English Over The Sleeve

This is a web exclusive, brought to you by ourcq.org! A scoop!

The famous French band, Bag in Box, will be performing live in Pontchateau on the 14th of December! Get your skates on!

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.

The radio has told me that the station staff at one station away on my local line thought that there were trains today. They were wrong - and they found out on the radio

“We don’t want to negociate! We want our retirement at 37 yrs and that’s it!” (and that’s a straight quote). Looks like the unions (who are negociating) are losing control.

I think I’ll move to Ardèche - the only French department with no stations.

Well, I’d best be off. No trains, no buses - Shank’s pony rulez! (and should that become Sarko’s Pony?)

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

While on the subject of links, try xkcd.com

I’ve just heard the 2nd in command of the SNCF (French State Railway authority) on the radio: apparently, there’s been a concerted attack on the TGV system. At least three fires have been set in the signalling system, with the apparent intention of supporting the current strikes and the effect of stopping all TGV services in the east and the west of the country (TGV Est and TGV Atlantique).

Ourcq over the Sleeve: breaking news?

Sarko bégaie chez Les Pêcheurs Bretons [06/11/2007]
Uploaded by benporkofer

I’ve never actually heard someone say “rtdnfdugdlgue” before…

And this is why :

L’insulte du pêcheur au Guilvinec à Sarko
Uploaded by benporkofer

The British Royal Family are celebrating their diamond wedding anniversary tomorrow - that’s 60 years of marriage, and a first for the British monarchy (I have a suspicion - that I can’t be bothered to confirm - that that’s actually a first for any reigning couple). Congratulations to them.

I’d hereby like to note that the Queen mother (at the time of the wedding, that was Queen Mary, of course - George V’s wife) was just as embarrassing as any other grandmother could be - she felt that Mahatma Ghandi’s present was shocking (she mistook the hand-spun lace doily for a loin cloth).

Here’s a thought: Queen Alexandra (consort to Edward VII) died at 80, Queen Mary (consort to George V) died at 85, Queen Elizabeth (consort VI) died at 101…

Girls, you wanna live long? Marry William!

A final note: I was vaguely thinking of buying the £5 coin struck for the event - but when I went to the Royal Mint website, they threw an error and asked me to contact them and quote the error number. That number was 44 characters long: if they have that many errors, they really should think about reviewing their website!

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…”.

I like grumbling.

I really like grumbling.

In fact grumbling about something really cheers me up…

Good. That’s sorted.

I’d like to inform those of my (many) visitors who don’t follow French news that France is currently experiencing a transport strike which has the unfortunate (and completely accidental, I’m sure) effect of making me have to walk to work. This does not make me happy. 90 minutes walking before you sart a full day at the office, and 90 minutes before you get home does strange things to my sense of humour - things like eliminating it entirely.

But hey, it’s not all bad - at least it’s not raining ! Oh, hang on…

So there you have my life in a nutshell, at the moment - get up, walk for hours, work, walk for hours, eat, drink, sleep, rince and repeat. What really gets me is the reading time that’s just vanished.

In future, don’t do anything involving the command ‘rm’ and a mounted disk in the morning. This will avoid you commanding ‘rm -r /dev/’, as root, instead of ‘rm -r /dev/sdb1/dcim’

Doh! I wonder what I’ve done?