Category: Technology

Avatar The dancing monkey

There are many complex and bewildering technologies to master in my new job, but probably none more complex or bewildering than the robotic dancing alarm monkey.

Alarms go off quite regularly, you see. We look after technical things, lots of them, and the technical things are all wired up to an alarm system, so when something goes wrong it comes up on a screen and an alarm goes off. Then we press a button to make the noise stop and see if anything needs to be done.

The alarm could just come out of a speaker. That would certainly make sense. Instead, though, it’s been wired up to an animatronic monkey with inbuilt speakers. He makes the alarm sound, and he dances from side to side while he makes it. By such means the announcement of a potentially catastrophic system failure is made delightfully charming. This is, with no danger of overstatement whatsoever, one of the best things about my job.

If you have a need to make noises in your job, I would recommend getting yourself a dancing monkey. You won’t regret it.

Avatar New beans, please

“One! Ha ha ha. Two! Ha ha ha. Three! Ha ha ha.” The immortal wisdom of the Count.

Here on the Beans, our counting is not done by a furry purple vampire, but by the Bean Counter, an ingenious piece of machinery made from old sofa springs and a second-hand nuclear reactor that we found in a car boot sale. For more than four years now it’s been faithfully counting up our posts and generating new genetically-modified beans and peas as a reward for our performance, while also disgorging between eight and twelve tons of a resinous toxic by-product into the picturesque River Swale each day.

The highly complicated algorithm by which it awards beans has remained the same since early 2014, so it’s no surprise that earlier this year there were calls for an overhaul of the system to better reflect the realities of blogging in the futuristic world of 2018.

The point of the Bean Counter was never to create a level playing field, but rather to produce a playing field with carefully chosen hills and crevices so that we all stand a chance of scoring a Bean each month according to our various blog posting habits. Critics of the existing system pointed out that it was far easier for Ian to score a Bean than anyone else, and that Kev’s time-consuming building projects meant that three posts in a month was an unattainably high bar for him to reach.

I am delighted to announce, as a result, that major engineering works have been completed and the Bean Counter is now operating a completely new set of rules.

  • Kev will now score a Bean if he makes two (2) posts in a month.
  • Ian will now score a Bean if he makes precisely three (3) or four (4) posts in a month.
  • Chris will continue to score a Bean if he makes four (4) or more posts in a month.

Some would say that these new rules should begin operation from this month onwards, and that existing scores should be left alone. Perhaps they should. But I had a go at that and it was really difficult, so the new rules now apply to all previous months as well, causing a major recasting of our historical Bean Counts.

  • Kev has gained six (6) additional beans for months in which he made two posts.
  • Ian has lost ten (10) beans for months in which he only made two posts.

This is deeply and inherently unfair, which is unfortunate but unavoidable without further major re-engineering work that will just be an absolute faff.

Your comments, detailed feedback and outright anger will be welcome in the comments section below, but may not amount to much.

Avatar A smidge of Smidge

It’s been a few years, but Smidge Manly hasn’t been wasting his time. No, since he finished answering all your questions about railways, he’s been turning his attention to the wider world, and very soon he’ll be ready to explain some of its greatest mysteries to you, his adoring public.

His new series, Smidge on Science, is in post-production right now. In it, he’ll be exploring the four key subjects in the world of science: wind, rain, time and cars.

To whet your appetite, and to remind you again of Smidge’s keen journalistic insight and forensic questioning style, here’s an informative and valuable interview he conducted that didn’t make it into the finished series.

Avatar Fracking History: the Georgians

Hello and welcome to another edition of Fracking History, the top-rated infotainment docuhistoriography show here on Beans TV.

In this week’s episode, we’re going to be seeing what we can learn about the Georgians. We begin by drilling vertically downwards some 212 metres into the past, and then turn the drill head horizontally to push through a layer of sediment composed mainly of the late Qing Dynasty until we locate a rich seam of Georgian history.

Our loud, highly destructive machinery now begins pumping a mixture of water, sand and polyacrylamide into history at extremely high pressure. The delay while we wait for results is extremely tense, with our resident geophysical historian, Dr. Cornward Habsburg, nervously checking over his valves and dials. Eventually a thin, dark-coloured liquid begins seeping from the outlet valve, and we have our very first sample of the Georgian era.

What does it tell us about the aristocracy and the ordinary people of Britain in the eighteenth century?

Dr. Habsburg adds a few drops of hydrochloric acid to a sample of the liquid and places it in a centrifuge at a controlled temperature of 76° celsius. The resulting dark residue is then inspected under a microscope.

It reveals Georgian society in all its debauched, vulgar glory. The presence of particularly high levels of carbon nitrates can only be a result of the deeply unpopular Prince Regent openly enjoying affairs with a number of high society women and the early development of the gutter press in the form of short pamphlets and magazines printing salacious gossip.

It’s been a fascinating journey to an important point in Britain’s history and has brought to rich, vivid life a chapter of the past that can be so difficult to accurately reconstruct today. But all good things must come to an end. Join us next time on Fracking History when we’ll be using the latest hydraulic hammer drilling technology to break through a seam of solid, compacted Dark Ages to begin extracting parts of the early Roman era. Until then, goodbye.

Avatar Jetfoil

Every day on my way to work, on the way through the station, I pass a number of disused doorways along a side wall.

It has recently come to my attention that one of them has an unexpectedly thrilling sign above it.

Jetfoil

As a result, I have the following questions, and I will not rest until they are answered.

  1. What is a Jetfoil?
  2. Can I have a go on one?
  3. If this is the exit from the Jetfoil, how do I get in?

Please answer quickly because I absolutely will not rest until these questions are answered and I am already quite tired.

Thank you.

Avatar Snippets of Flim-Flam – Work Edition

In work as in the rest of life there is much flim-flam, here are some snippets of it:

…and all seems well, however we’ve still got a lot of accounts which don’t have …

 

…Robert was the person that cleared the log files back in April I am not 100% sure which ones he cleared but that being said…

 

…change the theme back from a new electric theme to the current one.  I changed it against the system admin account by accident…

 

…regarding the prices…

 

…stated on that page. In the near future we will need to reconsider that as it wasn’t possible …

 

…to demonstrate that staff have received proportionate and reasonable training…

Thrilling I’m sure you’ll agree.

Avatar Meter readings

Things are busy because I’m moving house. The last few weeks have been really busy and I don’t have much time for a lot of the things I’m supposed to do. I’m meant to make four posts a month to the Beans, of course, but that’s been hard to do this month. And then there’s all the house move things to sort out as well, like arranging council tax and getting rid of the boxes new furniture came in and dealing with the gas and electric suppliers.

Luckily, today I had a brainwave: what I need to do is combine things to get through my to-do list faster.

That’s why I am using this Beans post to notify British Gas of my meter readings. If you are British Gas, the information you require is as follows:

Gas: 10857 29
Electric: 29080 3

If you are not British Gas, I hope you enjoyed reading this important information all the same. Thank you.

Avatar Testing…testing… 123

Hello? Hello?

Can you hear me at the back? If you can, then we have successfully transferred over to the new magical computers.

Things do seem to be a lot faster around here so I can only assume that the computers were very pleased with the ceremony I conducted on Saturday evening.

I couldn’t get any of the magical computer banks shown in the first post, but by way of apology we now have a full room of these pumping things out instead.

bg-cloudos

I hope this is still worth £15.