May 2005 Blog Posts
I've never used Amazon Wishlists before but as it rolls around to my birthday soon, I figured now is the time to get that list of out of the CDs I need to fill in the gaps and replace the tapes in my collection. There's a nice freedom in just putting together the list of things to have without buying them. Adding that one extra item will not cost you anything, and so you add it.
350 CDs, a few DVDs and miscellany later and I'm reasonably happy with what's there, but then the questions begin. If I choose to see...
There are simple pleasures in life which you just forget about and then rediscover. For some, it's that lost episode of Doctor Who. For me, it's the insanity of cartoons; Tom & Jerry, Wacky Races and the like. In particular, two series exec produced by Steven Spielberg in the early nineties - Animaniacs and Freakazoid - were just so great, it seems criminal that neither are yet available on DVD. Ain't eBay great though? Found myself a bootleg DVD of all the Freakazoid episodes there and have even gotten Jane to laugh through it. The (pythonesque) random asides, "Scream-o-vision as...
There's something unqualifiably good when you hear that someone's dreams are coming to fruition. It's already been slashdotted today but Jeff Minter's finally gotten one of his lightsynths into something meaty. In this case, its the XBox360 firmware. His Unity project for Lionhead got canned after two years after development, but the 360 has more texture pipes and the like and, to paraphrase, my god its full of stars. Can't wait to see what happens when you play NIN through it.
[Listening to: Head Like a Hole by Nine Inch Nails]
I decided not to take on the rewrites of the three Beginning .NET 2.0 Databases books for APress today. Getting first drafts in for PDC in early September and the poor pay (damn that excahnge rate) mean that the pride in getting the finished products out at Christmas is not worth the pain it will cause trying to fit writing in around a full time job which I'm currently enjoying. The odd chapter (write, edit or review) here and there is still a possibility but not a full book.
Of course having said this, I'll be made redundant next week,...
Apress have started putting their entire catalogue online as e-books, available from their home site. I'm not sure if I'd laugh or cry at this. It's great to see them offer another way of selling their books to the public, especially as the prices are significantly lower than their paper counterparts. I also like that the books I've written for them are given another way to finally make back the advance they paid me and get me some royalties. On the other hand, seeing them back as files again (albeit laid out pdfs) is a bit like they never went...
For those of you who still haven't seen the Hitchhikers movie, here's a rather good non-spoiler taster of the wonderful weirdness within.
I've finally got around to putting up some choice photos (courtesy of the nice Nikon D70 I got in Duty Free) from our trip to Hawaii and I've retro-actively fitted the trip notes into the blog as well if you care to browse back to April 3 and start there.
For those interested, the wedding photos are also available online at our photographer's website.
[Listening to: The Gumbo Variations by Frank Zappa]