Tagged...

The incorrigible Ridley has tagged me with the big Tag-O-Tron challenge: Reveal 5 things about yourself nobody (or not many people) know about you, and then tag other Bloggers to continue the chain.

Excellent! I've come down from my earlier low of the week and now find myself in higher spirits, so I should be able to come up with some morsels for the plebs to enjoy:

1) I spent 2 days and 1 night in a police/jail cell.
Actually, there are a couple of people out there who know this (including my parents) since this wasn't really my fault. The managers of the store I worked at thought it was a good idea to accuse every employee of theft so they could get rid of us and hire new staff. I hope other HR departments don't get the same idea.

2) I got beaten up in a cinema, but I threw the first 'punch'.
I do sometimes have flashes of uncontrollable, damaging anger. In one of those fits (and they do last only one millionth of a picosecond) I threw my cup of coke onto someone who was making rude comments about me and my friends in a cinema before the movie started (it was Monster's Inc. if I remember well). Needless to say, he got angry and started pummelling me. He turned out to be an ex-marine from the US, but so high on either adrenaline or coke, that he started calling the Police officers who were called to the scene 'Nazis'. Final Ironic twist: He got taken away in handcuffs and I got 5 free tickets for the next showing for me and my friends.

3) I got hit upon by a gay colleague.
I worked for what is now T-Mobile in The Netherlands. At an office party one of my (not direct) colleagues told me he thought I was cute and wondered if the feeling was mutual. I blushed and said that even though I was flattered, I sadly didn't think it was, and that I was also quite straight. He smiled, gave me a quick peck on the lips and said he thought it was a shame. Normalcy was restored and to this day working at that company was still one of the best working experiences I have had in my professional life.

4) I'm crap at games.
Even though I'm a games freak (and now a games professional as well), I've only ever completed a handful of games... The ones I can remember are Roadwar 2000, which I finished quite by accident actually (it was way too short), Wizardry IV and the magnificent The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Infocom. And that's it. It might not be world-shocking news to you guys, but it's something I feel distinctly ashamed of.

5) I haven't been creative since I wrote 'Brainwalk' in the late 80's.
And I mean nothing original has come from my hands since then. I used to be on a roll, writing short stories left and right, with most of them in use for the Atari ST demo scene. But Something happened (getting lazy is the largest culprit I think) and it all faded away. Sure, I've done expressive stuff since then (played in amateur theatre productions, ran D&D games, etc.), but nothing that had the creative rush that completing a short story gave me.

Hmmm... Maybe a bit too much of a lament than a confessional, but in all honesty, I don't really have that many skeletons in my closet.

Anyway, now to find some hapless victims to continue the Tag... (note: put on hold until I can think of more than 1 person I know who Blogs besides Ridley...)

What I've not got...

Passion. Anger. Drive.

I don't even have the drive to write more about it. Might have something to do with the flu I'm having.

DST Confusion

DST, or Daylight Savings Time, has always confused me. I never know instinctively which way the clock goes and if I get to sleep longer or shorter and if I now get more or less daylight. The only thing I do know is that once in a blue moon the DST change in the latter half of the year happens on my birthday and I get to have a birthday of 25 hours. Neat!

This year however there is even more confusion in DST-land. The US Federal government has decreed that the US DST is to be a different date than anybody else! God know why they did this (must be some kind of petrol-saving scheme or something like that) but it confused the hell of out me.

First of all I wondered if all my machines were going to be OK. I've got PCs at work and at home, and of course all kinds of devices with clocks that may or may not adjust themselves. The Sky+ box or one is notorious for losing the plot when DST happens.

I also have a Linux machine offsite where my mail and webpages get served-up. Would that machine be ok too?

Through Slashdot I found a nice article on Linux-Watch which explained how to go about checking if your machine was OK and how to fix it if not...

But wait a minute: my machines are all located in the UK? A nagging suspicion was building at the back of my brain (or was that the flu?). Would the lapdog government of the UK take on the change the US did slavishly or...

Timeanddate.com to the rescue: this page actually lists the dates and times locations around the world do their DST changes.

And yes. The UK luckily keeps its DST transitions to March and October. My 25-hour birthday marathons are saved. Not to mention my computers and sanity.