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Warn the Stupids!

London Underground. Most of you will probably have heard of the song bearing that name by Adam Kay and Suman Biswas, and if not, I recommend you do! It's a funny song just as it is, but sometimes I can see just what inspired the lyrics. This week I've been subject to two absolute gems of advice by way of their tanoy system.

Piccadilly Station is currently undergoing some works on some of the escalators leading to the station entrance from the Piccadilly Line, so to hear a message that reads "…due to works on the escalators at Piccadilly, passengers are advised to use the alternate escalators to either side…", erm, yeah, as opposed to standing by the out of service ones and waiting until the work is finished, hmm?

The second wonderment came from this: "The Bakerloo Line is currently out of service. Passengers are advised to seek alternative routes." Well, what excellent advice, I didn't think of trying to get home another way, just as well the London Underground public service announcements are here to aid me. Seriously, who are these announcements for? The same people who necessitate these warnings are those that elicit some of these others which I found today:

• "For external use only!" - On a curling iron - Excuse me?
• "Do not place this product into any electronic equipment." - On the case of a chocolate CD in a gift basket - That would be the same morons who use the drive as a coffee cup holder then?
• "Do not eat toner." - On a toner cartridge for a laser printer - But I was really hungry!
• "Do not use orally." - On a toilet bowl cleaning brush - Did they run out of tooth brushes?!
• "For use by trained personnel only." - On a can of air freshener - I can just picture the training video
• "Remember, objects in the mirror are actually behind you." - On a motorcycle helmet-mounted rear-view mirror - Oh, that's how they work!
• "Fragile. Do not drop." - Posted on a Boeing 757 - Who on earth can drop a plane? They're not toys!
• "For indoor or outdoor use only." - On a string of Christmas lights - As opposed to the other places you can use them.
• "May be harmful if swallowed." - On a shipment of hammers - I dread to think what inspired this one!.

These are just some of my favourites among many, and believe me, there are many! People must really be slipping on the evolutionary scale if this where we have got to now. Darwin would be turning in his grave!

So, with that little mocking rant out of the way, onto more serious things. I've been working on a site recently that requires the use of birth dates (and deceased dates where they apply) to be entered for people. Occassionally, this may include figures found in recent history. I came across a slight problem with that, however. The language this site is being written in is PHP, and this uses a 32-bit signed integer for storing the dates. The problem with this is that the actual dates that can be represented with this is quite a small range; Fri, 13 Dec 1901 20:45:54 GMT to Tue, 19 Jan 2038 03:14:07 GMT. So, anybody born before 1901 is going to run into a problem, likewise with anything that happens in 30 years time. To deal with dates outside of this range, either complex custom scripts need to be developed, or the whole system be upgraded to PHP6, which is not yet fully released for commercial platforms. I'll keep you posted about how this goes!