slipped a week over the years and created ourselves an official birthday on the 8th). it still astounds me that we created a feasible business when all we were really doing was screwing around with the web and sharing out the luck we’d had winning online competitions. but when i’m laden down with accounting and sysadmin and payroll and users it’s hard to see it as anything but a business, which is good i think. it’s still fun but in a different way to how it was when we began, and in a better way too i think.

the major change in the last year has been that loquax has become a full time job for me after sucking up the majority of my spare time for years. i now have some actual genuine spare time. a providential redundancy even saved me the tedious business of working out my notice. the financial concerns of running a small business are minor compared to the financial concerns of an employee of an ailing business, it’s all about being in control.

on the statistics side of things: loquax served about 3.7 million pages in january 2003 which puts us about 50% up on last year. the rate of growth is slowing each year but we’re pretty happy with it because the lack of rapid change means we can sustain things and we’ve still never actively promoted the site.

in short, things are still good, i’m very lucky, and it feels wonderful to be in a situation where the adage the harder i work, the luckier i get actually applies.

thinking about the guy in the portacabin next to the polo making machine led me on to thinking about my own teenaged summers working for mr kipling and i’ve found the manor bakeries website which will answer all your burning questions like:

why do people buy cake?

now i would have thought this was pretty obvious, albeit open to subsiduary questions like “why don’t people bake cakes?” for instance. but manor bakeries have excelled themselves with a chart breaking down the categories of cakes. it’s a thing of great, if somewhat surreal, beauty, go and see.

i’d also like it to be on the record that you can indeed eat as much cake as you like whilst working in a cake factory and that although the theory behind this is that you get sick of it after a while it doesn’t work. i can still eat as many mini battenburgs as you can throw at me. though i don’t think i’ve eaten a fondant fancy since.

matt webb calls up customer care lines to find out how exactly they care for their customers.

Polos
Very friendly. Bloke who answered customer care line based in a portacabin on the factory floor, near the Polo making machine. Asked to describe it, he said it was a like a six barrel machine gun, shooting mints. Loud.

i’ve always wondered what people asked these helplines. now i’m wondering why it didn’t occur to me to call and ask too.