I read with amusement/disbelief this article on The Daily Mash today.

Satire – yes. Factual – possibly.

Still, £42k for driving a truck does seem rather high compared to other jobs requiring more skill, more responsibility and better education.

I think that at the rate these people get pay rises, I’ll be able to retire from capital markets IT and drive a truck in a year or four.

Something strange happened at work. I locked my screen (XP) whilst taking a trip to powder my nose and when I came back, tried to unlock.

Invalid password. Tried again. Invalid password. Third time, typing very carefully. Invalid password, and by this time, my account was locked.

It turns out that my input method had switched to Russian (Cyrillic), but this wasn’t obvious in a password field, and it turned out it’s not possible to switch input method with the mouse. Maybe possible with some keystroke, bit neither I nor tech support knew what it was.

In the end, I had to have my PC shutdown remotely.

How did it happen? No idea.

This year is a leap year and today, February 29, is the traditional day for women to propose marriage to men.

So if you’re a confirmed bachelor, maybe it’s best to stay at home today.

Tomorrow, wife and I are going to Barcelona for the weekend, so like many people, I decided to print out my lastminute.com e-ticket and hotel vouchers. Nothing unusual there.

However, the printer started to make some very weird noises, screwed up the paper and eventually completely jammed. I could see bits of paper jammed in the mechanism, but it didn’t look like it was going to be easy to get it out.

Under wifely advice, we unplugged the printer, removed the duplex podule from the back, removed the paper, and I tipped the whole thing up to look for more paper fragments.

To my surprise, a screwdriver fell out the front! Doubly handy, as I was looking for that particular screwdriver the other day

Rebuilt, the printer is now working just fine.

Hurrah!

I was looking at the list of unclaimed prizes on the UK National Lottery web site and amazed that someone in Devon has failed to claim £6,989,367.40 !

The end date for claim is 26 March 2008. I wouldn’t want to be that person if I discovered it was my ticket on the 27th.

Recently, Apple introduced iWork ‘08, an upgrade to the ‘office productivity’ suite they provide. The big news here is that they finally introduced a modern spreadsheet product, Numbers to replace the aging AppleWorks.

Now the first thing I did with Numbers is see if it bests Excel on one of its stupidest ‘features,’ namely, Excel can only have 65,536 rows in a table.

So I create a small CSV file with two columns and 70,000 rows, and import it into Mac Excel 2004. As expected, “not all the data can be loaded,” and I’m stuck with 65,536 rows.

For those of you wondering why 65,536, it’s the number of distinct integers that can be represented in a 16-bit number – hello! this is the 21st century, we’ve moved on, we can do bigger numbers now!

So surely a modern spreadsheet app on a modern computer can handle more than that? After all it’s not lumbered with a crumbling codebase from the Duran Duran era!

Excitedly (yea, I should get a life) I import the same CSV into Numbers.

WTF?!

The file wasn’t imported because the amount of data exceeded the maximum table size. – Excess rows or columns were removed.

Numbers only managed to import 65,533 rows!

OK, you can get another couple, but not via the import…. worse, it took over 20 seconds to import the CSV vs almost instantaneous in Excel… and Excel was running under a PowerPC emulator.

Come on Apple, this is shocking. Stop playing with your iPhone and put proper effort into your software.

At the Ultimate iPhone FAQs List, Part 2, Jobs apparently says:

Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.

I wonder if he was referring specifically to the iPhone or more generally… and if he’d stopped taking his dried frog pills?