Sometimes you may try visiting a friend’s MSN Spaces blog in Firefox and get a message saying, “This space is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.” However it seems to work fine in Internet Explorer.
This isn’t typical discrimination against users on the grounds of browser usage (or is it? I think we should be told…) so much as a misleading error message. It happens when your friend has set their MSN Space to be visible only to their friends. Clicking on “Sign in” in the top right hand corner and logging in with the e-mail address and password that you use for MSN Messenger to contact them should let you in.
Shouldn’t Microsoft give a more informative message here?
An acquaintance of mine has been nagging me over the past few weeks to add another blog entry. “You must be very busy,” he says. “You haven’t written anything new for a while.”
I have been very busy, as a matter of fact. I’ve also been recovering from another close encounter of the third kind with the dentist’s Hedstrom files, aka root canal treatment. I blogged previously about how this had been a relatively painless procedure a couple of years back when I had this done to two of my back teeth, so I was not too concerned when she said that I needed to get a third one done. I thought that it would be reassuring to anyone facing the procedure who came across my website via Google or Technorati to know that it wasn’t all that bad after all.
Come to think of it now, if I’d read that particular post a week ago, I’d have sued me first thing on Tuesday morning. So, before anyone else gets the same idea, I thought I’d better put the record straight.
To cut a long story short, imagine every stereotype you can think of about root canal treatment, and that is what I went through on Monday afternoon. Now take into consideration the fact that she hadn’t numbed me up and you get the picture. Normally this is okay — the nerve gets removed in the first appointment, so by the time you get to the second stage, you shouldn’t feel anything much anyway. However, in this particular case one of my root canals was very wide and she ended up overshooting the end of the tooth by a fraction of a millimetre. The result was rather interesting, to say the least. She explained that if she had numbed me up, it would not have been painful, but she wouldn’t have discovered that particular fact and would have botched up the treatment.
Fortunately the bill came to a good bit less than I was expecting, which was an immense relief. Perhaps they have some kind of policy that if it really hurts they give you a discount. Every dentist should, after all. At any rate, I headed straight for Boots and bought a packet of extra strong paracetamol tablets to tide me over for the rest of the day. The tooth was still sensitive for about three days afterwards, but it’s now settled down and for the first time in a while I can chew on it and drink cold water at that side of my mouth without it bothering me. And let’s hope too that this marks the end of all this rigmarole and my chompers remain trouble free for the rest of my life.
So here endeth ye first day at ye new job. It was pretty good — the advice of one person to me that “the first day is always the worst” bodes well for the future because the first day wasn’t actually all that bad. Is it a case of first the worst, second the best, third the royal princess, as we used to chant at school? We shall see…
You will probably all be intrigued to know that I actually succumbed to wrapping a strip of cloth round my neck and tying a knot in it. This is a fairly major miracle for someone like me, whose general sartorial preference tends to lean rather strongly in the direction of the “high comfort, low maintenance” variety of a T-shirt and jeans/shorts/combats and the trademark Vans trainers. To put on a garment such as a tie, whose primary purpose seems to be to undermine the above principles and make you feel like you’re being asphyxiated, is not exactly my idea of a rip-roaringly good time. Having said that, however, it very much puts your mind into a mood for work and makes you feel a lot more business-like, as well as making you look good to the clients, so it has a lot going for it.
So will this new look beat my previous record of a year and a half as my longest lasting New Year’s Resolution, or will geekiness prevail? Well, just in case you thought that ties were a bit low on geek credit, Cambridge physicists Thomas Fink and Yong Mao have determined, using mathematical modelling, that there are no less than eighty-five ways to tie a tie, of which ten are aesthetically pleasing. Which of them are the most comfortable?
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Posted at 15:38 in Miscellany 
