Documentum: find the OK button

My first experience with Documentum:



Stare at the screen for a while
Find the OK button
Run from the room screaming usability like it's 1999...

Cruise ships struggle to stay afloat

Surely just one of a number of inevitable recession-orientated headline puns we will have to suffer over the coming months.

Likely others:

• Mining sector in big hole
• Housing boom demolished
• Carpenters get screwed [ok I think we can stop now: Ed]

Facebook vs LinkedIn

Dear (insert collegue name here),

I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. It's just like facebook without the stupid walls and sending people virtual flowers / hugs / games. Jesus. Have people not got better things to do with their lives. Etc...

Yours etc...

The CD you can't listen to (a decade later)

They'll last forever, Phillips said, 'forever' in this case actually being 100 years (well below the 500 year life of a book printed on acid-free archive paper).

Well just 10 years on, and some of my CDs are looking decidedly worse for wear.

I'm ripping my CD collection after being seperated from it for about five years (due to moving country). And I'm not liking what I'm seeing.

On several disks I have peripherial (or central) glue deterioration, leaving a 'watermark' where the foil is no longer attached to the platter. In some cases (Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works for example) the deterioration is all but a hair from the end of the music track itself.

Here's a (pretty bad) scan of the problem:



What we're looking at is that off-grey area away from the edge of the disk (not the funny pattern that the end of the disk made when it was scanned). Lets be clear about this - this is not abrasion, or a smudge. This is the glue holding the foil to the platter failing.

Fortunately I have two copies of 'The Downward Spiral', because this one is clearly on the way out:

...but I only have one of 'Fixed', which is failing from the center, so I guess it's time to make a backup:



I'm way less than impressed with all this, especially as I've found 3 cases in 50 and I'm about 1/10th of the way though (that's not even thinking about ripping all the CD singles). By contrast my (few) vinyl records are still as they were 10 years ago.

The car you can't sit in

On holiday in the UK we hired a Ford Focus estate. Nice car, but the bucket of the seat was narrower than my arse, so an hour in my legs were going numb ... and an hour doesn't get you very far when you're leaving Heathrow.

I am an average build male, 32" waist, generally regarded as slightly skinny. I can only conclude that this is a car for teenage girls / bulemics / models / junkies (combine any two)... none of which strike me as the estate-car demographic.

WTF?

The cup you can't hold

This coffee cup has a perfectly round and smooth handle, thus making it impossible to grip without burning your pinkie:




...so I had to drink my coffee with two hands, like a twat. I blame Ali McBeal.