The RANT thread (often contains fruity language)

[Oaky]

Southern have cancelled my train because ‘too many trains requiring repairs at the same time.’ Blimey, they have added a new page to the bumper book of excuses.

that's code 507:

id   507
name   "This train has been cancelled because of more trains than usual needing repairs at the same time"

all 900+ available here (the output is JSON,  the readability will depend on the ability/inclination of your web browser to render it sensibly):

http://api.area51.onl/rail/1/ref/darwin/cancel

number 908 is my current favourite:

"This train has been cancelled because of the train making extra stops because a train was cancelled"

[citoyen]

Someone should make those up into bingo cards to keep ian and his fellow commuters amused.

[Basil]

all 900+ available here (the output is JSON,  the readability will depend on the ability/inclination of your web browser to render it sensibly):

http://api.area51.onl/rail/1/ref/darwin/cancel

Thanks for that.  I was never sure if I'd really heard an announcement at Mordor Central about a train being cancelled due to overcrowding.
But there it is!  Number 685 on your list.

How is that going to remedy the overcrowding issue? 

[Cudzoziemiec]

Easy. If there is no train, it can't be overcrowded.

[PeteB99]

"Due to the late running of the previous service this train will no longer be stopping at $station"

Which was bad luck for the family opposite as that was where they'd left their car.

[Paul]

P1040458 by Andrij, on Flickr

...They look a tad dangerous.

I'm shocked that anyone got permission to put those in. Are they rigid?

[ian]

Easy. If there is no train, it can't be overcrowded.

My favourite is "This train has been cancelled because of overcrowding because an earlier train had fewer coaches than normal"

They're often creatively meta. I can't come to the pub because I'm not there.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Nat West bloody fucking web site. That is all.

[Andrij]

P1040458 by Andrij, on Flickr

...They look a tad dangerous.

I'm shocked that anyone got permission to put those in. Are they rigid?

Very.

I've never ridden through there at night, but I'd bet the lighting isn't the best.  I'll try to remember to look next time I ride through.

[ian]

By and by, adding any obstruction to the pavement by a cycle path simply leads to pedestrians using the bike route.

[ian]

Can we get that in Powerpoint?

I'm training a squad of weasel assassins to the eat the fucking face off the next person who asks me that. No, it's PDF, fuck the fuck off.

[Jurek]

P1040458 by Andrij, on Flickr

...They look a tad dangerous.

I'm shocked that anyone got permission to put those in. Are they rigid?

Very.

I've never ridden through there at night, but I'd bet the lighting isn't the best.  I'll try to remember to look next time I ride through.

Wow.
Did the HSE have their eyes shut the day that was approved.
Its a bit  errr..... Medieval...

ETA - Actually, they look a bit blunt to me.

[Pedaldog.]

I was watching BBC "News 24" earlier on and, on the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, I saw "Theresa May Tweeted her...."!
I am FUCKING HORRIFIED that a PM, of any make, in the UK would Tweet. Can somebody get me a Romanian Passport please?

[Kim]

I was watching BBC "News 24" earlier on and, on the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, I saw "Theresa May Tweeted her...."!
I am FUCKING HORRIFIED that a PM, of any make, in the UK would Tweet. Can somebody get me a Romanian Passport please?

Don't worry, we all know that Theresa knows fuck all about computers, and any twitter account will be run by some junior spin-doctor on her behalf.

[Mr Larrington]

I was watching BBC "News 24" earlier on and, on the scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, I saw "Theresa May Tweeted her...."!
I am FUCKING HORRIFIED that a PM, of any make, in the UK would Tweet. Can somebody get me a Romanian Passport please?

Get a Slovenian one.  In spite of Slovenia being part of the EU, their passports are BLUE

[Pedaldog.]

After many, many visits in the late 80's and early 90's I'd like a Dutchisher one most. Always had good times with good people and can even,vaguely, remember some of the visits.

[T42]

Amsterdam has just banned beer bikes, though.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Can we get that in Powerpoint?

I'm training a squad of weasel assassins to the eat the fucking face off the next person who asks me that. No, it's PDF, fuck the fuck off.

"We had a powerpoint today," said my pet not-yet-millennial yesterday. Twenty (20) pages on firework safety!!!

[ian]

Four slides. Each with an embedded image no larger than 130kB.

Size of the frickin' Powerpoint? 14.3 MB.

Le sigh.

[PaulF]

Four slides. Each with an embedded image no larger than 130kB.

Size of the frickin' Powerpoint? 14.3 MB.

Le sigh.

Have you borrowed our corporate template?

[ian]

There's no even a template, just the images and our logo. I assumed it was rasterizing the PDFs, but replacing them with PNGs only reduced it to 12.8 MB. There's less than 500 kB of actual graphics in the whole thing.

[citoyen]

Not much you can do about software bloat but I have a different problem, in the form of an art director colleague who seemingly doesn't care about making images as small as possible.

OK, so I get that pictures need to be of a certain quality for print, and that Photoshop files with layers and cutouts are going to be bigger than simple jpegs, but they really don't need to be that big. Quite often, I will open pages that are loaded with images of a high enough quality to print as an A3 poster, scaled down to just a few cm wide, and/or cropped so only a small part of the whole image is being used but retaining the whole image in the file.

This wasn't so much of a problem when we were office-based and sharing the same servers, but now we're all working from home and I'm on the world's shittest internet connection...

Some people seem to take the concept of unlimited storage as a challenge.

[ian]

Ah, the 2400 dpi image.

I've no idea what Powerpoint does with images. It appears to rasterize anything vector-based (erm, because that's what you want a supposedly device independent presentation application to do, or it would be in the stupidverse). To what resolution, who knows. I tried the 'reduce file size option' and picked on-screen and it simply make everything blurry and it was still 4MB. Powerpoint, let me again enumerate the multitudinous ways in which I hate thee.

[Mr Larrington]

Try DDS files if you want storage hoggery incarnate...

[citoyen]

Ah, the 2400 dpi image.

Exactly.

The best one I came across recently was where a 425MB layered photoshop image (made to fill a whole double page spread) had been re-used as a thumbnail on a separate contents page, where most normal people would have done something sensible like crop it, flatten it and reduce it to a 2MB jpeg that would have been more than good enough quality for that purpose.

I wouldn't mind if there was a justifiable reason for files being so feckin' huge, but what really irks is when you open a photoshop file and it turns out to be a small cutout sitting in acres and acres of empty space. Even if all you do is crop the image to the size of the cutout, it can reduce the file size by tens of megabytes, if not hundreds.

I get the pleasure of having to package this shit and upload it to an online archive, which takes approximately a week - and that's only if my internet connection remains stable long enough. I've taken to not bothering to archive some stuff. Life is too short.