Month: May 2002

🙂

We made it.

“waaait for ittt… waaaiit for ittt…”

Any personal views expressed in these pages are those of the person whose name is associated with it. They do not necessarily represent the views of my employer or any other individual or organisation.

Fuck it.

Anyways I promised comments on this and I don’t know if this says all that much but I thought Willow and Tara were the most convincing same sex couple I’ve seen on tv. The relationship just always seemed to work. Anyways do I think that Buffy is anti-gay because during the course of the show where every single relationship gets broken in a bad way, that relationship gets the same treatment…hmm does that sentence answer it all?

On a somewhat related note, I met Amber Benson last year and she is a wonderfully sweet person and is so much hotter in person than on the tube. That is all.

Recently I have come to the conclusion and I am sure to many of you this is not news, but socialising of any form outside of work with people from your team is not only a very good thing but it is necessary. My professional relationships on the whole are better with people who I have spent time with outside of work and I think that is quite an important thing to recognise.

I go for drinks with my entire team (ok yes all 3 of us) at least once a week and yes it helps that we all get on, but even a while down the pub on a Friday night helps a hell of a lot. I worked on a team for around 18 months where out of 5 people, one person ever went out with other people from work and that was me. Ok I am exaggerating but the scary part is not enough that it makes a difference. Sure we had the odd drink together at company do’s where you pretty much had to be there. And you know what? that sucks big time and it certainly contributed significantly to low moral. It got to the point where they were simply the people I worked with We were not friends we did not hang out we sat at our desks and we worked and that was it. I don’t think it is an employers place to make people spend time together outside of work, but you know sometimes I would have to say that would be a good thing.

I was thinking about it on the way home and I figured I had better expand on some of my thoughts in the last post. Saying it was the first call where I felt like I had a clue wasn’t really right, it was the first call where I was confident that I knew what I was talking about and confident enough to talk about it and play a more active part in the call, which for the first time on a call I had to, we were talking about a sizeable part of the project that was my responsibility and the problems with it. If nothing else it was a confidence booster and having people listen and accept what I was saying was nice. And it wasn’t really winging it all that much, just more a case of not being sure on everything. I’m looking forward to tomorrows call and hopefully a story appearing in El Reg soon after that.

I hate being so unsure of what I’m doing and not knowing how to go about changing it. I wish I had a better idea of what should be going on and what my part in it is. Things could be so much clearer but I guess that is often the case.

That was the first call where I actually felt like hey I have a clue what I’m talking about and people are a) listening to me and b) accepting what I have to say and c) acting on what I have to say. I wonder if it would have been the same if they knew how much I was winging it? Saying that I don’t really think that was as much as I thought it was going to be and a couple more like that will be good.

Adopted child’s brutal revenge stuns nation

A BOY of 12 has stunned Russia by arranging the contract killing of his adoptive parents because he disliked having to tidy his room and brush his teeth.
Yaroslav Kislov, an orphan in the southern town of Volgograd, confessed to police that he had arranged the murders so he could inherit his guardians’ savings of 100,000 roubles (£2,300), and also because he was tired of having to do homework and housework.

Full story: The Observer

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What a world we live in these days. I certainly never thought of that…

SYDNEY (Reuters) – Australian scientists announced on Tuesday a breakthrough in efforts to clone the extinct Tasmanian Tiger, saying they had replicated some of the animal’s genes using DNA extracted from preserved male and female pups.

“We are now further ahead than any other project that has attempted anything remotely similar using extinct DNA,” Mike Archer, director of the Australian Museum, told a news conference.

“What was once nothing more than an impossible dream has just taken another giant step closer to becoming a biological reality,” he said, adding that the ultimate aim was to clone a viable reproducing population of Tasmanian Tigers.

–>
Australian Museum Director Professor Michael Archer takes a close look at an 1866 Tasmanian Tiger embryo in Sydney May 28, 2002 that scientists have used to successfully replicate some of the animals genes using DNA extracted from the specimen. Scientists say they hope to clone a Tasmanian Tiger in 10 years if they are successful in constructing large quantities of all the genes of the extinct animal and sequencing sections of the genome to create a genetic library of Tasmanian Tiger DNA. The animal, also known as a thylacine, was a dog-like carnivorous marsupial with stripes on its back that lived on the Australian island state of Tasmania before it was hunted down by farmers who blamed it for killing sheep. The last known tiger died in 1936. (David Gray/Reuters)
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From Yahoo

WOW pretty much sums this one up. But to clarify, this falls under pdfc; pretty damn fucking cool.

To clarify further, I like this idea, and I like it a lot. Humanity was stupid enough to wipe out an entire species, well now we have gotten a little smarter and we can fix that stupid mistake. pdfc, covers it all

Russia and Nato have signed an agreement which heralds a new era of post-Cold War co-operation.
Protected by missiles, fighter planes and warships standing offshore, 19 Nato leaders and Russian President Vladimir Putin gathered at an airbase outside Rome to establish the Nato-Russia Council.

BBC News: Nato and Russia launch new era