Be Excellent To Each Other

I love that

So, after being given a guided tour round the pool tables, chess sets, table tennis tables, football tables, game consoles, massive two-player Time Crisis II cabinet, internal cinema, kitchens and canteen that offer free food and drink all day, deck chairs and hammocks at the London office of a certain well known company, my would-be manager had to point out that it was still a job, and I would still be expected to do work. If I get the job. Which he told me "not to worry about".

It's been a fair old morning!

Sounds promising. Things crossed for you.

Thank you. I'm sitting at my desk in my current job like some kind of amateur contortionist right now thanks to all the limb-crossing.

Bamba, much excitement about the Commonwealth games? Are you going to atke some photos of the bike racing for me, the course is a right good 'un?

There's some chat about the games in general around me but it's mostly people worrying about how it'll impact their travel as most folks I know didn't get tickets for stuff they wanted. Not that people are against it or anything and generally people are pretty happy to be hosting the event. Aside from just the general atmosphere around the place I'm mostly looking forward to going to the Science Centre and seeing what the BBC are up to with their UHD and Occulus Rift experiments:

http://advanced-television.com/2014/07/ ... or-bbc-rd/

I hadn't really looked at the cycling (outside of a wander around the area of the mountain biking track the other weekend) but the map for the road race looks like it would be excellent, if only because you'd be bombing down the kind of roads that are usually stuffed full of non-bike traffic. Although you'd also get a brilliant tour of all the sites of the city which would be pretty sweet.the time trial map looks like it covers quite an area, but the map on the official site if fuck awful so it's really hard to see exactly where it goes.

Does someone fancy referring me to somewhere that tells me what happens to a paintball when it impacts upon something?

I want to know what happens to the paintball itself (rather than the paint inside the paintball) and specifically whether the paintball breaks up (such that the fragments might do some damage).

Anyone know anything about that then?

Would YouTube help? I bet someone has a super slow motion video of one breaking.

But in answer to your original question, no. I know nothing about paintball apart from getting hit in the nuts when I went once.

Do your own research!

Haha.

If memory serves, a paintballs skin is fairly thin and fractures on impact, releasing the paint. It then dissolves in the damp, as it is hydroscopic. I can't imagine them doing any damage after impact, as all the energy has dissipated from them, and they are all floppy.

Busted. But seriously, I can't be arsed.

Now that was an awesome idea. They do fragment don't they! Thought as much.

Get a paralegal.

I'll be redundant in a couple of weeks so they're lucky I'm still doing any work and not phoning a load of agencies. I did that earlier.

get a paintball gun and shoot paintballs at members of staff. n must be greater than 30 for it to be statistically significant.

MaliA makes working science fun.

Bad thoughts to have in pubs whilst your drink is being poured, number 94 of the ongoing series:
Working out how many pints it takes for you to max out your credit card.

Pointless update: threatened my opponent to send data and slow mo youtube video to a medical expert because expert doesn't get the difference between "blunt trauma" and paint and paintball fragments fired into your eyeball at up to 300 feet per second. The reason is bound to be "meh. Do what you want".

Oh my word, I do believe The Guardian has plumbed a new nadir, this is truly must-read and hilarious, especially the comments.

I would've sworn this was parody/satire, but it's actually REAL...



http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfre ... CMP=twt_gu

Marvel and gasp in sheer, hysterical wonderment at stuff like this:



I genuinely ROFLed at the caption below poor old Thomas the Tank Engine's cheerful, smiling little mugshot. Absolute, unmitigated comedy gold.

The lovely Ms Tracey Van Slyke: I salute you, madam.

Oh dear. The Grauniad descended into self-parody so slowly I didn't even notice.

It definitely out-Guardians itself at least once a week, but still the only newspaper campaigning against FGM and for digital privacy on a regular basis, so is ok in my book.

Every single free newspaper website has clickbait for this exact purpose. It's still does some of the best investigative journalism going from a newspaper though. Hard to dispute that much.

Thomas and friends is fucking shit though. Either old school Thomas the tank engine or (I never thought I'd say this) Chuggington all the way. Speaking of which, whoever gave the town planning guy in that town the job needs his fucking head looking at. Surely at the interview stage he'd have revealed his hand to say that he's going to create a town with fucking train lines everywhere giving no easy access to anything rather than using driverless trains, which whilst benefitting the anti union sentiment that clearly prevails in chugland is somewhat lacking in the efficiency that would be expected from an autonomous transport system by firstly making the trains sentient, but also making them complete and fucking cretinous dicks. No one has been sold a pup of a transport system like that since Springfield got a monorail. Although saying that, the Greendale train line to pencaster seems a little extravagant as it only has five passengers a week, and always the same passengers. And there is clearly a road there that works quite effiicnetly because until they (in a complete volte face for royal mail) opened the most bleeding edge tech and delivery mechanism enhanced sorting office in Greendale, Pat used to drive there to pick up the post happily everyday. In fact, thinking about it, the guy who set up that system is clearly related to the chuggington town planner, and quite possibly has a cousin in the welsh fire service. All of them clearly left wing with an obsession with unnecessarily maximizing state resources. Thatcher would be spinning in her grave.

Bravo sir, bravo. *applause*

I'm not saying "everything in The Guardian is shite" or that I disagree with everything they do, far from it, I'll take them over any tabloid obv. But fuck me, even if they are just trolling their own site - which I've got my doubts.

Man, it made me laugh though, so it's all good.

So... you announce the news on facebook, but not in here eh? That's how it's going to be from now on is it

POTW.

Superb.

Heh, I've had a bit of an evening too! Thanks though!

And yes, to those of you who I'm not friends with on my future sort-of-employer's* website, I did get the job!


*sort-of, because I won't be employed by Facebook, but by a third-party IT firm, albeit one that handles all of Facebook's IT globally, and in a position where I will only work for Facebook, in Facebook offices. And apparently when I start, my Facebook profile will be altered to an employee one. Which is why I need to spend the next month getting used to lowering the swear count and threats of violence to co-workers in my status updates.

Well played that man.

A tip of the hat to you Sir

Well played Zio

Nice work, Zio!

Sounds better than the surprise overnight trip to Brum Ive got tomorrow.

Thanks everyone!

I had my new employer call me a little earlier to tell me I'll have my contract this afternoon. They want me to start on August 26th, so still plenty of time to hand in my notice.

In other news, I'm drowning in work here. My boss always said to me that I should just let him know and ask if I needed help, so I have, and he's fobbed me off. And there's a PA here who has a massively inflated opinion of herself, always talks down to me and complains about me behind my back (but she did it to both my predecessors too, so she doesn't get taken too seriously). She's been on extended leave lately, but came back today and has already been on the phone, talking to me as if I'm some very special kind of stupid.

All jobs have downsides and obviously this new one won't be much different in that respect, but all this here lately feels like it's the Universe, telling me everything about this move is right.

*like*

<Zio changes his relationship with current employer to "it's complicated">

You should totally hand in your resignation in the form of a printed out Facebook status update, and Photoshop a shit load of likes/shares on to it

Read that and weep (rest of) Europe.

In related news, i'm of to Alton Towers for the umpteenth time again in a couple of weeks

Current employer not taking news very well. New contract most complicated and full of legalese I've ever seen. Little doubt I'm going to be working for an American company. Stay tuned.

Oh, and they want to see my degree certificate. I'm pretty sure I lost that the day after I graduated.

Current employer should have treated you better, then you wouldn't have been looking for work elsewhere.

You can get a replacement, just contact your old uni. They may even have a form to fill in online to get a new one sent out.

It's all been a bit of a rollercoaster all this. There were six interviews with seven different people in the finish over the last three weeks and I now feel totally fucked. Still can't quite believe it's happened.

Revel in their annoyance, don't feel guilty about it It's not like they ever gave a crap about what you wanted.

As a very wise man on here once said "The only difference between loyalty and not, is the sincerity of the sorry from the company when they kick you in the nuts."

That always was a good quote. My dad said much the same thing when I was talking to him about it last night.

I dunno... I've had grievances about where I'm working now, but I wasn't planning on leaving and wasn't even looking for anything else. This new company approached me. You can imagine when I got the email from someone purporting to be from FB in California saying they'd liked my LinkedIn profile and wanted to talk to me about a vacancy they had - I thought it was some kind of phishing spam. I checked the headers on the email and did a whois on the domain it'd come from before I replied to it! When I was chatting to my soon-to-be line manager yesterday, he told me he did the exact same thing when they approached him too!

Once, on handing in my notice I was told that it "wasn't convenient" and then "how I'd let everybody down, a team that has supported you" by not staying at a lower wage for an extra month. I got over that one quickly enough with the large payrise I was going to.

In more related news, Grim... how big is your garden?

http://www.italintl.com/category.php?ca ... 20Coasters

One of those "what could possibly go wrong" moments.



Followed by

https://www.facebook.com/whitehatmedia/ ... 7465346902

I do have to agree with her on the main point of if theres a cycle lane that they are not using, instead choosing to block (often rush hour) traffic, that does make them collosal pricks.

See also: not choosing to release the snake of 20+ cars you've built up. If that were me I'd be extraordinarily embarrased.

If cycle lanes were in good states of repair they would be used.

There really are very few good cycle lanes that are clear of debris, or that don't abruptly stop and start, dumping bikes back out into the flow of traffic.

A very common design is to have them running down the left side of the road, paying no attention to side streets. Cars will then overtake and turn left across your path, assuming you can't possibly be travelling at a decent speed, or turn right across the front of you as you are less visible.

In that situation it's actually much safer to be on the main carriageway rather than the cycle lane, even ignoring all the grit and glass you get at the side of the road.

I read that tweet as distasteful hyperbole rather than as a serious statement of murderous intent which is how many of the commentators there seem to have interpreted it.

If cyclists don't like cycle lanes for whatever reason, are using the main carriageways and/or they're not to their liking - tarmac 'em over immediately and return the much needed road-space back to cars. Everyone's happy.

(If cycle lanes are present, I think their use should be mandatory on pain of an on the spot fine, no excuses. Same goes for cycling on pavements; funnily enough very nearly got run down yesterday by some dick doing 20mph on the pavement in busy Manchester city centre...).