Silicon Valley/Beta's - How Not To Run a Start-up

On Boing-Boing, there's a review of a series starting in the 'States called Silicon Valley, a comedy about a programmer who develops a new compression algorithm and, instead of selling out for gazzilions, takes some seed money and tries to run his own start-up. All very Microserf's:

However, this is not the first time programmers have been on the small screen in a comedy. A few months ago, Amazon created Beta's:

I'd normally just cringe and move on (they're not as good as The IT Crowd by the looks of things)

but the other day I expanded my Douglas Coupland collection with jPod and The Gum Thief. jPod was also made into a TV series, sadly unavailable.

Oxfam Monday & Tuesday - Till Trouble

Pulling two shifts at the shop, I had a problem with the credit card machine. It kept beeping at me and when I looked it said that it couldn't connect to the PIN pad. I wiggled the connection (this was upstairs on the Tuesday afternoon, so it was quiet), but it then asked me for a function code (??). I had a few words with Mark and he came up and looked through the little manual that came with it. He fiddled for a while, shrugged, and went underneath the till to find the plug to do the hard re-boot. I told him it reminded me of the running joke in the IT Crowd:

While on the top deck, I found a Luaka Bop sampler with this rather groovy sound:

Rock on!!