Mulled Wine (by sarah)

Right - tis that time of year again!!!!

We are not having a specific week this year - mainly as we are stranded in Gloucestershire due to lack of money - ie we cant visit any of you - so we hope you will all come and visit us over this festive time!

In other words get your bums over here and enjoy our hospitallity and recieve your cards and gifts cos we have no money for posting (all presants and some cards are hand crafted!). We do however have left over wine from the christening - red wine, that is, and lots of oranges and apples and the like - throw in some spice (I could make some really bad Scifi puns here as we've just watched Dune but I wont I promise!) = Mulled wine.

We also have mince pies in the freezer, chocs and plenty of filter coffee and the like!

If you dont turn up we will have to hunt you down in the new year and make you stay with us - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!!!!!

Please come and visit - we have a bed setee and a real fire place with real fire in - perfect for those roasted chestnuts - come stay for as long as you like - all we ask is that you tell us at least 1 hr before you arrive so that we can make sure the mulled wine is a heating!

Feel free to bring partners, friends etc...

I will endevour to email everyone - but this is me so - Ella, Becca and Charllee let the regulars know and I will endevour to be more organised than normal (HAHAHAHA).

Whoever controls the spice, controls the Empire.

The Curse again (by alaric)

Eargh.

I've been laid low with something flu-like the past two days, but that's not the problem at hand; it just adds a little extra horridness to it all.

Somebody wanted some information from Sarah before school time today, and since it was late last night when Sarah had the information, we decided to ring at eight in the morning to pass it on rather than eleven thirty at night, since they might already be sleeping.

So I set the alarm for eight, and had my phone to hand (with the number in). And went to sleep. I was woken by the alarm, turned it off, then found to my annoyance that the clock said eight twenty - I'd slept through twenty minutes of alarm, mainly thanks to only having gotten to sleep around one o'clock and being ill, so I poked Sarah awake, handed her the phone, and she left an answerphone message - at the time, I though this meant the whole family had probably already left and we were too late. Afterwards, we drifted back into our troubled sleeps.

I then naturally awoke at half past nine (since I work from home, my normal routine is to wake up at nine, to start work at ten).

So, imagine my surprise when I found I had a voicemail message from this person, rather annoyed that we'd woken them up by ringing at twenty past five that morning...

I still don't know how this happened. I distinctly remember turning the alarm off, and seeing it was twenty past eight before waking Sarah to make the phone call.

This suggests three possibilities:

1. My alarm clock played a mean and nasty trick on me. It shifted three hours ahead in the night, then shifted three hours back before I woke again. (Yes, the alarm was set for eight, not five; I'd not slipped up in setting the alarm or anything simple like that, and the alarm clock's time does currently match what my watch, wall clock, and NTP-synched computers say). Which is actually possible, since it does synchronise to the MSF time signal; perhaps it received a corrupted time signal, but then reset itself when it received a non-corrupted one later.
2. I dreampt of the alarm clock going off and me stopping it, and woke naturally from this, then saw the ...:20 on the clock face and thought it was 8:20 because that's what I was expecting (and 8 and 5 look similar on a seven-segment display)
3. The Painswick telephone exchange is using Time loop logic as part of an experimental new generation of infinite-bandwidth broadband connection.

I suspect (1) is the most likely. But either way, it's incredibly depressing.

Tea = Dinner, Dinner = Lunch but Lunch does not = Tea and the ensuing confusion (by sarah)

We have made a social fopar but it appears to be a language problem more than anything else. I dont know if its a regional thing or a generation thing but to us Tea is the evening meal and dinner is something that either happens in a resturant or at lunch times ie at school you have dinner time, at christmas you have christmas dinner at lunch time etc...

However, there is the concept of Afternoon Tea which I had only ever seen in films before moving here. Sure there is tea the drink but you tend to ask do you want a tea, or a cuppa or a cup of tea. That a is very important and if not used say in just shouting TEA to someone - hand jesters must be used for clarity.

Now after accidently missing an evening meal and then being asked if we wanted to have a re-run of sorts this Sunday we said yes. Al was told we where all invited for tea, my perants and all. Al assumed this to mean the evening meal ie to replace the one we missed. So therefore it would be at the time the previoous one was seduled - 7.

We rearranged the structure of the day in order to be able to make this meal including making sure JEany bow had had enough sleep so as not to be grumpy chumps. Al made sure his business meeting was finished well in time though he was still in the middle of the debrief with our client when the language mistake cuased an explosion.

Poor Barbara had been waiting for us from five to come over for Afternoon Tea whilst we were waiting for 7 to have Tea. But it turns out that Barbara considers Dinner to be the meal Tea and was obviously really annoyed, especially as she hadnt come across the concept of Tea being the word used for the evening meal.

It was a right ol' mess!

Ok so Afternoon Tea is probably what we would call coffee break or snack time depending and is the equivalent of that extra meal the French have. Also the deviation could well have occured as children have their last meal of the day when they come home from school which would be about Afternoon Tea time, and so would be called tea but then as they get older the evening meal gets later but they are less lickly to start calling it something else.

Ok so me and Al would say that meals are called: Breakfast Brunch (obviously you have this when you get up too late for brekki and too early for lunch) Lunch/dinner Coffee break/snack time (Doesnt really count as a meal and only really applys in an office type environ) Lunner (this is mine and Als special personalised meal for when we realise we've forgotten to eat lunch and its a bit too close to dinner time but not close enough for it to be dinner) Tea (occassionally called dinner if going to a resturant) Super (very occassionally used when you realise its midnight and you've forgotten to eat dinner so you have ceral or cheese and busciuts in bed to tide you over to the morning - Al may also have minni trifle or some such for this particular psuedo meal)

We would typically only have two or three of these meals a day.

From what we've gathered though this is what we are supposed to do: Breakfast Lunch Afternoon Tea Dinner/super

Shrug - must be a regional thing though our friend who grew up here said that she calls the evening meal Tea and the midday one dinner - oh well. Clarify definitions in future! That way you will not have to suddenly produce a meal for five people with no warning cos you thought you where going else where for that evening meal :/

Business Ettiquette (by sarah)

Things that Sarah and Al hate:

1)People phoning for business reasons on the HOME phone when they have not even tried the BUSINESS one nor Als mobile.

2)People being mean to secrataries who tell them the boss cant come to the phone (especially when it is not the secratary and you are phoning on the HOME phone).

3)People making mistakes and then taking it out on you becuase you cant fix it/talk to them right at that point in time.

Grrrrr!!!!!!!!!!

Sorry guys I am just very defensive of our work life seperation. Plus if we say we dont have time to talk we really dont - we go through hoops to talk to peopl - hands free kits whilst washing up ect.....

Ok rant over.

Whatever happened to S-Buffers? (by alaric)

Back when I were a lad, I went through the obligatory phase of wanting to write a 3D computer game, and during my research, I came across S Buffering, a technique for rendering 3D graphics much more efficiently than a Z Buffer, the technique used in modern 3D graphics cards.

In software, an S buffer certainly seems to be inherently faster than a Z buffer, and at the time of the original article on S buffers, a software S buffer would (he claimed) outperform a hardware Z buffer.

Plus, they very elegantly handle transparency, and transparent surfaces abound in modern games.

But what happened to them? I thought about them while unable to sleep last night, so did some googling today, and all I found apart from copies of the original article was a forum post in which somebody basically asks the same question.

So I'd be keen to see if an S buffer on a modern CPU would outperform a 3D video card (I suspect video bandwidth would be the limiting factor, though). But mostly, I'd be keen to think about whether one could implement an S buffer in hardware that would produce better price/performance than a Z buffer...