Well England won, sounds like a small riot / footy match outside the office, inside it's quite quiet and people are trying to pretend to work. That is all.

Ok total Twilight Zone today about 3 seconds after putting up my last blog I get an email from Jane saying the link is incorrect. Ok that is silly once you type it, at the time it was werid.
Next Stopped smoking the other day, ummm tuesday I think, it was, can't remember when I had my last one. Sometime round 7 ish or something, Emma and I had been down for the fly over so it must have been round 7ish.
Okay as a side note, feeling pissed at the moment, so listen to Some soothing DanZig and would it play in my CD player nooooooooo, put it in the DVD player XP pops up a window saying " so ya want me to play da CD or what ?"

Mwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
Anyway, giving up is somewhat different to what I remember when I last gave up nearly 9 years ago. Needless to say I think if I had to sit next to a junkie for more than about 3 minutes, they would get up in disgust and part saying "Your fucked up", Got headaches, totally nill attention spam and a very vivid imagination at the moment, which seems to be liking paranoia at present. Anyway folks either don't start or live in a small cave with no people for 3 months when you give up, preferably with about 16 tons of your favourite booze.

Good one, we lost our pipe at work yesterday to our servers from noon till about 19:30, it took that long to trace the problem to a "mid point exchange" fault. What is going to happen because of it? Fuck all that�s what.
I can�t get Eclipse to work with our cvs setup, I assume it�s just me being silly, but still it�s pissing me off.

Back at work after the jubilee weekend spent in Normandy with Emma�s folk, Claire and Al, Caught the train to Dover on Saturday morning, with Claire and Al, all four of us with various states of hangover. At Dover we met up with Peter and Joy where we all piled in to Peters Jag, needless to say I�m now eternally grateful for being tall as this meant I got to sit in the front. We had a couple of hot, sunny days and a couple of hot rainy days, all in all nice weather, with the most amazing lighting storm on Sunday night, it was very weird a lot of the time there was lighting without thunder. It was between clouds rather than a cloud and the group, very freak. What other randomness occurred, we all went to the Benedictine Museum and some cliffs on the Monday and over a couple of f-off big bridges which were cool. Emma, Al and I flew back on Tuesday from Caen airport, which was brilliant, two check in desks and room for about 2 plane loads of passengers, ultra small and ultra clean, Very cool. By the time Emma and I got back to the flat we both collapsed and watched the Jubilee on the BBC, what a load of crap, the commentator was shite, I guess its hard to ramble on about nothing for 8 hours, anyway, Emma dragged me down to the Mall to see what was going on and catch the fly over. Masses of people, cool fly over, and all in all a relaxed atmosphere.

Interesting article about Java and open source development, although they don't mention Eclipse which seems a bit silly. On a completey different note check out This, its what happens if you go for one too many beers, its a joint Rich T, Jono idea.

Ok, I�ve made a start at my website , Bit of an arse that Im not going to have time to work on either the site or any of my MIDlet stuff till next week. Oh the YAY side of things we have just relaunched the archive at work and so far fingers crossed it seems stable.

It would appear that the English government has decided to mimic blackadder and apoint a Darling in place of buyers.

Went to a evening put on by the Friends of Imperial College at the Science Museum with Emma tonight. It was a private showing of the Human Body at the Science Museum IMAX cinema, with a talk by the producer and several academics from Imperial afterward. The movie was brilliant. It was my first time at an IMAX cinema and once again I learned some more about something not to do with computers. The talks, and the question / answer session was also interesting. The producer spoke about how the movie was made, which was cool. I think I got more out of the evening than Emma, because she works in the field.
OK and on a completely different note, I was thinking about previous lives early, and thought that there are now more people alive than were ever alive before [1]. Anyway how could there be previous lives if there are more people alive now than have ever lived in history [1] . I though maybe previous lives could be from other creatures and seeing as there are a load of extinct creatures and small creatures we have managed not to wiped out, they could come from. Just a thought, I think I've just come up with Nirvana or at least the cycle of karma, Oh well.

[1] Crap explanation email if you wanna know I mean.

Some people are funny, isn't he a big girl.

Emma sent me this link, looks as though Linux has just been released for the PS2 in Europe, sounds interesting, I'm tempted to get it to have a play, I think I may wait till others have it and we can see how much Sony has crippled it or at least access to the hardware.

Ok, only been using Eclipse for a couple of hours so far. Even so it has some funky new features like, organizing your imports, removes unnecessary imports, suggests ones that are missing and narrows the scope if you put .*. Also has a quick fix option that attempts to fix your code if there is anything wrong with it. However possibly the bees knees is the Junit support, F Brilliant, already found a bug I had no idea existed AND it�s a piece of piss to set up. Brilliant !!!

Ok something I forgot to addd about the wedding was the high number of napkins that got set on fire at our table, it was amazing you�d be looking round the room and there would be a small fire on the table and the people round it lost in conversation, well I thought it was a bit funny. I installed the latest stable build of Eclipse
at home over the weekend, and its about 58 Billion times better than it used to be, come on release 2. Funny though I decided to try it at work and went to look for the latest stable build, I clicked strangely enough on the �Stable Build� link and was greeted with a load of big red crosses, DOH ! oh well got an early version so wahoo wahoo.

Went to a wedding yesterday for one of Emmas cousins in Haywards Heath, it was really cool, in a little village church. Got to meet some of Emmas rellies, who were cool.
Just watched the first race of the World super bikes, completely mad bastards, they are racing at silverstone in about 4 feet of water, Bayliss managed to drop it twice, once while leading and then again coming through the pack and still finished in the top ten. I've just switched over to see the beginning of the F1, not sure if I can be arsed watching after the last race bullshit.
Jesus Christ the guy below our flat must to totally deaf , I can hear his TV clearer than ours, why are people so unconsiderate ?

Gotta love people, started to look at Ant to build my J2ME projects last night,ya know reading the ant docs and pissing about nothing too serious. I was just about to leave work and what do I find an article[1] on Suns wireless site about it, Brill. Clare and Al[2] are over for dinner tonight so I won�t get to play with Ant till either late tonight or tomorrow, boo, although it will be cool to catch up and have a natter.


[1] http://wireless.java.sun.com/midp/articles/ant/
[2] Emmas sister and her boyfriend.

So we are moving our servers from our building to our head office, because they have a better server room, with better air con, cleaner power, a better network setup and dedicated people looking after everything. Brilliant we think, 24/7/365, however they say noooooooo not even CO-LO people give you that[1], this seeded doubt in my mind that we wouldn�t be able to run upstairs to our servers if anything wrong and that they would be trapped an hour away and we would never be able to get access to them.
Then today one of the other developers gets a call from a tech guy asking if we really need Fast Ether Channeling for our server as they will only have 3 ports left in there switches if we do, and that its not really necessary to do this as we have redundant servers, Mwaaaaaaaaaa god only knows what level of service we will end up with once the servers are live.


[1] They seem to think that if you pay someone �250K PA to look after your servers, the providers will take the money and laugh at you.

Well, good news and bad news, have just got a Flat Panel Monitor[1] at work that you can pivot, it seems clear. Being able to have your monitor in portrait is very cool, however we will see if it is just a new toy fad or not. However on the downside, I got an email from Mum today and our dog was put down last night, which is sad, but he was 17 and not doing to well so I guess its all for the best, I just thought I would get to see him again, hopefully none of the other oldies will croak before I have a chance to go home.

[1] http://computers.cnet.com/hardware/0-2295747-404-7095959.html

I started reading From Beirut to Jerusalem[1] by Thomas Friedman and it so seems like a good book, I've also started writing an ant[2] build file for my J2ME[3] project, I'm constantly amazed at how much software is out there for J2ME, and its all free. I think I now have all the tools I had for J2SE[4] wahoo. Have you noticed there appears to be an inverse correlation between the price of software and how many bugs / features it has ? Free software seems to run fast and bug free and applications you pay for seem to run slow and be riddled with bugs, at work we recently gave up on our F expensive XML Store and have starting using Lucene [5] to index our content and its soooooooo fast, easy to use AND has brilliant support wahoo.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0006530702/qid=1022059048/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_3_1/202-0275862-4691877
[2] http://jakarta.apache.org/ant/
[3] http://wireless.java.sun.com/
[4] http://java.sun.com/
[5] http://jakarta.apache.org/lucene/

Righto I'm now one of the Blog Collective.