The Rant Thread. :)

Samuel Creshal · Post by **Samuel Creshal** » Mon, 21. Oct 13, 10:30

Bloody hell, even thieves are elitist idiots. Stole a Macbook and two iPads, but left the eight much more expensive ThinkPads in the office.

greypanther · Post by **greypanther** » Mon, 21. Oct 13, 11:03

That's not elitism Samuel, that's just being pragmatic, even thieves know there is a huge demand for Macs and ipads. Supply and demand I would say...

I need to rant about the latest moronic decision out of Camorons little brain:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24604218

The government has given the go-ahead for the UK's first new nuclear station in a generation.

France's EDF Energy will lead a consortium, which includes Chinese investors, to build the Hinkley Point C plant in Somerset.

Ministers say the deal will help take the UK towards low-carbon power and lower generating costs in future.

Critics warn guaranteeing the group a price for electricity at twice the current level will raise bills.

So the arsehole thinks it is a good idea does he? It will indeed lower carbon emissions for the country, but at an unacceptable cost!

1) The electricity produced will be at a much higher cost than one alternative I can think of.

2) Security of supply? Bollocks! We won't be relying on the Russians for gas anymore, cos it will be owned and run by the French and Chinese! ( How much of EDF does the French tax payer own?

)
3) Guaranteed prices for the product produced for what 35 years? meanwhile the British tax payer will pay for disposal of dangerous waste and the decommissioning of the plant! ( Please prove me wrong on this! ) So guaranteed, tax payer subsidised profits to the French shareholders?
4) We still have an appalling record on nuclear waste disposal; see the ongoing farce that is Sellafield/Windscale!

Camoron is a complete and utter idiot! Either he and his cronies are so out of touch with reality, or perhaps they all have an ulterior motive for such ****** decisions?

I think Robin Williams probably had it right, we need our politicians to be more like sports people; they need to have displayed on their shirts, every multinational who sponsors them in one way or another; be that future; past or present sponsors.

RegisterMe · Post by **RegisterMe** » Mon, 21. Oct 13, 12:10

/insert rant about greypanther's rant

.

Slightly more seriously, perhaps it's worth a thread of its own?

Stars_InTheirEyes · Post by **Stars_InTheirEyes** » Mon, 21. Oct 13, 12:57

@greypanther I completely disagree. To me, the cost is irrelevant if it means taking one more step away from coal/oil/gas dependency.

RegisterMe wrote:/insert rant about greypanther's rant .

Slightly more seriously, perhaps it's worth a thread of its own?

I think so.

Chips · Post by **Chips** » Mon, 21. Oct 13, 19:35

Thirded

Bishop149 · Post by **Bishop149** » Tue, 22. Oct 13, 15:54

So word 2010 can't cross-reference to heading text if they are in text boxes.

In word 2007 apparently this was also true but there was a work around involving converting a textbox to a frame.

It appears that in their infinite wisdom microsoft have closed this work around, you can no longer turn textboxes into frames (the command is still there but it doesn't DO anything!) but only create either frames or text boxes.

So I am now faced with

a) Keep everything as it is but do all of the figure referencing by hand. . . ie if Insert one between 2 and 3 so that 3 become 4 I then have to manually change ALL the subsequent cross references to increase them by 1.

b) Redo all my figures so the captions are in frames not textboxes, which I just tried on one figure. . . as soon as I ungrouped it I lost ALL of the alignments and formatting
Redoing all that will take I would estimate about a week. (it took me almost a month to format and align them all nicely the first time round)

I am ****** annoyed.

Edit: Oh FFS, I have just realised that Word provides a captioning function to do this. . . there is just one problem. It is shit.
It appear to have a character limit. . . . a VERY small character limit, oh and can't handle things like bullets or numbered lists.

It is clear designed for children making pretty posters, not a scientist trying to write a thesis.

I think my best option is to make all my figure reference bookmarks. . . I will still have to manually name them, but if I always make book mark name the same as the numbered text (there is no option to do this automatically) then at least the chances of me missing a change of cross-reference is reduced.

Samuel Creshal · Post by **Samuel Creshal** » Tue, 22. Oct 13, 16:12

Guess there's a reason why LaTeX is popular among scientists.

Not that it doesn't have its own share of inane problems, but they tend to be a bit more manageable.

Bishop149 · Post by **Bishop149** » Tue, 22. Oct 13, 16:29

Ok the bookmark thing is working. . . . I have found it doesn't matter what I call the bookmark, I can select it to display as "paragraph text" which fortunately I can set to be the bit that is part of the heading numbering . . . so all the text in the actual document should update automatically and remain correct . . . . although it may become confusing as the bookmark names won't.

I forsee a situation where the "figure 4" bookmark actually ends up referring to figure 6.

Samuel Creshal · Post by **Samuel Creshal** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 16:27

Error message of the day: "Heyijustunpluggedtheprinter AND I CANNOT PRINT ANYMORE FIX IT"

In unrelated news, Cruel and Unusual Punishments should be legalized again.

greypanther · Post by **greypanther** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 16:30

It must be a fun and exciting experience working where you do Samuel. I imagine each day brings new and interesting adventures eh? You are just so lucky to have such clowns working with you.

Samuel Creshal · Post by **Samuel Creshal** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 16:33

Sadly, they work 100 kilometers away from me, so I can't just whip them whenever they do something stupid.

greypanther · Post by **greypanther** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 16:47

So how did they expect you to mend the printer?

brucewarren · Post by **brucewarren** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 18:23

With a blood sacrifice obviously

And I thought this was made up

Morkonan · Post by **Morkonan** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 18:49

Samuel Creshal wrote:Sadly, they work 100 kilometers away from me, so I can't just whip them whenever they do something stupid.

You should totally get one of those USB controlled rocket launchers...

https://www.thinkgeek.com/product/8a0f/

Then, ship it to the office disguised as a network storage device. Have 'em hook it up in the middle of the office, next to the copy machine or something. It should be easy enough to get a vid feed to enable targeting to be easier. But, who cares if you're indescriminate? If some idiot uses his CD tray for a cup holder, THE ENTIRE OFFICE SHALL SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES!

Btw, on a more practical note, a friend of mine who served his early years in the IT industry had a wonderful "Get Even With Stupid People" solution - He simply remotely took over their keyboard, periodically, and typed random keys while they were typing.... Just random keys and never for very long, just long enough to make it annoying. (Probably kept the guy who sold the company keyboards happy, though.)

Cpt.Jericho · Post by **Cpt.Jericho** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 18:58

Samuel Creshal wrote:Sadly, they work 100 kilometers away from me, so I can't just whip them whenever they do something stupid.

But it's a good distance to nuke the whole place. They will never ever do something stupid anymore when the whole place is just a steaming pit of slack

brucewarren · Post by **brucewarren** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 19:02

I'm not sure it's a good idea to encourage him in this matter. He's already quite keen to nuke the Squirrels.

Samuel Creshal · Post by **Samuel Creshal** » Thu, 24. Oct 13, 19:12

Morkonan wrote:You should totally get one of those USB controlled rocket launchers...

Sadly, the other office is zombie invasion proof. The printer is in the basement, the offices are on second floor, and there are no more than two employees in each room.

Hmm… Can you link them to a central firing computer? Nothing screams "death from above" like two dozen rocket launchers firing in unison.

Probably kept the guy who sold the company keyboards happy, though.

Thankfully, a Model M takes plenty of (ab-)use. Sounds interesting.

brucewarren wrote:He's already quite keen to nuke the Squirrels.

To my defence, they totally deserve it.

Bishop149 · Post by **Bishop149** » Fri, 25. Oct 13, 15:17

I have never seriously used Microsoft Word before.
Sure I have used the hell out if to type stuff, but I have never used it in the sense of making full use of all the formatting options, track changes, referencing cross-referencing etc

I am not realizing what a broken heap of shit it is, and why people complain so much about it. I have honestly spent as much time working my way round bugs in Word as I have writing my damn thesis.

I now have an issue where by EVERY possible definition paragraph 1 is on the previous page to paragraph 2. . . . and yet it INSISTS on numbering 2 as 1 and 1 as 2.

I have spent half a ****** day on this! I have tried every conceivable rearrangement tto try and force it to number correctly and it just WON'T.
I am at my wits end.

red assassin · Post by **red assassin** » Sat, 26. Oct 13, 01:24

This might be a little late to be helpful, but have you tried LyX? Write typical LaTeX documents without actually needing to learn LaTeX. It's designed for scientific papers in particular and handles all the cross-referencing, diagrams, tables and formulae in a much saner way than Word. I haven't actually used a word processor in years.

Bishop149 · Post by **Bishop149** » Wed, 20. Nov 13, 13:01

How did this thread fall to page 4! No one got anything to get off their chest any more?

Well I have a couple to restart the thread!

1) If you live in London you will no doubt be aware that 6 cyclist have been killed on the road recently and the establishment is busy kneejerking in response. Statistically speaking the last few years have seen a decent increase in the number of people cycling, and the number of deaths and serious injuries have actually decreased in proportion to this rise.

This is in fact entirely in line with experience from other countries which reveal the single most effective means of reducing cycle deaths is increasing the number of cyclists. Cyclists therefore become a normal part of a motorists driving experience and thus they become more aware of them.

Whilst there is no doubt that areas of Londons road design could be improved to improve cycle safety that's not whats being kneejerked, as far cheaper to send some extra police out to fine badly behaved road users for a week or two until the fuss dies down.

Statistics lessons for politicians immediately, a spike does not a trend make. Actually this is a 100% serious suggestion, a large part of a politicians job is making policy decisions on the basis of data. . . . data they clearly don't understand.

2) TFL outright lying on their announcements. If a whole line is out of service and will be for a while just fricking say so and allow people to make their way by other means. Don't just hold people waiting around saying "It will all be fine in a minute"

Its not as if they're making honest mistakes, they promise trains are a few minutes away when the train in question is later revealed to never even have left the depot. The also sometimes contradict each other with one person trying to give some honest advice and others towing the line of the BS de jour.

It also goes against all experience they must have. I have had some significant experience of delays due to "Person taken ill on a train" The absolute fastest they can clear this up is about 30 mins, usually with at least 2 trains being taken out of service to re-regulate things. . . . usually the line is shut for hours.
So why do they continue to spout "minor delays" and assure everyone it will all be fixed before the next train arrives in 10 minutes time.

I honestly dunno why they do this, all it results in already pissed off people becoming all the more pissed off.

egosoft.com

egosoft.com

The Rant Thread. :)

Should this thread be renamed as above?