Posts from 2007

Boring, alcohol fuelled haze

• Prelude
• Friday
• Saturday

My friends were disappointed, insulted and absolutely mortified at the suggestion (from a comment on this blog) that the Hook Norton Festival of Fine Ales was merely a

'Boring, alcohol, induced haze'

However, I simply loved the turn of phrase that captures the very essence of Hook Norton in just four words. So much so, I had T-shirts made up for this weekend's antics.

New for 2007: The entire event will be live mob-blogged from start to finish so don't forget to tune in to this blog, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook and BBC World Service for exciting, real-time updates.

PS. This will be news to wives, partners and mistresses who have always been told that there is no mobile reception whatsoever in the beautiful, unspoiled Cotswold village which is the only reason their loved ones are incommunicado for a blissful 48 hours.

Weird. This was also the subject of my final year project at University. My AI creation was written in C on Unix and used the curses package.

However, my effort wasn't so accomplished, had severe problems when a piece was crowned and didn't implement the 'huffing' rule correctly.

Having said that, it did beat me on four occasions.

I own up. Its a fair cop. It is 27 years and 5 months since my last confession. Since then, I have sinned, Holy Father. In fact, I have committed an absolutely heinous crime. Please forgive me for I have submitted multiple random guesses.

May the high priests (and priestesses) of the BAAG movement, please have mercy on my wretched soul.

Recently, I have been guilty of supporting and even proposing a multitude of 'any guesses', all of which were proposed as possible solutions to solve a critical system problem on a production system:

1. I failed to cough and splutter in an effort to stifle my laughter when a manager suggested that 500 European users adopted shift working to clear the backlog.
2. I didn't shout down a ludicrous proposal to reboot the Siebel Enterprise every 4 hours in order to maintain some level of service.
3. I wrote on a whiteboard that consideration should be given to reinstating the previous version of the application even though this in itself was risky, time-consuming and unlikely to address the root cause.
4. I even proposed patching to Oracle 10.2.0.3 with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
5. I shuffled nervously and blushed when the customer asked 'Who do we escalate to when you fail to fix this problem ?'
6. I watched in silence as the SAN man was stood against a wall and pelted with questions as senior management all pointed fingers in his direction.
7. I failed to stand up for righteousness and technical purity as runaway, rogue sessions were maliciously and arbitrarily terminated by an Oracle DBA.
8. I failed to suggest running a trivial SQL to determine index fragmentation and stood by as 74 indexes were needlessly reorganised.
9. I watched helplessly as a systems administrator claimed the problem was 'definitely in the underlying disk I/O subsystem' simply because 8,000 operations a second were being performed.
10. I failed to raise my eyes skywards and embark on a spontaneous two hour training session with a DBA who claimed the 'buffer cache hit ratio was fine' and the problems only started once users were allowed onto the system.

My only defence is that all of the above 'any guesses' created enough of a diversionary smokescreen to buy me enough time, alone in a darkened room, to analyze multiple Statspack reports, reproduce the majority of the problems in SQL*Plus and then prove the behaviour was improved when statistics on empty tables were dropped and two additional indexes created.

This lucky 'guess' miraculously restored performance and stability. So you see, 'any guess' is not always such a bad strategy, after all.

OK. I couldnt resist any longer. Scobles recent post about this killer Google Reader application forced me to sign up for yet another pointless, short-lived, social network, Web 2.0 application - Facebook.

I was keen to preserve my 'Johnny Come Lately' status and was relieved to find, coincidentally, that Donncha had signed up just ahead of me so I am now confirmed as the very last person in the world to sign up for Facebook.

Scoble's right. Mario Romero's Google Reader application is blissfully simple and lets you browse friends' shared items and aggregates the most popular shared items. Once it gets enough traction, this application will indeed be 'Digg for intelligent people' (and me).

Facebook is better than LinkedIn because it's more human and it's more fun. That senior partner at Accenture with a tedious, dry 6 page CV can now be seen half-naked, pole dancing in Bangkok, juggling firesticks, laughing and simultaneously drinking a colourful cocktail through a novelty straw.

Facebook is aimed at a teenage audience and people who snigger at 'Poke Norman !' and I do have some difficulty with people writing graffiti on my 'wall'.

For example, some cheeky Irish builder wrote this: 'Urgently needs re-pointing. Can do you a deal if you get your drive done at the same time.'

The 80s pop star - Prince - simultaneously delighted both his fans and horrified the music industry with his shock inclusion of a disposable CD with a leading (shurely shome mishtake) UK Sunday newspaper.

Norman Brightside, an avid Daily Mail reader, was absolutely delighted with the complimentary inclusion of 'Planet Earth' with his £1.40 Mail on Sunday.

'I simply love 'The Artiste Formerly Known As Prince'. Whenever I get invited to a fancy dress or themed party, guess who I always go as ? With this latest gift from The King (geddit?), we really are 'going to party like it is 1999'. I had heard a rumour that his latest CD would cost £8.99 and include a free copy of the Daily Mail but this surpasses all my expectations. Let's go crazy !' 'I am hosting a dinner party on December 18. Normally, I like to get things underway with some David Gray, bread-sticks and dips followed by Dire Straits and amusingly shaped carrots that resemble human genitalia. However, this free copy of 'Planet Earth' will make an ideal ice-breaker and help initiate stimulating conversation for at least 3 minutes.'

'My wife isn't quite so happy. She drove the 'Little Red Corvette' round all the newsagents and bought 153 copies of the Mail on Sunday because she thought she was getting a free CD single featuring the Duran Duran single of the same name. She is now suing Associated Newspapers for compensation as she hurt her back lifting the pile of newspapers into the recycling bin.'

Zzzzzzzz.

Lyrics plugin for Media Player and Winamp.

Although you will spoil the Reading festival for your immediate neighbour with your loud, tuneless, intoxicated karaoke at least you will know the words.

Last Thursday, I enjoyed an superbly entertaining taxi ride back from LHR. Unusually, the taxi driver wasnt waiting for me at the meeting point. I called the taxi company and was told he was 3 minutes away. He was actually 10 minutes away but, to be fair, he was extremely apologetic when he arrived.

The driver was a rather tall, imposing, Indian gentleman. Once in the car, he immediately got into a protracted and increasingly heated argument with the dispatcher about the address for his next drop-off. The dispatcher insisted the location was 'Surbiton' with no address. Not unreasonably, the driver argued that he needed an exact address.

Finally, he turned to me and asked 'Sir. May I ask you for your address ?' so I obliged. He then exploded at the dispatcher who eventually conceded that my address was indeed correct, wasn't actually 'Surbiton' and did include a road and house number.

Puzzled, I asked the driver why he simply didn't ask him where I lived when I got into the car. 'Because you, Sir, are the customer and I shouldn't have to pester you just because I work with complete idiots.'

He then informed me that 'while he wasn't a racialist (sic), British people were all incredibly stupid' and proceeded to expand this sweeping generalisation with the startling fact that 'last years Mensa study reported that 68% of the world's population was below average intelligence.'

He then proceeded to regale me with a variety of hilarious anecdotes from just two years in the minicab business.

One lady asked 'Are you a cab ?' to which he replied 'No, madam. I am not a cab. I am a taxi driver so please do not leap onto my shoulders.'

Another teenager asked if she could smoke in the car. He politely pointed to the 'No Smoking' signs clearly displayed and said 'No. I'm sorry madam. That won't be possible.' Undeterred, she then asked 'How much extra would it cost to smoke ?'. 'Well, madam, if you pay me the current market value of this car, I will get the bus home, you can drive this car to your garage and you can smoke there all night long.'

On another balmy summer evening, a rich lady from Mayfair didn't answer the door or phone for 15 minutes. When she eventually deigned to open the front door and announced 'she had been sitting out in the back garden with a glass of wine because it was sunny', he replied 'You're right. It is a lovely evening so I am ending my shift right now and going to sit in my garden with a glass of wine'. He promptly left her standing, speechless, on the doorstep.

Another customer threatened to call the office because the driver was slightly late and he had a flight to catch. He said 'Well it's not my fault that I'm late. Blame the idiots working at this company.' When the customer said 'That is outrageous. I am going to call your manager', he replied 'Sir, you can call New Scotland Yard for all I care.'

But my favourite story involved another rich lady. It was late on Saturday night, the roads were busy and the driver wasn't familiar with the area so he started to enter the destination address into the SatNav system.

The well spoken lady said 'Oh don't bother with that. Just follow that blue Mercedes'. My friend said 'Certainly madam but I really would like to key in the address as well if you don't mind.' The lady said 'Look. I've already told you once. Just do what you're told and follow the blue Mercedes.'

The driver complied. 25 minutes later, the blue Mercedes pulled into a driveway. The taxi driver pulled up at the kerb and stopped. He looked into the back seat. His well dressed female passenger was asleep and suddenly awoke. 'Are we there ye - What are we doing here ? Where the hell are we ?'.

The driver gestured to the car in the darkened driveway: 'Madam, you told me to follow the blue Mercedes.'

Didnt take long. Please welcome Roland, err, Bianchi.

My son, Norman Junior III, plays competitive junior tennis. When I watch him play, I tend to stand at a distance and remain completely silent. Outwardly at least. I always try to offer positive encouragement - congratulations if he wins and commiserations after a defeat.

My son wins some matches and loses a handful more. However, he always enjoys playing, he doesn't scream and shout or thrash his racket into the ground. He wins and loses with the same good grace which makes me just as proud as his sporting prowess.

However, recently, he was given a real hiding by a lad of a similar age, ranking and ability. When he came off, I said 'Jesus. If you're going to play and serve like that, I think even I could take a set off you.' I always call him 'Jesus' when I am cross with him.

This lunchtime, work and school commitments finally allowed the great Brightside veteran-junior invitational challenge to take place.

He thrashed me 6-0. I took him to a couple of deuces but only because he made a couple of unforced errors and threw in a few double faults. When Sue Barker interviewed me, in a sweaty and breathless state (me not Sue) immediately afterwards, she made the preposterous claim that I only made two outright winners during the whole 24 minutes.

When I asked my son for tips to improve my all-round game, he graciously replied

'You actually weren't as bad I thought. You did get some serves in.'

I may have lost but I can tell you, I really looked the part as I strolled out onto court 14, immaculately attired in cream flannels, cream blazer with a cream holdall embossed in gold lettering with 'NB'.

We then adjourned to Asda for an emergency purchase (toilet rolls) and I cheered myself up with the purchase of Editors 'An End Has a Start'.

This CD has been on my wishlist for a whole but I have been poised on tenterhooks, waiting for Doug Burns to divulge his innermost thoughts on this indie band but, sorry, Doug, I simply can not bear the suspense any longer.

I see Interpol's third album ('Our Love To Admire') is also out which has received negative reviews for being too similar to the previous two with vivid echoes of Joy Division so that has also been ordered.