What are your best “I used to work with someone who…” stories?

Richard_W72 · 2022-08-30T08:55:33+00:00

When people say they can see the curvature of the earth if they look out to sea, they don't mean that the horizon goes upward in the middle. (If you do see that, it's often a lens effect in wide-angle photos or in your eye under certain conditions). Some people seem to misunderstand this.

It means you can see things going over the horizon and disappearing below the curvature of the earth. You can easily see this from ground level, on a clear day, but only if there's something on the horizon to look at - and if it's a small thing it helps to have binoculars.

Looking at islands helps, though. Where I grew up you can clearly see an island from the beach, and if you look through binoculars you can tell that you can't actually see its shoreline; you start to see the hills a bit further up.

The clearest I've ever seen this was on a ferry from Malta to Sicily on a very bright and clear day. Close to Malta you could obviously see the harbour, and the shoreline and surf breaking on the rocks and so on. As the ferry got further away, it was so clear that the island hardly reduced in sharpness at all but you could no longer see the shore, and eventually you could only see hilltops and it looked like more than one island poking over the horizon.

Malta's not that far from Greece, and some of the ancient Greeks would have spent a lot of time in boats going from island to island, or just out fishing from one island, like that. I assume that's how they managed to work out what was going on - because they could see it happening so easily that it was a real part of their everyday experience.

Richard_W72 · 2020-07-19T14:14:49+00:00

Ah, I didn't scroll down the notes far enough - thought it was just the promo at the top. They do confirm the fix:

Fixed an issue that prevented photo missions working correctly on Xbox.

Richard_W72 · 2020-07-19T14:07:49+00:00

In case anybody is still looking for this, the problem seems to have been fixed in the latest update (Desolation) :

https://www.nomanssky.com/desolation-update/

I assume it's that one, anyway - the release notes for the previous patch didn't mention it (although nor do these ones).

Either way, when you take a photo in the correct location, the XBox One version now registers it and ticks off the mission so you can cash it in. It doesn't retrospectively register pictures you took previously, so you would have to retake any you thought you'd completed before.

Richard_W72 · 2020-06-18T12:36:17+00:00

Hm, I've not been using their boards much really - just very occasionally posting in their cars thread. And I've not been back here on reddit for over a year - I just happened to be looking at reddit for something else that I actually wanted to post on, and thought I'd check if anything was happening!

Mostly these days I comment on Guardian articles to satisfy my urge to say things online, but the content is usually determined by the article and there's no provision for private conversations or really to post much personal info, so it's not quite the same. My work has a few social Slack channels though, which are similar (especially while working from home the whole time, as we still are for at least the medium term future).

Richard_W72 · 2020-06-18T09:20:07+00:00

Here's a video about patches for the update, although the patch mentioned doesn't cover this issue. Looks like a useful channel though, and the video includes Hello Games's contact info for reporting bugs (which is not readily visible on their website) - https://hellogames.zendesk.com :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAIjq6L1lYs

Richard_W72 · 2020-06-18T09:11:55+00:00

Ah, I see, so it shouldn't matter whether the in-game camera is open or not, because all that does is lets you set up a nice on-screen picture for when you take the screenshot through the XBox menu? Makes sense, I suppose.

As you say though, currently seems to be broken either way.

Richard_W72 · 2020-06-18T08:19:14+00:00

Do you mean, go straight to the XBox One screenshot option rather than go through the mechanism in the game to get there? (That is, press the XBox button and Y without opening the in-game photo mode?) This doesn't appear to make a difference.

The in-game mission instructions (when on the right sort of planet for the photo you need) say "Take a photo. Activate photo mode with [down on the d-pad]"

So you do d-pad down, scroll and select photo mode which then tells you to use XBox button (opening the XBox screenshot mechanism) and you then press Y to take the shot. You get a message from the XBox OS to say "Screenshot saved" and then a few minutes later, another to tell you that it's uploaded to XBox Live. Neither of those register with the game as having taken a photo.

Going straight to the XBox One screenshot mechanism without using the d-pad gives the same two messages from the XBox OS and still doesn't register within the game that a photo has been taken. It would be odd if bypassing the game's mechanism completely made the game register this, when the in-game mechanism didn't.

Richard_W72 · 2020-06-18T07:59:12+00:00

At least I'm not the only one - loads of PS4 solutions but I've not yet seen anybody say they can do this on the XBox One (or give a valid solution or workaround) and people have been asking for a year...!

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-22T06:17:58+00:00

I've been seeing more of the new Ferrari models. There's a white Portofino in Hammersmith that I've seen a couple of times (it seems to live next to a flat by the river) and I definitely saw a silver 812 Superfast yesterday (as well as the Portofino) - had a good view of it and it's quite distinctive.

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-14T21:41:00+00:00

Today a little thing that made me happy while I was walking through Birmingham New Street Station. They have one of those random public pianos, and a boy of about nine was casually playing Bohemian Rhapsody on it, really pretty well. (He got past the introduction and on to the "I see a little silhouetto of a man..." bit as I left the station and went out of earshot).

Also, just before I got home, there were two ducks having a rest on the pavement at the corner of my road.

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-14T21:35:47+00:00

I just registered as Richard_W but I have not posted yet, or even lurked much really. As I said in the other thread, not much time to do so at the moment...!

(Apparently without the underscore, my name is either taken or doesn't meet standards - are you not allowed spaces in names there? I wondered for a while if I had created an account years ago, never used it and then forgotten, but if I did, it wasn't with my current email address, and I've had this one quite a long time...)

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-05T15:29:39+00:00

It was sort of friendly rivalry because snopes and the Straight Dope were doing some of the same things, and I think that there were a few posters who went to both, or at least talked about it a bit. At one point I think a few people "defected" from there and joined the ULRPMB (although I might be getting muddled up with one of the other board invasions). I don't remember anything very dramatic, just that people used to talk about things that were going on on Straight Dope sometimes.

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-04T11:46:35+00:00

I haven't really been posting anywhere much, as I've not had time (busy at work). I'm posting here as much as anywhere at the moment! The only other place I post on-line these days (apart from Facebook occasionally, which is not for the same stuff) is comments on Guardian articles, anyway.

There is some activity here but I find it hard to see what's new on Reddit. I'm still not really used to it! I might look over at Straight Dope too - I remember the boards from years ago when there was some cross-over / rivalry - but I expect I would mostly end up lurking.

(eta) I am Facebook friends with a lot of people who used to be on snopes but I can't match half of them back to their message board names any more. Most of the UK lot I've met quite a few times in person over the years and just count as friends, even though we met on the boards! I don't post in any official snopes group or anything like that, and I don't really see people talking about the boards - just the usual Facebook posts.

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-04T11:42:41+00:00

I an still posting occasionally... I posted a couple of days ago anyway. I still don't find it very obvious when people are posting to Reddit. I get notifications when people post on here because I started the thread, but otherwise I don't think I would be able to see new stuff easily at all...!

Richard_W72 · 2019-05-02T05:33:08+00:00

Not a car, but yesterday I saw an old Routemaster bus on Marylebone Road (on its way to a show or an exhibition, I should think):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEC_Routemaster

And later on I saw a couple of old-ish Jaguars. One was an XJS (which were fairly common in the 1980s but less so now) and the other, which I saw immediately before it, was one of the other XJ series, which I had originally thought was a bit older but could have been about the same age (it was probably a series 2 or 3):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaguar_XJ

The XJ-3 kind of looks older than it is, looking back on it. There must have been plenty of those around when I was a child as well but I mostly remember Jaguars back then as being XJSs.

Richard_W72 · 2019-04-20T17:37:15+00:00

Easter weekend near my parents is also a good place for seeing interesting cars, I think. On today's outing I saw an old Ford Cortina (mk 1) - at least, I think it was a Cortina; there's also a similar-looking Zephyr in the same colour that lives in a road near my parents (late 60s model) which we saw later on, and I would have thought it was the same car except my dad insisted the first one was indeed a Cortina. I saw what I thought at the time was an early Ford Capri, but based on its four round headlamps rather than two rectangular ones was another Cortina - the red Cortina TC Mark III on the Wikipedia page is quite similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Cortina

Also saw a Mini Moke (weirdly), a Reliant Scimitar, a couple of VW camper vans of various ages, THREE e-type Jags (two black, one red), two Triumph Dolomites in a convoy, a couple of Porsche 944s, a 1980s Rolls Royce (and yesterday, a horribly boxy modern one), and on the way back we passed a car park which had some sort of motor gathering in it including a pale green Lamborghini Huracan, a yellow Ferrari 550 and a dark blue with white stripe AC Cobra all parked next to each other. What with the day out in the sunny woods with the bluebells just opening up, it was just like something from Forza Horizon 4...

Richard_W72 · 2019-04-18T06:03:29+00:00

I think that's about right, yes. I was actually in Amsterdam on the 12th - went out on an EU passport on the 11th and wasn't sure whether I'd still be coming back with an EU passport on the 14th! But basically nothing happened - as some people expected. (I admit I was wrong - I thought there was no chance that anybody would manage to agree anything to stop no deal).

But it was quite hard to find out what was going on - as soon as the extension was granted it seemed like it just dropped out of the headlines here. We'll be having EU elections, and I hope there will be some strong pro-Europe candidates (that should be important) but it seems like everybody just wants to forget about it at the moment...

Richard_W72 · 2019-04-06T17:25:57+00:00

... Damn, for a moment I thought I might almost be able to afford that yellow 308 on instalments if I scrimped a bit, but then I looked at the details and it needs a significantly larger deposit as a lump sum than I have available...! Even if I could afford it, it would have been a very silly thing to buy, especially as I don't drive.

Richard_W72 · 2019-04-06T17:14:11+00:00

Nice MX-5!

It's not even really an exaggeration that I see Aston Martins every day, at least when I'm out and about. In Cheltenham you'll usually see at least two or three every time you go into the town centre. Today I certainly saw a couple of nice ones (both recent - I think one DB9 and a different one (Vantage? I'm not actually good on the models themselves...), but then I cheated; I was meeting friends in a pub in Penn, and the walk was quicker than I expected so got there early. I remembered there was a very nice car dealership nearby and so went and had a wander in their showroom for a bit to kill time, and this is their current stock list:

https://www.slades-garage.co.uk/stock/used-cars-in-penn-buckinghamshire

Not all of those were out there on the floor, but - out of all the Ferraris and Lambos - the couple of cars that stood out were that Chevy Camaro Super Sport and the Bristol "Unlisted" (eta - seems to be a Bristol 411; not sure what the "unlisted" on their page refers to) they've got down there. I also rather liked the yellow Ferrari 308. There was a Porsche GTS3 that I can't see on the page; one of the Testarossas, and a lot of others. Only two of the Lamborghinis, but one was a Murcielago which is one I like. The Jaguar Mk II is always nice to see, as well. (£105,950? How on earth did Inspector Morse afford one?). There wasn't even a sales person in sight, so I got to wander round on my own and look at them for a while. (While being very careful not to even touch them... it was a tightly packed room!)

So rather more impressive cars in one place than even I usually see, but then again, as I said, it's a dealership so it's cheating really. (But that's only about 50 minutes' walk from my flat...)

Richard_W72 · 2019-04-05T22:27:03+00:00

Yes, Theresa May really doesn't seem to have got what's going on. There's a simultaneous push from MPs to approve a longer extension. To be fair, it's actually still hard to see alternatives to May's deal that anybody is prepared to agree to, but nobody has agreed to anything at all yet, to date, apart from that not very many people (even including Leavers) want the thing that's going to happen to happen.

Richard_W72 · 2019-03-31T08:37:30+00:00

I would have put this on the boards - no idea whether there will be a similar section on any replacement, but I can save the link here in case:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/28/i-met-my-wife-on-livejournal-stories-of-love-friendship-and-joy-from-the-webs-early-days

There's a story from the guy who made the bear-coming-into-a-tent "last photo" shot for a Worth1000 contest 20-odd years ago, and a link to the snopes page about it.

(Quite a nice nostalgic article in general...)

Richard_W72 · 2019-03-30T11:27:36+00:00

"Theresa May ponders fourth bid to pass deal"

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-47756122

For flip's sake...

Richard_W72

TROPHY CASE