The Desktop Fishbowl
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Wednesday, 10 July 2002

During a discussion on IRC about the merits of helping people, I remembered something I wrote years ago on the subject. I Will... I will help people who are willing to help themselves. I will help people who respond to advice critically, and demonstrate that they understand what was said, and can extrapolate further from it, and possibly teach me something. I will contribute advice to a forum, since that way I get back far more than I give. I will offer my opinions to anyone who is stupid enough to listen. I will help friends, secure in the knowledge that if I don't have time to help, or it's getting annoying, I can just say so, and a friend will be considerate enough to stop asking. I will help anyone who pays me enough. However, I don't do a similar deal for aggravation and personal abuse. I'll aggravate and personally abuse people for free. :) 2:48:44 PM

I added a BlogChalk to my template. Rather than make a post about it so the search engines will notice (after all, the post will eventually drop off the bottom of the world and I'll be re-indexed), I tried putting the required page text in a div that gets hidden by CSS. I'll see how it works - it's quite possible that Google recognises display: none and refuses to index that as well. 1:20:21 PM

From an otherwise boring letters page on The Register (although I did learn that C# and Db are actually slightly different frequencies, which I never knew before): Just to let you know, # is also the abbreviation for fracture in medicine ( can't speak for the US though). For example C-Spine # = fracture of the cervical spine ( a broken neck). So the new M$ product C#, accordingly is either paralysed or dead, says Pete W. 7:56:23 AM

I like this turn of phrase. It appeals to the nerd in me. The meal “Lunch” has unexpectedly departed, because an error of type SevereStomachBug occurred. To avoid further problems, you should remove other meals and restart the digestive system. [mpt] 12:06:51 AM