Stressus Maximus Confrontatus In Perpetuum Nexus Plink

gfrancie‘s tales of pizza ordering have reminded me how I dislike phoning places to order food. I’m very reluctant to do it. For some odd reason I find it stressful, the whole business of making phone calls, plus the effort of trying to be understood. Oh, the crosses we foreigners have to bear in a foreign land.

It’s the same in the drive through. I can never understand what the loudspeaker hole is asking me, and I never can make myself understood. The speaker grating emits sounds like a metallic duck with sill rust, plus I feel a twerp shouting “Number 5″ at increasing volumes in the direction of an illuminated sign showing group porn shots of McNuggets and Big Macs.

It’s all the same sort of emotion: food ordering stress.

Also, food tastes so much better if somebody else orders it for you. If you can find a partner who will happily order food for you, then that is True Love and you are Golden.

Le Menu Chez Cogshifter

While sarahparah is away in Aspen, I am contemplating what I shall be cooking myself every evening for the next week or so. Poopsie is no problem: she has certain dishes she likes, and the cupboard is stocked with the necessary ingredients. Although I believe there are a few sausages and other items in the fridge, awaiting my hot griddle, they wont keep me going for more than a couple of evenings.

Now, I could resort to the sort of stuff I used to cook when in digs in Sheffield and Manchester, namely lots of mashed potato, gravy, beans and pork chops, bacon, sausages and so forth. I could drum up a shrimp curry, a timeless classic. Perhaps also a couple of cheese quesadillas with hot chipotle pepper jam. A nice Boeuf Stroganoff, or a creamy Spaghetti Carbonara. An Alton Brown meatloaf. There’s a Fray Bentos pie in the cupboard, together with a couple of mini treacle sponge puddings, the spoils of the England holiday. They wont last long. Alternatively I could go the fruit-route … lots of grapes, peaches, plums, bananas, blueberries et cetera which I could combine with some sort of Bran flakes. That doesn’t sound so bad.

But what I am really looking for is something easily and quickly cooked or obtained, delicious, freshly made and at least temporarily satisfying. And I think I have the solution: McDonald’s!

Am I crazy?

DoveCot Dickheads, POP, IMAP and Sunny Afternoons

“There’s nothing so nice,
On a hot summer’s day,
As messing about on the river.”

Poopsie had a little friend over to play yesterday. Here they are just before we set off for McDonalds. This friend looks so similar to Poopsie that they could be sisters, don’t you think? In fact an old lady stopped me in McDonalds and said “I was looking at your two daughters and thinking how cute they are”. Smirk.

So I am having trouble with my email. They have decided to “migrate” me to the new server, an ostensibly simple task. Except that their new server is some public domain thing called DoveCot written by the open-toed Birkenstock Brigade who have not made sure it supports Outlook properly. This results in my getting double copies of every message. Now, instead of agreeing that they need to properly support Outlook running in POP mode with “leave message on server”, they say that Outlook is “broken” because it doesn’t understand the standard UID syntax. Moreover, they say I should use IMAP, or a different client, et cetera.

BOLLOCKS!

As far as I am concerned, if you write an email server, it needs to support Outlook, regardless of whether Outlook strictly conforms to the protocol. Otherwise, people wont use your server. Worse, if you adopt the attitude that it’s all Microsoft’s fault, it doesn’t help at all, but simply inflames the situation. If these jimmies really expect me to change all my tried and trusted ways of dealing with email just for DoveCot’s sake, they are mistaken. I will simply use a different server.

It reminds me of a recent investigation I did to identify Fast Fourier Transforms for Windows. There is a good one called FFTW, but the developers simply lost me because they said on their Web page, effectively, “FFTW will not work with Microsoft Visual C++ because Microsoft are incapable of writing proper compilers, and it doesn’t compile. Use a proper OS.”. The arrogance here is breathtaking! How not to win friends and influence people. Sheesh.

McSpill

Why did I spill a brimming cup of lemonade all down my trousers in McDonald’s just now?