Rob's Ego Trip!

Played SWG last night. I'm really getting to like it now. The interface is a bit sluggish, but I assume that'll improve over time. I really like the waypoints system and the "heads-up" moving map which really make moving throughout the world so much easier. Also, it looks like I'll be able to play with my friends who play "hardcore" without any detriment to the group which rocks!

Left for work just under 10 minutes later than usual and have just got here :( It's amazing how much difference a few minutes can make to the journey time!

Whilst travelling, Gordon Brown was interviewed on the Today program. He came across well, but like every other Labour politician at the moment blamed the Government's unpopularity on anything but the Government's policies...

I've updated the RSS feed template so hopefully the entire body of the entry is included now...

ADiary 1.1.1 is out! Just a minor update that allows for relative document directories to be stored in the ini file.

I've done this so that I can install ADiary on my USB flash disk and so I'll always have my notes with me wherever I go. (I keep my USB disk on my keyring). However, when I plug the disk into a computer, I don't know what drive letter it'll be assigned which is why I wanted relative paths, so now ADiary find it's own documents :)

to Sylvia's F'log!

After quite a long hiatus, I'm back doing personal programming for the sites I run. I've done some minor stuff over the last few months, but nothing big. Mostly it's been bug fixing and a new style sheet for the-allens.net. On the other hand, I've done quite a lot online gaming recently :)

I've got two or three things I want to get done in the near future:

• New character list system for SWG britlore.co.uk characters.
• Fix the Naming Ceremony pages on the-allens.net to fit the current site style.
• Bug fix ADiary so that I can use it on a USB flash disk.

I've also got a freelance paid project coming up that will be a nice bit of pocket money, but requires me to write a whole new webapplication. The toughest bit so far has been thinking of a name, but with Georgina and Sylvia's help, I've now got three possibilities to consider :)

Photos are now up of our holiday. My favourite is this one:

HP/Compaq shows how to provide proper customer support...

My journey to work is a trip through roadwork city at the moment. It's only a 35 mile journey along A-Roads and there seems to be always some roadworks being done somewhere along it. Today a new set started up in a place where the previous roadworks only finished about 2 months ago! What's going on? Haven't these people got better things to do than make my journey longer?

Rather amazingly, it appears that the European parliament has actually worked for us rather than for big business for a change. According to this article in The Register, the parliament has made numerous amendments to the proposed software patents directive. The important thing is that the amended version makes software patents sensible (i.e. available for true inventions) rather than the imbecilic system in the US.

Of course the industry lobbyist are less than happy, but that's a sure sign that the amendments are probably a good idea anyway!

trundled along... in my absence, 5 tasks that I had been assigned to were either marked completed or abandoned. This reduced my list to 19 - the first time it's been under 20 in two months. By the end of the day, it was back up to 23! I think they were storing them up till I got back...

Still, I completed one today :)

We had a great time. Jon and Teagan alternated from getting along wonderfully to shouting "yes"/"no" and "mine" at each other!

Don't want to be back here.

Back shortly :)

With only a few days to go until our holiday, we've finally started thinking about it! The amount of paraphenalia accompanying a small boy is amazing. It seems that we've allocated one and half suitcases for Jon and half a suitcase for Georgina and me together!

With any luck, we'll start the packing process tomorrow...

will have to wait as Georgina's pregnant :) It's still very early days, but we can't keep the news to ourselves!

Update
As Georgina won't be drinking alcohol for a while, Sylvia has suggested this cocktail:

"Peach nectar + ice + grenadine in liquidiser until ice is all mixed in.

Add Sprite & Sparkling water and spin once quickly (or use spoon in liquidiser so you don't lose all the bubbles)"

We went out today to look for some P20 suntan stuff for our holiday. We didn't find any in Worcester, so phoned up a few branches of Superdrug around here and found some stock in Bromsgrove. Back into the car we piled and off we went. As it was coming up to lunchtime, we thought we'd treat Jon to a McDonalds... also it was a way to shut him up from saying "I'm Hungrrrreeeee!" every 20 seconds! Just past Droitwich we came across a Little Chef and Georgina's eyes light up - Fried Breakfast! So we pull into the carpark so that Georgina can have her fried breakfast...

Jon's face crumpled when he realised that it wasn't McDonalds! Georgina tried to tell him that it was better food here, but he wasn't having any of it and so we passed up on a nice fried breakfast and had burgers instead... That'll teach us to give him advance notice :)

This afternoon we have a company strategy meeting to talk about the processes we use in the company and how to make the production process more streamlined. Thus only half a day of "real" work and half a day of trying not to fall asleep!

The Today programme had an item about new laws designed to safeguard children from sexual predators. Apparently they also criminalise two 15 year olds for having a kiss! What really got me was that the Home Office Minister, Paul Goggins, was saying that they couldn't work out how to phrase it so that this wasn't possible. I mean come on! What kind of excuse it that? He was going on about having to define what kinds of "sexual acts" would be covered... are our legislators this blinkered? How about going along the lines of if there is age difference of less than 2 years, then any wrong doing isn't covered using the sexual predator stuff and we let existing laws cover it?

Mr Goggins' rather poor comment that the police have promised that they won't use the law against teenagers is equally stupid. We already know that when you give the police powers they will use them. Take the case of the demonstrators at the arms fair who were searched without any reason... Besides, if the law isn't going to be used against teenagers like that, then phrase it such that it can't be!

It just annoys me that we can't even get a relatively simple law to protect children without cocking it up because we can't think of the right way to word it.

Another Register article. This time about the Government's plans to have a file for every single child in the UK that can be looked at by just about anyone who feels like it. The new initiative doesn't seem to tackle the root cause of the problems resulting in Victoria Climbi?'s death: Competance.

The Register is reporting that the RIAA is suing a 12 year old girl for downloading music. What really gets me is that the RIAA president Cary Sherman said: "Nobody likes playing the heavy and having to resort to litigation".

Who are they kidding?

If they charged a sensible price for CDs and sold MP3s themselves at sensible prices (say 50p per song) then they would be raking it in... oh wait.. they are raking it in anyway! I have very little sympathy with an industry that hasn't cut the prices of CDs since their introduction 20 years or so ago...

Time to start looking at independant artists I think. Anyone give me some good recommendations?

Neil is currently writing an interesting series on software development. This section comes from today's piece on reliability of software.

"Programmers, like all people, are fairly lazy. For any sufficiently complex problem, a programmer will implement the basic part well enough, but will frequently leave a segment for implementing later. If you look though the code of an application, you will no doubt find comments marked up with initials, a few asterisks or an X or three. These are the sections the programmers decided to leave for later, possibly hoping that when later came, it would be someone else working on it."

It's so true!

Clearly this is my week! Another productive day so far!

It's about to do downhill though as I'm doing a pre-loader for a Flash movie this afternoon and I'm not a fan...

This is turning into a really productive day today. I'm not sure why, but I've managed to tick off 5 items on a list of 7 things to be done by Wednesday. It's very satisfying and I was getting comfortable with the idea of making the deadline...

The dangers of complacency.

Just now, I've been given two more jobs to be done by tomorrow night which means that 5 out of 7 might be all they get for Wednesday. Typical!

We went to Merry Hill shopping centre this morning/lunchtime. Mainly to have a look around. It's very nice and not very far away (half an hour's drive). Jon didn't cope very well with not having a lunchtime nap though and has been whinging all afternoon :(

The laptop we use to connect to the Internet has died :( There's a nasty clicking sound when the harddrive is accessed and it doesn't work any more... We've now set it up so that we connect via Georgina's PC until we decide what to do about having a third PC available whilst we play games :)

Moby has some really good points in his blog about the Music Industry. Well worth a read.

Just as Jon gets to the age where he doesn't need a buggy very often than we discover that we can now make money out of pushing him around!

This deserves a link :)

Do you use BT Openworld for ADSL? Be afraid...

When I lived in Birmingham during my student days, the Bull Ring was horrible. Now they've spend £500 million to make a new one. It's certainly different from the last one, but I'm not sure I like the design of the new Selfridges.

Georgina wanted me to start an Amazon wishlist, so I have.

I've also added this link to our bookmarks page so that both of you can find it again...

Is it only me that thinks that the Government may have got something right here? As anyone who actually reads this drivel knows, I'm not one of those people who thinks that Tony can do no wrong... To me, the general concept that those people applying for a British passport should know basic English is a good one.

In other news, ?40 for a multi-region DVD player strikes me as a good deal!

The Osbournes with a lisp?

There's a good article about the BBC at The Register.

It seems fairly balanced piece and I tend to agree with most of it. What I find most interesting is that having tried most of the commercial news websites, I come back to the BBC because it's just better at what it does. The redesign recently made it worse, but it's still better than the guardian's site or the independents or sky's!

I'm fairly ambivalent about the license fee tbh as I think that I get very good value for money. ?116 per year to pay for BBCi and Radio 4 is great value and I get BBC TV and Radio's 1 to 3 for free should I ever wish to use them... Of course I would prefer not to have to pay for them at all! However I can see how it upsets Sky that they can't dominate the TV arena as from what I can tell the BBC is it's only competition. Sky would dearly love to be a monopoly for general TV just like it is for serious sports fans (especially football).

The fact that the BBC seems to have enemies in both the Tory and Labour parties strikes me as a good thing too. It's certainly politically biased, but doesn't suck up which is a refreshing change to the newpapers...