Harry Wood Blog

Today in Upperthong the cloud base is at approximately 673 metres…
…acording to the Upperthong weather station

I get on my train back to Baden, on my way back from the end-of-season snowboarding weekend in Flumserberg. I have a ludicrously red sun-burnt face. Zurich Hauptbahnhof is bustling as ever, but this time there’s not so many skis and snowboards being carried around. Seems the Swiss dont bother much towards the end of the season.

On the platform there’s a guy with a moustache and a guy without a moustache. They stand there together, while everyone walks past. They have their arms around each other’s backs.

My impression of Switzerland so far has been based on the family-oriented church-going communities around Baden. I’m imagining Swiss society to be a little backward with regard to homosexuality, so I’m a little surprised to see these blokes in a homosexual embrace in such a public place. But then again, Zurich is a big city, and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to see it in London.

A middle-aged woman is sitting near me. She’s chubby and has a motherly look about her, which seems to be typically Swiss. She’s like every other family-oriented church-going Swiss woman I’ve seen living around Baden. She stares at the man with the moustache, and the man without a moustache. I am imagining it is a disapproving stare.

But the train starts to move. She waves to them. She presses her face to the window, and continues to wave until they are out of site, and then she slumps in her seat and is obviously trying hard not to cry.

…weird

Last weekend I roller-bladed 12.5 miles around London in a group of over a hundred people. The friday night skate really is great fun. It’s very well organised. They have ‘marshals’ wearing luminous tops, who keep everyone together, and stop the traffic while everyone zooms past. They have a map of the weekly route, weather cancellation information on the website. The route is always in two halves, the second half being faster, for the better skaters.

You have to be pretty good at roller-blading before you should attempt it, because they go fast and they huddle together in a big herd of inter-tangling legs, but if you are a competent street skater, and you find yourself in London on a Friday, I heartily recommend it!

When I’m manically cutting and pasting between windows I sometimes find that MS Outlook suddenly sends my email before I’ve finished typing it. The reason is that they’ve cleverly made ‘Ctrl Enter’ a keyboard shortcut for the send command. In any other type of window, it just behaves like ‘Enter’.

One of these days this is going to get me in serious trouble. It already came close. A while back I sent an email to some guy, to compliment him on his website and ask him a question. Only trouble is I got as far as ‘Nice website’, then accidentally sent the email, complete with a company ‘signature’ which contained an advert for one of our products.

I would normally have deleted this signature, since its a bit crap, and of no relevance to anyone outside the Tibco integration industry (i.e. most people I email), but as it was, this guy received an email which looked like nothing but an advert from my company.

Naturally enough he quickly came back at me with a vicious flame, and I had to explain what an ‘Ctrl-Enter’ing idiot I am. Thankyou microsoft. Thanks for that embarrassment. I am only thankful he didn’t flame the company sales department (which is what I would do in that situation), imagine the explaining I would have to do then.

[UPDATE: Turns out there is a way to switch off Ctrl-Enter keyboard shortcut in outlook. I'm discovering this while also finding that Yahoo! mail AJAX interface somehow does Ctrl+Enter sending. Gah!]