Tonight is The Phantom Menace on ITV, which Mr bin Laden will be watching from his hotel room in Bournemouth and wondering if it really is about him. I haven't seen it (or Osama), but I'm expecting it to rival Fame Academy for total arse. Apparently the 'attendees' of Fame Academy are 'ludicrously gifted', by which standards Las Ketchup should be rivalling Benedict Spinoza for profundity and thought-provoking ideas.

At 'school' today I reduced 70% of our processes to a single button-click - marked 'Go' - which reminded me of minimalist Spectrum programs which consisted of:

10 RUN

then a slightly more destructive program which went:

10 NEW
20 GOTO 10

Anyway, certain elements of my management are convinced that all our processes can be automated within a single application, which I am pretending to write (if they looked at all my variable names they'd see how serious I am about it actually working), so obviously they haven't read about the compression-obsession bloke on Rinkworks' Computer Stupidities site:


A guy I worked for was kind of a penny pincher. One of his disk space saving techniques was to compress compressed compressions. He would use the product that compresses EXE files internally so they automatically expand when executed, then zip a whole bunch of files including those, then store the zip file on a DriveSpace compressed volume. I think his eventual goal was to get all his files down to 1 byte.