Simon Hoggart, comparing Manchester to

[Big Words ]
Simon Hoggart, comparing Manchester to London in the Grauniad:

"There's a trade-off: nice and cheap versus grotty and thrilling."

...But London isn't cheap. Or particularly nice.

Yes, it's an obvious response. BB guesses we're biased, because we're living in Manchester rather than writing about it from a bijou apartment in Hampstead.

Commonwealth Bullshit

[Big Words ]

• The IRA bomb "ripped the heart out of the city."
  The IRA bomb destroyed the Arndale Centre and an outdated and rather ugly M&S store. If we're talking body parts, these were more like the bladder or the arse of the city. To our shame, we rebuilt the Arndale. And the new M&S store consists entirely of that well-known bombproof material, sheet glass.
• We're all "mad fer" the Games.
  BB can tell you now, the prevailing vibe among all but the few delusional souls acting as volunteers is "Oh, bloody 'ell! 'Ow much is this costin' us? Can we still get to work? Bloody rush hour's goin' to be 'ell. And why's the council closed me local baths?!"
• Manchester doesn't have homeless people or urban squalor.
  ...Because the police kicked out all the beggars last week and the council kindly refurbished all the council houses lining the main routes a while back. But only externally; the internal damp is still rampant. And they didn't bother with the properties behind the ones facing the roads.
• The volunteer programme was heavily oversubscribed.
  Right, which is why the council has been touting for an extra 150 volunteers among its own workforce - after all, what else would social workers and benefit office staff have to do while the Games are on?
• Russell Watson is a nice young man
  During rehearsals, Russell Watson demanded that his backing choir, who had been practising their contribution for months, either sing quietly or, even better, mime so as not to drown out his golden tones.

One good thing we can still say about Mancunians: we're not easily impressed.

Six rules for good guys

[Big Words ]
Six rules for good guys in Bond movies:

1. Don't be the first woman Bond shags, as you are bound to die horribly and brutally a short while later. Although if you've just slept with a wrinkled smoothie wearing a fake tan and a safari suit, this might be preferable.
2. Avoid accompanying Bond to carnivals and large crowded places where you can't quite follow what's going on. You're bound to be quietly and efficiently killed by something mysterious you never saw coming, and die with a "huh?" look on your face.
3. Don't stand near water; it always contains something with sharp teeth and a man-sized appetite. Avoid bridges with hinges in the middle. Don't even stand on the edge. If this is the pool:

   O
   

   ...you should be, like, over here:

   <
   
   
   
   Posted by Ade at 01:35 PM
   | Reply
   
   

Empty Spaces is being highlighted

[Big Ego ]
Empty Spaces is being highlighted on GBlogs today, so we'd like to say "hellooo" to you all in a delightful Leslie Phillips voice.

But really, following the unwritten rule of blogs (now written down: "all blogs not written by Anna Pickard are crap"), you should go here.

Uptime, top ranking

[Big Job ]
The realities of "uptime" for Internet sites is discussed by Steve Levin in an article that was linked on Slashdot, so you've probably already seen it. BB agrees wholeheartedly, while being a little confused by references to NOC teams and the huge cast of support personnel seemingly on hand for all web sites - surely all those jobs are done by one entity, aren't they? Usually us.

Talking about defining uptime goals reminds us to avoid products that guarantee 99.99...% uptime. In a previous existence on a lower plane of being, BB worked for a company selling HA software - we won't mention their name to avoid embarrassment (our's). Initially, the product promised the standard four-nines of availability. Then one day, the person editing the sales collateral - who didn't possess a great technical understanding of the subtleties (i.e. marketing) - thought, "Weeeell, why split hairs? Let's just round the figure up!" So this HA product will now give you total uptime all the time, presumably by never ever failing over (which causes outage). That begs the question of why you'd need it in the first place, if your infrastructure is so reliable it never fails over anyway.

Actually, you don't need it. No one needs that kind of confused trash talk near their production systems.

According to GBlogs

[Big Deal ]
, Empty Spaces is an online journal. So we'd better not disappoint:

Crawled out of bed at 11am, rowed with mum - parents SUCK! Went to Foxy's yesterday evening, LOL! Wore my new red Docs! Mike and Den were there! I told Den that his shoes were kewl and he replied something else that drivels on and on like this for entry after entry, oh ghod we can't stand teenage diaries.

BB is vastly insulted by the suggestion that our stream of bile and cynicism is considered a mere diary, no matter how regular or passionate it might appear. BB is preparing to reassert itself. The "I" word is henceforth banned.

Spent

[Big Ego ]
the other night discriminating against tent pegs on the basis of their sexual orientation: bent or straight. Then I swore at the pile of bent ones, which was bigger than the straight pile, and threw them out. No letters please.

I used to bend tent pegs with my foot, which was slow and tedious, but since buying a mallet I've discovered that I can bend many more in the same time. Now I regularly bend a quarter to a third of all my pegs on every camping trip, which would be good news for the plethora of outdoors shops in Manchester if any of them could lower their pretensions sufficiently to sell tent pegs instead of wackily-patterned "x-treeeem" trousers. Of course, it helps that I can uneeringly locate the rockiest patch of ground in any campsite, the one place where three inches of topsoil hides six feet of hardcore. I can't teach you how to develop this ability - it's a gift. Rather as some people can divine the presence of water underground, I am a rock diviner. Some innate sense guides me to the single worst place to pitch a tent in the whole of Wales. Often when I vacate a pitch, quarrying concerns and aggregate companies immediately move in looking for fresh granite reserves.

Once bent, tent pegs develop an incredible flexibility that allows them to be bent more and more into an infinite variety of shapes - every shape except straight again, in fact.

I also love camp cooking - don't listen to anyone who claims they've often heard me moaning about how awful it is. There's something about crouching over a blackened stove full of dangerously flammable liquid, clumsily stuffing burnt fragments of sausage in your mouth with your fingers, that causes everything to just fall away: centuries of civilised behaviour, appetite and weight chief amongst them. It makes me want to hammer a bone through my nose (if I can do that without bending it) and paint some cave walls. X-TREEEM!!