Posts filed under 'Bizarreness'
Whilst having a rather annoying stomach pain overnight and lying on the floor in an effort (quite a successful one I might add) to alleviate the pain, something occurred to me that has occurred to me on many previous occasions, and probably goes some way towards proving my partial insanity.
If ceilings were floors, they would never meet the applicable safety standards because they have all of these things sticking out of them, effectively posing a trip hazard. It’s not immediately apparent just how much is sticking out of the ceiling simply by looking at it, so what I suggest you do at some stage during the day is look at the room you are in upside-down. Arguably the best way to do this is to either lie on the floor and position your head so that it is almost upside down, or do a handstand (or as close as you can get to it), then look around the room. All of those light fixtures, exit signs, fire sprinklers, uneven grills on air conditioning outlets, smoke detectors, security alarm sensors…and in some cases even the fluorescent lights aren’t level with the ceiling.
If gravity were reversed in buildings, we would have completely useless and dangerous floors (and that’s not even taking in to account the tiled ceilings that would fall in to a gap, exposing all the wiring and air conditioning ducts, in many office buildings…but it’s more fun to imagine that the ceiling is solid).
To the same extent, what if we did build buildings the other way up? It would be rather odd having the lights and air conditioning vents in the floor…and those emergency exit signs would make a lot of sense on the floor, especially as we are taught that in a fire you should get as low to the ground as possible to minimise your exposure to smoke.
I do have to admit though, that it wouldn’t make much sense to have carpeted ceilings.
Samuel
June 15th, 2007 at 08:33am
This article in the Winnipeg Free Press is good for a laugh. It would appear that they ran out of last names in China a long time ago, and China now have so many people with the same name that the Chinese government are considering some amusing measures to fix it.
To get an idea of how serious this problem is, 85% of China’s population share a mere hundred surnames…that would be like having the entire Sydney White Pages filled with just Smiths and Browns.
A quote from the article:
In April, a survey reported by Xinhua News Agency said that Wang was the most common surname in China, with about 93 million people sharing the name. That was followed by Li with about 92 million and Zhang with about 87 million.
The Chinese Academy of Sciences has reported that at least 100,000 people share the name of “Wang Tao”, the newspaper said, causing problems in daily life.
The solution to this, apparently, is to alter Chinese laws to allow children to be given hyphenated names (such as what I have). This would unfortunately take a few generations for the effect to take hold, and of course the problem there would either be only slightly fixed, or result in names that won’t fit on a page in the phone book. It also doesn’t help from a pronunciation point of view that many last names are very similar:
Under a proposal distributed to police departments around the country by the Ministry of Public Security, parents called Zhou and Zhu would have four options when naming their newborn, the China Daily reported.
Their child’s surname could be Zhou, Zhu, Zhouzhu or Zhuzhou.
The simple thing from my perspective would be to allow people to change their names so that you could have a larger set of names, however there seems to be some cultural issues surrounding that idea.
One thing I do know though, until it’s fixed, trying to ring Wang Tao when I forget his number is going to result in a large profit for a bunch of phone companies.
Samuel
June 13th, 2007 at 10:50am
Here’s a conversation I had with someone on the phone yesterday:
Them: (name of business).
Me: Good afternoon, I was just wondering what your dress code is?
Them: Anything from casual to formal.
Me: OK then, thank you for your time.
Them: Is that OK?
Me: Yes, that’s fine, thank you.
Them: OK, good bye.
(They hang up)
The stand out quote from them in that conversation is: “Is that OK?”
What a strange question…it’s their dress code. What were they going to do if I said “no”? Change the dress code because a random person rings them and tells them to? I doubt it.
Update: Clayton Northcutt has pointed out a deficiency in my logic which I can only attribute to being quite tired at the time. See the comments for details. End Update
Samuel
June 9th, 2007 at 08:14am
I was trying to avoid writing anything about Paris Hilton’s jail sentence, however it’s very hard to avoid hearing about the story over and over and over, and therefore hard to not think about it. One thing did occur to me though that I think is worth sharing with you.
Late last week I walked past one of the stores in Westfield Woden and noticed that they were featuring t-shirts in their front window with the slogan “Free Paris” on them. The t-shirt annoyed me, as I can’t see any good reason why Paris Hilton shouldn’t spend time in jail for her criminal activities. In hindsight I would like to have started ranting and raving loudly at the front door of this store, although it wouldn’t have achieved anything, and I tend not to be quite that extroverted.
The one good thing I can see here is that the people who produced these t-shirts have just lost their market. Ms. Hilton’s release in to house arrest in her mansion is about as close as you can get to a full release without releasing her, and will probably be suffice for the people who wanted her released. I can’t see the t-shirt sales going anywhere now, unless the stores add an “I” and a “d” to the t-shirt with a marker pen so that it reads “I Freed Paris”…but even then I can’t imagine that many people would want to buy a shirt which has been written on (autographed shirts excepted).
I’m not going to comment on Ms. Hilton’s mental state, which is apparently the reason for her more lenient house arrest sentence, however I will defer to the following quote from the fictional mayor of Arcadia Waters, Col Dunkley, from the television programme Grass Roots, as a seemingly adequate description of her psychiatrist.
“You can always find an academic who’ll swear on a stack of bibles that he agrees with you.”
Perhaps I’m being a bit harsh…but I just find it peculiar how often this psychiatrist will jump to Ms. Hilton’s defence, and say whatever he needs to say in order to get her out of a tricky situation.
Samuel
June 8th, 2007 at 12:26pm
This blog, like any other WordPress blog, receives plenty of comment spam, admittedly it has been receiving and awful lot less comment spam since moving from Bluehost to AussieHQ hosting (dropped from thousands per month to hundreds per month), and the spam filter does a pretty good job at marking it all as spam, and even better yet, it hasn’t had a false positive (marking a legitimate comment as spam) for many months.
Update: Correction, there was a false positive earlier this week which was brought to my attention today. End Update
However I do, every month or so, get a false negative (which in my opinion is much better than a false positive) where a spam comment doesn’t get marked as spam. Due to the fact that these comments appear to come from non-existent users (who naturally don’t have any approved comments), the false negatives land in the moderation queue and I manually mark them as spam, so you never see them.
Today I received one of those spam comments, and I thought I’d share it with you because I can’t work out what it’s going on about, and I was hoping that you might have a theory.
run house…
Very actual information about run house….
Just like all comments spam there is a link to a website with absolutely nothing to do with the topic of the comment, and the aim of the spam is to get you to click the link…but why on earth would anybody click a link for that? What on earth is a “run house” and why do I need “very actual information” about one?
Moon experts might down play the effect a full moon has on people, but if they are going to speculate about what would happen if we had two moons, then they are probably just as influenced by the full moon as the crazy people of this planet.
Samuel
June 1st, 2007 at 02:08pm
Thanks to IBN News for alerting me to this story (it’s a good thing I still have that Google alert for Dickson College!).
There was a fire in a classroom at about 12:40pm on Tuesday at Dickson College. Police are calling the fire “suspicious”. According to ACT Police about 600 students were evacuated, and a teacher hurt her foot during the evacuation. As a police investigation is currently underway, I will reserve my comments on this particular fire for another date.
I have fond memories of the strange activities that they liked to call fire drills when I was a student at Dickson College though. I remember one in particular where everyone was evacuated in a semi-chaotic manner…once outside, nobody quite knew how far away from the building everyone was supposed to be. At first all the students were able to go virtually anywhere they wanted to, then an exclusion zone of about twenty metres was setup around the front office, followed by a fire brigade official telling the then-deputy principal that the students were too close to the building…so they moved us closer to another one instead. Nobody had the faintest clue what was going on, not even the people who organised the drill.
The only other times I can remember the fire alarm ever going off at Dickson College is when the alarm actually thought something was wrong, it was rarely ever right, but it did happen often enough to remove any real need for fire drills.
People who have been reading this blog for a long time would remember that when I was a student at Dickson College I was also an employee there, and I clearly remember working in the tiny LOTE (Languages Other Than English) computer lab in the morning during one of the school holidays. I was busy working when the fire alarm went off. I did a quick check of my surroundings and could see and smell no smoke or fire, so I got my things together so that I could quickly evacuate if I needed to, and continued working.
The fire alarm at Dickson was separated in to two components, one was the “user friendly” control panel which certain staff had access to, the other was the actual fire detection system which the Fire Brigade has access to. The “user friendly” system was used for the emergency intercom system and basic control of the alert and evacuate tones. Standard procedure was usually for the registrar to open this, make an announcement that the alarm is being investigated, and silence the alarm while investigations were carried out.
On this particular day there was no announcement and there was no silencing, so ten minutes in to the alarm, the automated evacuation program kicked in…an endless loop of an American voice saying “Please proceed to the nearest exit and evacuate in an orderly manner” twice, followed by a few cycle of the evacuation “whoop whoop” tone.
There was still no sign of smoke or fire, and by this stage it was quite clear that I may have been the only staff member in the building as the alarm automatically gets silenced when the door on the “user friendly” alarm control system gets opened, so I picked up my things and quickly walked towards the front office. When I got there I saw the registrar battling with the door on the control system which appeared to be jammed…she informed me that the fire was non-existent, and the alarm had been set off by tradesmen removing asbestos from the art building. I waited with her in the front office until the official all clear was given by the Fire Brigade, after which I went back to work.
Later on in the day when I saw my Indian boss, the head of the IT department, again I asked him where he was during the alarm…amazingly, despite an alarm speaker being situated right outside his office, and the smoke doors in the same area automatically closing quite noisily, he told me that he wasn’t aware that the alarm had gone off. He had been sitting in his office working, wondering what the noise was…even the automated evacuation alarm wasn’t enough for him to consider that something may have been wrong…but then again, he wasn’t particularly bright. He has improved since, and even has IT qualifications now (he had a horticulture degree or something at the time).
Samuel
May 23rd, 2007 at 10:36pm
First it was the DVD player, now it’s the microwave, what appliance will be next to die in my house? And which one of you has a voodoo doll replica of my house? And why do you keep sticking pins in it?
On a slightly less important note, I gave up on tipping State of Origin matches a long time ago, so for this I will defer to a random number generator. 1 for New South Wales, 2 for Queensland.
The random number generator generated 1, if the person with the voodoo doll could see to a New South Wales victory it would be appreciated.
Update: It looks like the Voodoo Doll person stuck a pin in New South Wales at half time…this is fantastic, I can blame someone who might not even exist for the footy results! End Update
Samuel
May 23rd, 2007 at 07:00pm
Thanks Thomas, I love the quote, it seems to fit perfectly.
Why does it fit perfectly? Well I can think of two reasons in the last week which could probably summarise it.
I’ll start with the coffee machine at work, I pressed the button to get a large coffee, it made the coffee and then informed me that the dreg drawer was full, so I dutifully pulled out the dreg drawer and noticed that there was barely anything in it…I placed it back in the machine, and suddenly all was right in the world according to the coffee machine. I started talking to it, and informed it, much to the astonishment of those around me, that it was an attention seeker.
Some people think I drink too much coffee, but I was only on my third for the day at the time.
Skip forward to today and, after driving myself mad trying to work out the title and artist of a snippet of music (I’m really bad at that game) I went to the source of my confusion and asked for the title. A short time later I had the artist and title and located a copy of the song in question, namely “Take on me”…I started listening to the song and, a few moments later, recognised the song (I previously didn’t know the title of the song, even though I recognised the music)…I thought “aha!”, at which point I realised that this was the name of the artist as well as my exclamation…my decision from that point was obvious, I had spent far too much time in front of the computer and I better go and vacuum my bed.
Insane? Me? Yep!
Samuel
May 20th, 2007 at 12:02pm
I receive some weird junk in my email, but this one from “Jelle Hooper” absolutely takes the cake.
From: Jelle Hooper Jelle-Hooper@angelofdestiny.nl
To: admin@samuelgordonstewart.com
Date: Apr 29, 2007 10:32 PM
Subject: Insane report
Important communique!
Instead of being someone who wants to own a big airline, you become an airline boss who happens to not own an airline at the time.
Some unbelievably wise words of wisdom from my insane angel of destiny.
Samuel
April 30th, 2007 at 04:13am
Just went up again! And on public service pay day too.
Was
Unleaded: 126.9
Diesel: 130.9
LPG: 61.9
Now
Unleaded: 133.9
Diesel: 130.9
LPG: 61.9
I wouldn’t be surprised if diesel and LPG go up shortly. Surely if this really was part of a discounting cycle the petrol companies would have gone broke earlier in the week.
Samuel
April 19th, 2007 at 07:33am
Ah the perils of automation. I’m sure we’ve all stumbled upon those peculiar spam emails where slabs of various books are intertwined in an effort to get an image about what you should do on the stock market through the spam filters, but one in particular has outdone itself.
This morning, amongst the other spam in my spam folder, was a message from “Qgpkarate quake” titled “Be an grandniece”…the first line appears to be a reply to the title:
“Never, madam,” cried he, affronted in his turn: “never, I assure you. “
Samuel
March 22nd, 2007 at 02:16pm
Or perhaps I should have said “An incompetent message from the ACT Government”.
Saturday the 9th of March 2007 doesn’t exist…you can have Friday the 9th or Saturday the 10th.
“Tow away-fines will be reinforced”. It’s good to see that the Chief Minister is inventing a new dialect of English, pity it doesn’t make any sense. I’d also love to know how you reinforce a fine.
Incidentally, the sign is at the Ainslie Avenue end of Kogarah Lane, a lane which is always filled with parked cars. I wonder where, with all the parking restrictions on nearby streets, the government were expecting the cars to be parked during the mysterious no parking period?
I had a chat with Clive Robertson about this sign and he was quite amused, neither of us think anybody could be fined for parking in the no parking zone, as there is no way to know when the no parking period was.
Samuel
March 13th, 2007 at 09:50am
According to the logs, somebody landed on this website last week by searching for “promo presentation Powerpoint vacuum cleaner”.
This is the 56th result (6th result on 6th page) on Google for that search query.
Whilst I’m confused as to what this person was looking for, I’m even more confused as to why they followed the link to this site…the result seems to have very little to do with their search query, although as I said, I have absolutely no idea what they were searching for.
Anybody care to enlighten me?
Samuel
March 12th, 2007 at 03:49pm
In an email selling “Viawagra” and “Valwum”, a nice friendly spammer sent me a confused story about gambling.
Boys, said Mr. Weasley under his breath, I dont want you betting…
Thats all your savings … Your mother
Dont be a spoilsport, Arthur! boomed Ludo Bagman, rattling his
Rattling his what? and did the boys end up gambling away their life savings to the delight of Arthur and the dismay of Mr. Weasley and mother? Would anybody like to complete the story?
Samuel
February 19th, 2007 at 10:15am
I know people at 2CC read this site, and I would like to let you all know that I am now at breaking point. Today has been an unmitigated disaster, with a strange attempt to fill in breakfast air time when the network programming didn’t come through, and now a complete failure of the automation and a constant repeating of the emergency tape’s copy of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds Of Silence”, not to mention yesterday’s failure to broadcast orange warning emergency information.
As for this afternoon, John B1_B5 made these comments a short time ago in the Rain, Hail, Blue and Orange Alerts post.
But let me just say this – I’m getting sick and tired of hearing them play “The Sound of Silence” every time they come back from a news break !
I’ve heard “The Sound Of Silence” being played 15 times in the past 2 hours !
They’re now playing it whenever thay go to an ad break as well.
Somebody obviously needs a swift kick up the rear end !
I then wrote:
It’s the emergency tape John…I hear it every now and then during New Day Australia, but today has been an absolute shocker for 2CC.
They obvious haven’t bothered to employ a panel operator today, they are automated, and either the pulses aren’t coming through from Sydney, or somebody killed the 2CC computer, or forgot to program the ad breaks…but that’s irrelevant, 2UE traffic and weather are coming through during the news, they need a panel operator for this show, and don’t have one.
I thought it was bad when they scheduled half the Christmas day ad breaks to be a minute overtime, drowning out 2UE with a cacophony of noise, but today is clearly worse.
I’m very disappointed with 2CC today, and for a fair bit of the last week, I’m surprised that the program director (whoever it is these days) didn’t recognise the need for a panel operator today.
In my opinion, senior staff should be monitoring the station, and the emergency tape should be setup to send a text message off to someone if it gets started…and if something like this happens, somebody should go to the station and fix things up.
In all seriousness, if I was a panel operator for 2CC, I would be making my way into 2CC right now (well, about two hours ago) to either panel until 6pm, or fix the automation.
2CC have been doing very well for the half a year or so, with minimal problems, and a strong commitment to making the station sound good…they should be ashamed of this latest effort…or lack thereof.
And I’m sorry, but the irony of “The Sounds Of Silence” being on an emergency tape triggered by 15 seconds of silence has well and truly worn off.
The only good thing about this afternoon is that we haven’t heard yesterday’s weather report since Murray Olds started, but I would prefer to hear it than yet another repeat of the bloody sounds of silence.
The bottom line on this is that if we have a repeat performance of today’s disaster, 2CC risk losing me to the horrid local ABC station…it might be filled with insane people, but at least they have local weather, don’t play yesterday’s weather, and aren’t going to play the same song 500 times a day.
If I, as a staunch supporter of 2CC, am considering switching station, think about how many people you have already lost.
Samuel
Update 6:12pm: The normally automated shows appear to have scheduled ad breaks…Sports Today has ads! Hooray! End Update
January 1st, 2007 at 04:42pm
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