I've just caught the second half of the first of the BBC's If drama-documentaries:

If...the lights go out

Is Britain at risk of the same sort of catastrophic power cut recently seen in the United States and, if so, why?

Scary stuff.

Earlier today - in my capacity as Admissions Selector - I hosted my department's contribution to the Science at the University of Strathclyde - Information Session event. Two of the pupils from the school that has been been piloting ISAW and who had been contact with me [see this post] came along and introduced themselves to me. It was good to be able to put faces to names but even nicer to actually chat to a couple of prospective students that have a genuine interest in the subject.

MacDevCenter.com: Scheduling Tasks in Panther by James Duncan Davidson:

"Computers are all about automation of tasks, and Mac OS X gives you several tools to help execute tasks at certain times of day and even on a regular and repeating basis. After all, if you want to copy a file from one place to another, or download a set of web pages at 5:25 a.m. on the dot, why should you have to get out of bed when the computer can do it for you?"...

Some years ago I coined the term "semi-colonic irritation" in an e-mail thread about a simple optimisation UserTalk programmers could use in their UserTalk coding in Frontier.

Needless to say, some novice C programmers I've taught over the years often fall into the trap of ending a #define with a semi-colon as in:

#define FALSE 0;

And then use something like

if (result == FALSE)...

which of course causes the compiler to throw up an error along the lines of "If statement missing )".

I was quite surprised that a Google Search: semi-colonic irritation yields no hits since, IMHO, it's such a nice play on words ;-) No doubt Google will index this post in the not too distant future and there'll be at least one hit for the phrase.