Freesteel Blog » Back and lazy

Back and lazy

Wednesday, July 26th, 2006 at 11:24 am Written by:

cliffs of bolt tail

We had good weather down in Devon, and were determined to stay until it went bad. But it just got hotter and hotter until we couldn’t take it anymore. It was a a boil-in-a-bag in our suits when we went out on our kayaks. The water was still freezing when we dived deep, so was quite refreshing. I meant to have a write-up up, but the Python Imaging Library you get with Python24 of enthought can’t decode jpgs, so there goes my standard scheme of shrinking batches of photos to the correct size. I’ve put up much less on the wikiscuba about all this than I intended to by now.

It’s so easy to fall behind on the write-ups of holidays when you’re taking enough, and interesting things are happening during them. I can bore people silly in the pub about what I did last weekend. Sometimes they’re interested, and sometimes they’re just being polite. If you put it up on the web they can read it themselves — if they want to — during work when they have even less good things to do. Then you’re freed from keeping track of who you have blabbed your latest anecdote to, because you can assume anyone could have seen it.

I’m always amazed at how we do this — not only remembering stuff, but remembering who we have told our stuff to. Occasionally I get it wrong and tell very interesting story to the same person twice. Sometimes the person I’m telling it to takes the piss and tries to make the mistake into an embarrassing incident. Computers have cache tables, so it’s up to the receiver to tell whether it has heard the information already. That would be more sensible. Maybe we shouldn’t mind hearing the same story twice; it gives us a opportunity to tell whether anything has been changed in it, and determine what information is unreliable. Maybe if people allowed that to happen, we’d be telling the same stories over and over again every night.

I want to put a link to the numbers joke here, but I can’t find it. The story is as follows: Stranger in bar hears a local say “63”, and everyone chuckles. It’s explained to him that they’ve all heard the stories so often that they’ve numbered them to save their breath. Stranger says, “Okay, I’ll try. 47!” Whole place falls down laughing as if it’s the funniest thing they have ever heard. Stranger asks, “What was it?” The local replies, “It’s the way you told it.”

Anyone got a link to a list of jokes of such nature for citations? Jokes are very difficult to remember, but you can be very popular with friends and strangers and potential girlfriends if you know a lot of good ones. So why don’t we soak them up naturally? I’d been meaning to learn some, along with some magic tricks before I go backpacking again.

Anyway, we’re back. Nothing went wrong with our kayak diving this time, and we still can’t believe no one else does it seriously. We’ve been out on a boat in Liverpool Bay since them, and dived a couple of wrecks near the giant gas platform. They’re building another field of wind turbines out there, which will be a lot nicer.

3 Comments

  • 1. Bryce Hendrix replies at 4th August 2006, 6:34 pm :

    Just wanted to let you know, PIL’s lack of JPEG support was fixed on the official 1.0 release of Python 2.4 Enthought Edition

  • 2. Sym replies at 8th August 2006, 10:56 am :

    Am I the only one who thinks you look huge and the rocks you are standing on look like a long stretch of costline?

    Infact, I can’t tell if you have edited it. mmm

  • 3. Julian replies at 9th August 2006, 11:47 am :

    This sounds like a bit of a fractal effect — the texture is self-similar at all scales.

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