Stupidity (mine)

Two examples of stupidity, by me, follow. I just found them interesting... probably they are mostly failures of lateral thinking.

Before that: some misc. If you're interested, there's a photo of my apiary at the bee blog. And JA has a post about the next-generation Pork Barrel Simulator, though being polite he doesn't call it that. Am I being unfair? James also notes, about the "Great Tokyo Earthquake": Our own earthquake detection system rated last Saturday's quake as a plastic-man-toppler which I thought very cute. Speaking of the Simulator, I've just got hadcm3 running on a quad-opteron box under g95 at what looks like 2y/day. Sadly g95 is nothing like as good as gcc: its about 2-3 times slower than commercial fortran compilers, at least on some bits of the code.

OK, on to the stupidity. Number 1 is the shower. About 6 months ago, ours broke (in that it wouldn't really turn off). So I stuffed a cork in it, and we went on to having shallow baths. This was because it really wasn't worth getting a plumber in when the entire bathroom was being rebuilt... soon. We're getting closer to the soon (about 2 months away now). But, the point is, last weekend I bought for £6 one of those rubber things that you put over the bath taps so you can have a shower. Its less convenient (you have to take it off to fill the bath with any speed) BUT it does give you a decent shower. So why did it take me 6 months to think of buying one?

Number 2 is the sand pile. Not self-organised criticality thereof, but a simpler matter: the builders had left a big (1/2-tonne) bag of sand in the middle of the lawn. It made mowing the lawn a right pain etc etc and they were always about to get round to moving it. It was far to heavy for me to drag, though Ian-the-Architect thought a few people might move it. Anyway, in the end, when they were obliged to tidy up, Paul the Builder came along, and... just shovelled it from one bag into another. It took him less than 1/2 hour. I could have done that, had I thought to.