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Pat's Blog

Question

Tuesday, September 26, 2006 at 11:13 AM

Please can you explain to me why is it that Windows Task Manager is:

a) An executable file that needs to be loaded from disk whenever called upon, rather than something living in the Kernel
b) Taking up 4MB of RAM
c) Unable to forcably kill processes

Thanks.

(1) comments

Scary Driving Moment

Friday, September 15, 2006 at 8:52 AM

It might be a bit of a bloke (or just a bit of an idiot) thing, but I occasionally like to push my car to see how many miles I can squeeze out of a petrol tank.

Back in the days where I didn't have a "miles remaining" on screen display I used to be fairly conservative - filling up about 10 miles after my petrol warning light came on (which generally appears when you've got about 40-50 miles remaining).

However, since I've had a car, which has an onscreen display showing "Miles remaining" in my petrol tank, I've become a bit more daring (read reckless) with regards to this - generally only filling up when there's less than 20 miles remaining in the tank.

This has generally been fine, apart from last night where I pushed it a little.

I'd gone past the last petrol station en route, 13 miles from home with "22 miles remaining" in the tank and thought "Hey, this'll be fine... it'll be tight but fine".

I didn't count on the high quality estimation of my lovely car, which went as follows:


Miles Left   "Miles Remaining" in tank
12           19
11           15
10           12
9            10
8            8
7            7
6            5
5            4
4            3
3            1
2            0

It was around the "10 miles remaining" mark that I really started to brick myself. What also didn't help was that my phone was about to run out of battery.

By "1 mile remaining" I was actually starting to laugh... surely I couldn't actually get stuck at the side of the road, without the ability to even get help?

Surely?

Well, in an unexpected bout of luck, I didn't, and with some expert coasting managed to get back the last 2 miles with (supposedly) no petrol in the tank.

I think to be fair there were a good few more miles left (I guess the ol' "miles remaining" thing is a bit on the cautious side), although of my 50 litre tank I managed to squeeze 50.2 litres of petrol in whilst filling up.

So, driving 2 miles with 0 miles remaining. I wonder if I can beat that next time...

(1) comments

Career Break!

at 8:44 AM

As you may or may not be aware, I'm having a career break and sodding off to Australia for just under a year in November.

A big, unexpected step? Damned right. But a great one.

Check out Squage's Big Adventure for more details and to keep up to date with the trip as I wander around the planet...

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