life
I’ve been a big fan of PVRs for years, buying a TiVo for the few months they were available in the UK. I retired that and bought an Acer Aspire iDea 500 as soon as it was released in 2006, it being the first MCE machine designed for the UK; Core 2 Duo, quiet(ish), plenty of connections, including SCART, which given my ancient CRT TV is a requirement. To this day it’s one of the few, if perhaps only, machine with SCART. These days plasma and LCD TVs are easy to connect to, but any CRT TV in the UK...
Banks are quite possibly the least customer oriented organisations, not matter what their advertising tells you. I hate the whole money transfer process that takes 3 days, but it's even worse today. I've just tried to transfer some money from my company account and the online system kept telling me "please pick a valid date" or "please pick a valid working day". I've just missed the deadline for today's transfer, because obviously no one wants to transfer money after 4pm, but I now find that the standard transfer won't work until Tuesday, because it's Easter. That's right, a fully automated...
So Alex has broken the news; he's taken the blue pill. Alex has been working for the Patterns and Practices group at Microsoft on contract for some time, writing documentation for products such as Enterprise Library and the application blocks. They finally saw sense and offered him a full time position, which he's accepted; my glowing reference obviously didn't put them off. It's not like we're going to stop talking - our long rambling chats on the phone will no doubt continue - but I'll certainly miss working closely with Alex; not that we've done a huge amount of that...