Tyred

The illness progresses apace. My nose is running like unto a tap whilst my brain is most decidedly not running at all. It keeps hitting breakpoints that I didn't set up and the stack trace seems to be for a different process entirely.

Yes, I am mixing my metaphors like I mix my drinks. Badly.

Given it took me an hour to fry three sausages, it was not the best time to get my car in to the garage for a Service and MOT. Four new tyres and the geometry realigned. I have to admit I Googled "tyre geometry realignment" to check that it wasn't a made-up thing because today they could probably have told me my Ring System needed a Cassini division and I would have gone for it. The only car where that might be an actual thing would be GM's old Saturn brand, which has gone the way of the Sega Saturn.

My face burns from the constant blowing of nose. Tomorrow, I must go to work and do a software release for one guy.

Button Man

Today, I have been putting new buttons on my trousers. With a hammer.

I've been economising on the clothing budget by not buying any, so the slow march of entropy (and being a fat pig) has taken its toll on my trouser buttons. After my trouser supply fell down to the critical threshold of one pair of trousers that don't fall down, I scraped together the cash for some new buttons.

In the past, I'd bought blister packs of sundry sewing supplies from supermarkets, a pointless exercise as the buttons in question are really meant for shirts and tend to break under eh... load. This time I went to a hobby superstore and bought a pack of proper "Jeans" buttons that you basically rivet into place; hence a happy few minutes this morning hitting my pants with a hammer.

It also seems that the Dole Diet is doing me some good as I had to rivet the new buttons a bit tighter to keep said pants in place.

Coloured Rocks

Flicking through the late-night TV channels, I notice a teleshopping programme for typically shonky only-available-on-TV jewellery is actually called "Coloured Rocks".

Truth in Advertising.

The Fat Lady has Sung

Sorry, Opera, but today after a long love affair going back to oohhhhh I dunno, Opera 5.0, I have decided to switch browsers to Google Chrome. We'll still always be friends, though...

Good Enough

It often amuses me when people talk of something being "second-rate", or if they're feeling especially venomous, "third-rate". They're referring back to the old Royal Navy "system of rating" that was used to classify ships back in the age of sail; very roughly, ships of a hundred guns upwards were classed as first-rate, ships of 90 to 98 were second-rate, ships of 60-80 were third-rate and so on down to the sixth rate 20-24 gunners.

The interesting thing is that bigger was not necessarily better. The backbone of the Royal Navy from the mid 18th to early 19th centuries was the third-rater, as it was for most other fleets- the French came up with the definitive third-rate in their "seventy-four", a number of which we made off with and liked so much that we built our own 74-gun ships to replace our less-seaworthy 70s. A third-rater had less firepower and durability than the larger first and second rates, but was more seaworthy, faster and gun-for-gun, significantly cheaper to build and operate. While you'd want your first and second rate ships for fleet engagements like Trafalgar, most of the day-to-day work of war at sea was performed by third rates.

The third rate was "Good Enough". You might need two third-raters to engage a first-rate, but for the cost of a first-rate, you might be able to build three third-raters, and for a navy maintaining a blockade of Napoleonic France and responsible for protecting a maritime Empire spread across the planet, the third-rater was the way to go.

So next time you're accusing your local football team of  being third-rate, you're accusing them of being exactly Good Enough.