April 2005 Blog Posts
No wait, that headline isn't quite right. I mean I hear a Thrush. Down on th patio. It's a glorious day here and the windows are open wide, and the thrush is happily bashing snails on the flagstones. Whack, whack, whack. Noisy little fellow. Well, when I say little, I mean huge - the snails obviously aren't for his family, since he's a bit tubby. But then so am I, and less snails means more chance for the Hosta which they tend to decimate every year. The snails that is, not the thrush. Unless they've developed a hitherto unknown habit...
Hmm. Wired have a review of H2G2. I think they miss the point, in that this is the vision of the movie DNA wanted, not what Hollywood wanted. That's why it never got made before. I know Wired is a US magazine, but they don't get the importance of the film actually being made and staying true to the quirky writing. Nor do they look outside their borders - there are other, more famous red rocks than those in the Southwest USA. Jeez, learn a little about the world please.
[Listening to: Prophesy - Nitin Sawhney - Prophesy]
There is something inescabably good about life when you go to see a good movie and have a large plate of fish and chips with a beer afterwards.
Yesterday was generally a bad day; didn't feel great and didn't get much writing done. Very DNA. So I decided to abandon work at 5:30 and head out to see The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Simply put, it's a triumph. Douglas would have loved it. Interestingly the audience contained quite a lot of youngsters, probably ranging from 10 to 16. The rest were in the middling years who, like me, probably remember...
I'll be at Developer Developer Developer on Saturday 14th May, which is a free day of sessions by community speakers, held at Microsoft in Reading, UK. After that will be the VBUG Spring Conference on 18th May in Sheffield.
[Listening to: Land of the Free - Thea Gilmore - The Lipstick Conspiracies]
Having spent last week with Alex (who is feeling much better now) and using his Media Center box I feel I need one. I can't afford one, nor can I really justify one since I have a perfectly good (nay excellent) TiVo, but you know, geeks and their toys. I want to buy one that is small, quiet and fits under the TV, so will start investigating. But, in the meantime I borrowed Alex's Black Gold Digital TV card (he's still on analogue as digital TV in the wilds of Derbyshire is, err, let's just say erratic) and intended to...
I know you expect variable weather in spring, but today has officially been weird. I awoke to snow which had all disappeared once I'd showered. Since then it's been glorious sunshine, with black clouds menacing on the horizon. About 5 minutes ago what can only be described as a blizzard appeared. A sort of cross between snow and hail and now we have big fluffy snowflakes whiting out the view. It's almost unreal, like as though someone is standing just out of view tipping a bag of fake snow into a fan. Actually I haven't got up to check so...
Yesterday was the UK MVP day down at Microsoft Reading, which as usual was a fantastic day. A wide variety of talks, including a short one by me on how to get into writing and publishing. One amazing session was from Microsoft Research where we were showed some of the projects they are working on - pretty darn cool, and the hope that some of it might appear in Longhorn. What's interesting for me about these days is meeting people of different ages and skills, whose specialist areas are nothing to do with mine. When you're wrapped up in your...
Dave's top tip for keyboard shortcuts - make sure they don't clash with other applications. I'm recording a demo for a presentation using Camtesia, which uses F9 to start and stop recording. I'm 5 or 6 minutes into the presentation and start the debugging bit, manually placing a breakpoint in VS 2005. I continue with the demo, hit the breakpoint, press F9 to disable the breakpoint for next time around and continue with the demo. Completely forgetting of course, that since I'm recording F9 is now handled by Camtesia so I've stopped the recording. Another few minutes of recording and...