English Over The Sleeve

I studied English at uni. And I know that I am not alone. So let’s be honest here: Doesn’t this sum it up rather nicely?

With thanks to bunny.frozenreality.co.uk; image under this CC license.

Bonjour amis de l’Anglais par dessus la manche!
Voici un petit lien français avec une joyeuse vidéo sur notre beau pays!
Et viv’el chicon
GF

Edited by macdo to embed the clip

It’s the very official international standard for brewing tea.

I can’t comment on this.  Anything I’d say would be superfluous…

You may remember that there was, last year, a small buzz about the French anti-2007 resistance. Guess what? They’re coming to Paris!

Check out fonacon.net, and go to Montmartre this evening if you want to see them in action.

• For some time now, I’ve been looking (in my professional capacity) for a chess set supplier who doesn’t actually demand the payment of an arm and a leg for 32 pieces of injected plastic (and your first-born for an industrially printed vinyl ‘board’). I think I’ve found one. If I have, I’ll let you know. If you are a chess set supplier and want to do business with me, let me know in the comments!
• Warehouses are complicated to build and furnish. This, in conjunction with a heavy workload, gastro-enteritis and the discovery of facebook (I know, only a few years late!) may explain the recent absence of posts here. So sue me.
• Who does quite small (less than a hundred) runs of thermomoulded plastic parts, working from a model (and preferably in Europe)? Answers in comments, please. (Please note that 42 is not an accepted answer to this question.)
• I rented a Renault Clio the other day, for a week. But when I got to the agency, they apologised and gave me a Ford S-Max. You probably don’t care - but hey! I’m telling everyone!
• I’ve got a new phone, of the sort that would theoretically allow me to BoB - Blog on the Bus (TM). Don’t hold your breath for that… but the phone itself is pretty cool.
• Christmas leave is coming up waaaaay too fast. When can I find the time to go christmas shopping?

I was blarchiving* this evening, when I stumbled across the “Blog Readability Test”. Obviously, I ran it on English Over The Sleeve / blog.ourcq, and I got this result:

Then, as an experiment, I ran it on the English Over The Sleeve Archive from November 2006, and got this:

Obviously, I was intrigued, so I ran it on November 2004:

Then I realized that English Over The Sleeve didn’t exist in 2004 - so the page that test was running on was just a list of recent post titles. I would obviously have succeeded as a headline writer.

*According to the Dictionary of Eye-watering Words, as referenced in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!, to blarchive means to read through other people’s blog archives.

Ebay - buy anything! (link to The Register).

While on the subject of links, try xkcd.com

I have been asked what Ourcq (as in, http://blog.ourcq.org ) means.

The answer is… complicated. Several reasons are plausible.

1. The Ourcq canal is the starting point of the Boulevard Macdonald, here in Paris. This ties in rather nicely with my web identity (and macdo.com was taken)
2. I was (slightly drunk and) on a metro that stopped at Ourcq. I freaked out and bought the domain name (and macdo.com was already taken).
3. I was looking for a short and sweet domain name because free.fr had decided that my blog was ‘abuse’. As macdo.com was taken…
4. Our CQ is a new web fad, and I wanted to cash in on it. Besides, macdo.com was already taken.

With all these potential reasons in mind, please answer the poll below.

Here’s a short funny true story, to thank you for answering the poll question. Someone was presenting the results of a poll in which participants could answer Yes, emphatically (2 respondents), Yes (4), No (4), and No, certainly not (1). The answers came up on the powerpoint, and the guy started his commentary thus : “As you can see, the results of this poll were overwhelmingly positive…”.

When I created this blog back in 2005, I wrote a page about the game rules. One of the points I made was that “spammers should be twittered at”.

Is that prior art?

I’m vaguely trying to pick up a SQL/PHP skillset at the mo; and I stumbled across this. It made me laugh.