July 2004 Blog Posts
Funny places hospitals. 10:30 'appointment', and I sit until 11:50 watching a succession of people arrive, be seen and depart. A polite enquiry as to how much more of a delay I can expect gets "we're very busy today". Well, duh. Miraculously I'm called just minutes later, to be seen by a young (Spanish?) girl, busy, bleeper going off, who explains the x-ray. When the shoulder dislocated the ball pushed out of the socket, breaking off a small chip of bone. It's not lodged in a dangerous place she assures me, after a quick check with the consultant, so as...
It started on Saturday. Possibly the year before. Well actually, it was three years go, the first in what has become the annual BBQ of some friends. They have several acres in the middle of nowhere and decided to hold a big summer BBQ. Year 1 was glorious weather, I was staying in a local B&B so got gloriously drunk. Year 2 it rained, but was still great. Year 3, more rain, still fun, until I was about 300 yards from home when someone went straight on at a corner and wrote my car off, damaging my left thumb in...
While I wouldn't want his current job (not that he really wants it), Steve does have the luxury of being able to blow things up. Given the frustrations I've had with beta code recently I woudn't mind destroying things with large amounts of high explosives. The odd alpha/beta CD, just to make me feel better.
My brother suggest I use his painter since I've taken so long to decorate the office. Katie is doing his. I reckon he's right, she'd probably be quicker. If a little messier.
Terrible week work wise, with nothing working, some of which I'll explain in another post. Still the week ended well with a Kathryn Williams gig which was excellent. Been wanting to see her play for a long time, and the highlight being her rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah - simply breathtaking. Really moving. Stopped in at Dan's on the way home for his house warming, so caught up wit a few people I hadn't seen in a while.
Then I've had a weekend of decorating. The new office is almost finished - just a final coat and the woodwork and it'll...
So, working with Yukon at the moment and wasn't having a very good week. Finally got some code working , but some of my conversions weren't giving the right values. This is GIS stuff, so I'm dealing with Latitude & Longitude, converting to decimal values, calculating distances etc. I couldn't work out why things weren't right, and spent hours debugging. Finally, with Alex's help, we realised I was using the wrong type - I should have been using decimal to preserve accuracy in calculations. Now I understand rounding and the instrinsic problems of storing floating point numbers, but it's just...
I've been holding off on getting a new laptop, but finally went for it - a Dell Inspiron 510m, excellent screen, big disk and lots of memory. And very nice it is to. Since the disk is big I'm going for 3 boot partitions: a stable one running .net 1.1, a .net 2.0 beta 1 partition, and a general test partition (for any other beta stuff that comes along), plus a large partition for data. I've isntalled the stable one and decided to clone it for the others to save some time. I've not used cloning software before, but decided...
Lou (of frog-box) now has a blog. Should she call it Blog Box or Frog Blog. She can't make up her mind, and both are good.
If you only ever go see one band in your life make it The Hot Club of Cowtown. Huge amounts of unassuming talent having fun, that's the best way to describe the band. Elana sizzling on the violin, Whit's fingers moving so fast on the guitar, and Jake on the double bass - possibly the coolest person I've ever seen (side note: It's impossible to look uncool while playing double bass.). You get the feeling that if God descended and said "you only have three hours to live, what do you want to do", they'd simply say "Play". I've never...
My friend Lou has finally joined the throngs of self-employed with her new graphic design service Frog Box. She designed my web site plus business cards, and has come up with some cool stuff for a new Al and Dave design, which we might eventually get time to implement. She's very talented and did get accepted as a storyboard designer for a new film, but turned it down because when you're starting out you can't afford to work for nothing (related news: their previous film, Dan had a hand in). It's funny but when you look at talented designers you realise...
I spent 3 days last week on a course at DevTrain, the company I'm going to start doing training for. This was the Web Apps with C# course, aimed at beginners. Now I'm not a beginner but I am going to train this course, so I sat in to see how the current trainer (and author of the course - they are all custom written) did it. It was an interesting time, as I was worried I might be bored. After all the material isn't new to me, and I used to be a trainer years ago - an MCT training VB,...