Matt Large

Week of the iPad 2 ...

2011-03-30T12:56:00.001+00:00

It's been an unusual week for me, I've got a week leave from work. It's not a holiday as such, I'm not doing anything special. It's not even convenient timing, there's lots to do at work and a week out of the schedule is problematic. But it is the end of the holiday year and I had 10 days to go and can only carry over 5, so here I am.

The upside to this is that it is the week after the iPad 2 launch in the UK. I couldn't take the time to queue on Friday, although I went after work to join the back of about 300 people outside the Covent Garden Apple Store to be told straight away that there were no 3G models left after only 20 minutes of selling. I figured with my week off and nothing in particular to do that I would try queuing for the first time.

I've never queued at an Apple store before, mostly I've been either too lucky or too lazy. Pre-ordered my first gen iPod Touch, iPhone 3G and iPad 1, waited a few weeks till stock improved for iPhone 3GS and 4.

Online ordering was something I wanted to avoid. Firstly it's currently a 3-4 week wait, but mostly because Apple's delivery arrangements in the UK are terrible. They will only deliver to the card holder's address and only during working hours. This isn't really the most suitable arrangement for Apple's target audience, myself included. You can't redirect delivery until a first attempt has been made and then you have to contact Apple who tell the delivery company, if you are lucky they'll do it the first time you ask. The one time that tried this was my iPod Touch pre-order, it took 3 weeks from original delivery date to get it, I could have walked to an Apple store and back in my lunch break. I would have cancelled the order but once it's at the delivery depot you have to accept it and then ship it back to them, that just sounded like prolonging the hell.

So this time for the iPad 2 I decided to queue. Not having done this before and the store staff saying you had to arrive early to get one I did just that. I might have overshot the mark a little though, arriving at 3:45am Monday where I waited till gone 5:30am till anyone else joined the queue. At 8am there were still only 11 of us when store staff came out and said that there would be no iPad 2's today.

Tuesday I gave myself an extra hour or so and arrived at 5am, to wait with about the same amount of people till 7:30am when a member of staff told us that there were no iPad 2's and that we shouldn't queue anymore as they were shifting to online reservations only. This is where at 9pm they post available inventory for reservation for in-store pickup.

At 9pm I was sat in front of the iPad 2 reservation pages for Regent Street, Covent Garden, White City and Brent Cross (all easily reachable for me) as well as Cambridge, Milton Keynes and Brighton. Regent Street showed some inventory, but no 32Gb 3G models which was what I was planning to get. So I selected a black 64Gb 3G instead, and also a 16Gb black 3G that a friend wanted. I signed in and proceeded to the screen to select a reservation slot, by which time the 16Gb models had sold out and so that one dropped off the reservation. I quickly clicked next, which resulted in an error because the 10am time which was the default first selected slot was taken. I changed to 10:15am and clicked next ... Success! :)

The time was now 9:03pm and Regent Street had no more 3G models at all for reservation. 15 worried minutes later I got a confirmation email.

This morning I arrived at the store well before my reservation time. Glad that I did, because as I waited in line I heard the staff discussing that they had no more 32Gb Wi-Fi left but still had reservations for them to fulfil. Happily mine was waiting for me, I also got an orange smart cover and the digital AV cable.

All in all, a desperate, but interesting experience. Not sure if I'll do it again though, guess we will see when the iPhone 5 comes out ...

So it's been a while ...

2011-02-26T17:55:00.000+00:00

I'm sitting here at the iMac, something that is happening less and less thanks to iPhone, iPad and AppleTV, and I thought I should post an update. Skipping the testing/source code rant from late last year, when last we spoke the iMac was in trouble. After much restarting and disk recovery attempting, the internal HD was declared dead. Now, thanks to the folks at M.R. Systems, I now have a wonderful new 500GB internal drive, and a much cleaner iMac (running about 5 degrees C lower than before).

Most importantly, on returning the iMac home, I told it to restore from Time Machine and 3 hours later I was back to exactly where I had left things. It is a wonderful technology and if you have a Mac you really should be using it. Although while my machine was quickly dying I also appreciated my SuperDuper! bootable cloned drive too.

I said I am sitting at the iMac. What I am actually doing is watching the Space Shuttle Discovery on STS-133 preparing, in the next couple of hours, to dock with the International Space Station. There are many wonderful things to think about in this scenario.

I could be thinking how amazing it is that a craft with 6 people in it was launched to space 3 days ago and is about to dock with a freaking space station! A space station that also has 2 Soyuz, 1 Progress, 1 HTV and 1 ATV space craft docked to it. That all these were launched from 4 different places by 4 different space agencies.

Of course I probably should be thinking how amazing it is that all of the above is happening ~180 miles above my head and the video is being beamed through multiple satellites, many ground stations, back up to satellites, down to somewhere, encoded and streamed to livestream.com and from there to me. It's pretty cool :)

Strangely though, I keeping finding myself in awe of the iMac itself. In respect to the recent problems, which given it's non-stop performance for the 3 years prior I totally forgive, it is amazing that I don't really think of it as old or ailing.

The iMac I am sitting at is a first gen aluminium iMac, bought late 2007. At the time, having put up with a slow iBook G4 for a couple of years, I knew I was willing to spend up on it. I wanted it to be my computer for a good few years. I did build to order with it and got a Core 2 Duo Extreme 2.8 GHz CPU, 4Gb of Apple installed RAM. That was about all you could do to the iMac at the time, but it was totally worth it.

The photo above is from the day the iMac arrived home, with the slow iBook next to it. You will notice the complete lack of anything else. In the 3+ years since that photo, the iMac has become the brains of a much wider mess of technology. Highlighted to me when I took it away to be repaired and left a hole on the desk with wires hanging there looking for a home. I think of the iMac as like the V'Ger probe from Star Trek: The Motion Picture. A single piece of tech which has drawn other tech into its orbit, making it more than it was. Right now, hanging off the iMac is;

HP Printer/Scanner/Copier
1 TB WD TimeMachine drive
500 GB Seagate cloned drive
20" Apple Cinema Display
iPhone in Dock
iPad in Dock
Wired Keyboard
Magic Mouse
Magic Trackpad
Wacom Bamboo tablet
Via network;

Apple Airport Extreme
Apple Airport Express
AppleTV

Beyond the nest of cables and technology that the iMac supports I am also in awe of its capability. I don't treat it well, I have 4 Spaces set up and treat each almost as if it were a separate computer. One contains controls and management for the 2 web servers and MySQL DB's that are running, another is for web development with Eclipse, Sequel Pro, JEdit and CyberDuck always open along with a collection of browsers including IE running under Wine. There's another space for Apple dev with XCode and Kindle open. Then finally there's my main space which, while I am writing this, has Twitter, Chrome, iPhoto, Spotify, iTunes all running. There's also a Chrome window full screen on the second monitor with the Nasa TV stream running as well as a copy of Video Monkey current converting a copy of a Space Station tour video available on Wikipedia, from OggVorbis to H.264 ready to stream from here to the AppleTV.

True, iStat Menus is telling me I've been at 100% CPU for a while now, that I'm using a lot of network bandwidth and the overal temp is up a couple of degrees from before all this started. But I'm still using this computer without really thinking about it. Pretty awesome don't you think.

Unfortunately the next couple of years must bring the iMac to the end of it useful life as my main machine. OS X Lion reportedly removes support for Core Duo chips putting mine as the lowest allowed spec. When the iMac was last updated (October 2010) it was reasonably 10 times more powerful overall. Of course you pay for that, maxing out the current iMac in the way that I did back in 2007 puts it almost twice the amount I paid. Guess I've got a couple of years of hard saving to do, but as before it will totally be worth it.

Remembering a dark day ...

2010-10-03T20:10:00.001+00:00

It must have been late June 2000, I had been in my first post university job for only a couple of weeks. The 2 main developers at the company were PhD students and desperately want to get back to their research but the current project had been eating more and more of their time until it was all they did.

In the late June 2000 timeframe we are talking about they finally declared the system good enough to launch, so it did. They immediately left the company to complete their research and I remained to maintain the system. Me, a newbie to "professional" development, new to Java and new to the rather large and complex code base they left behind.

For a couple of days things were fine. I tinkered with a few bugs and prepared the next release. That next fatal release when all of a sudden everything went wrong. Old bugs, from before I even started at the company, resurfaced. Nothing made sense and there was no one around that could help.

By about 3am I had managed to patch enough that the system was at least up if not fully functional. Over the next few days I patched bug after bug. Then one of the original developers came back, having put a decent amount of worked into his PhD. He looked over what had happened, the list of bugs that had seemingly returned from the dead and immediately realised what had happen.

You see there was no source control in place. So, to keep life simple, they had split the development into 2. While they both had a complete source to compile against, they would each only change one side of it.

This had worked through most of the development, until the day they left. When they put their source into a single folder for me, for the first time since starting. One developer put his source code in first, then the other put his in. Both his up to date correct half that he had been working on and his old incorrect copy of the other developer's half. Thus all of the bugs fixed in the previous weeks by developer 1 returned.

----

I recount this story because it has been in my mind of late. I have been putting a lot of effort into planning regression tests for a change I am implementing which first brought this story to mind. Also I was chatting to a developer the other day who was bemoaning bugs returning from the grave. Coincidentally I was also reminiscing with someone about horrendous problems we had on a project that did use source control, the variant of which turned out to be a costly mistake.

From my story and those of others in this area I take away 2 lessons that I try never to forget. Firstly, you must have source control, and an associated plan of how you will use it. Secondly, you cannot assume that simply having and using source control is the answer. While it may prevent the total disaster I presented above, I have seen many projects have source management issues even with source control in place. Be sure to review, on a regular basis, how you are using source control and whether it actually offers you the safety net you might assume it does.

Sad times in the Scorched Tortoise shell ...

2010-09-29T00:47:00.001+00:00

For the past week I have been trying to resuscitate the iMac. A little over a week ago I came home to find the beach ball of doom and then a failure to reboot. Still some options to try before I am forced to concede that it is going to have to be an expensive out of warranty hardware fix.

I don't begrudge the machine having a failure such as this, it's only been powered down for about 3 weeks in total over the 3 years I've had it (1 week for a flat move and 2 weeks for our wedding). In that time it's been working hard.

At least I don't have any worries about data loss. My multiple backup strategy is putting my mind to rest about that.

In the meantime I'm not feeling out of touch, or really without computer in any way. I've got the iPhone and iPad which cover most things and the old iBook G4 is being pressed back into service for the other essentials. It's impressive how many developers are still ensuring their applications are Universal.

I'll let you know how things progress, and hopefully that it turns out to be nothing too drastic.

The new Mac Mini is very nice ...

2010-06-15T12:03:00.001+00:00

... just have to keep telling myself that I don't need one and can't afford it.

So how are things with you?

2010-06-12T14:07:00.000+00:00

As has become normal for the last few years it's been quite a while since I last blogged. I hope 2010 has been as good for you all as it's been for me so far. Thought I'd post an update on what's been going on for me this year.

The day job that I moved to in September last year is still proving to be a great choice for me. Great people, interesting work (gobs of data flying around all the time) and relaxed, meaning it's the first job that i'm not stressing about when I'm not there.

Launched a couple of project so far this year and working on 2 more that should prove interesting and important to various people in the organisation.

We managed to get the new version of http://www.sportbilly.com complete for the World Cup and people seem to be having a good time.

The iPad arrived (blogging from it right now) and the new iPhone is coming later this month, so my gadget habit is progressing nicely.

With the relaunch of http://www.sportbilly.com out of the way I've got a weekend free to perform some much needed maintenance on the iMac, so I've left iDefrag doing it's thing and escaped to Starbucks where i am writing this.

All in all life is pretty good right now, I hope it is for you all. I'm going t try to post a little more here, and make some changes to the blog in the coming months. Don't know what people want to see on here but I'll probably write about the SB relaunch process and what i learned from that and the iPad/iOS situation.

New year, new work/fun ...

2010-01-10T16:28:00.002+00:00

It's been a pretty good start to 2010 for me. At the day job there was a major update that one of our data suppliers was doing between 31/12/2009 and 1/1/2010. When I say major, I mean a complete change required to every system that touches that data. Several teams had been spending the better part of 6 months preparing. Having only recently joined I wasn't deeply involved, I just helped prep and perform testing, but I was still very glad when everything went as planned.

As for my other main project things have been progressing well. I've implemented over half of the new design and had a wonderful few weeks discovering that JQuery really is one of the most wonderful things ever. Making the use of Javascript in browsers "just work" has made my life much easier and enabled me to implement far more interactive components than I had planned. I tip my hat to them.

Even though things have been going well I'm still a little bit behind schedule on the project, so lots of effort over the next few weeks to catch up. But, as I described in my last post ("In the zone ...") it is much more joyous for me this time around. This is also because I have made it much easier on myself. I spent a little bit of cash to pick up a second monitor (an Apple Cinema Display 23" second hand) and a new office chair/foot rest. The combination of these things makes working at home a lot easier than it used to.

Hopefully this will all have been a good investment and I can finish the new design so the rest of the team can relaunch the site and I can spend a little time on some new personal projects. I hope you are looking forward to the rest of 2010 as much as I am.

In the zone ...

2009-11-22T16:46:00.002+00:00

It's been a long time since I was "in the zone" on a personal project. The zone I am referring to is the developer zone not Twilight or Phantom. This is the zone where you start coding and then are amazed that many hours have passed when you next look up.

The project I've been working on for the past few years has had it's ups and downs. The past 12 months have mostly been downs. Something changed recently that reinvigorated my relationship with the project, that change was finally getting a great design.

Three years ago I implemented the first version based off some old design documents the team had commissioned but never implemented. That was tough, without the original designer around to fill in the blanks as needed, but I got through it and the project was still fresh and exciting. The next phase was a redesign triggered by underlying changes in the information model and the closest thing I had to a design was a suggestion that it should be "like the BBC site".

That work dragged. Every step of the way I was having to think about design, implement assets and tweak stuff on the fly with no overall look and feel guidance. After about the 50th time I suggested it the team finally got a professional designer in, though after the horrible made up design had gone live to little joy.

In 6 pages of PDF Paul produced something that both looked elegant and fitted the IA beautifully. So for the past couple of weeks I have spent my spare time "in the zone" implementing the html and css statically and loving every minute of it. By the end of the month I will be done with this phase and will then implement the design on top of the existing backend code. I can't wait.

Without the drag of a bad (or no) design weighting me down the implementation in code will be quick and also allow me to tidy up some of the code issues I have been meaning to get around to for ages.

Most startups realise the benefit to their users of a great design, but the benefits to team morale are not often mentioned. Right now I can safely say they are just about the most important thing that could have happened to this project. Oh, the redesign also give me a chance to move over to jquery finally and that's another pot of fun all to itself.

New week, new fun

2009-03-23T13:12:00.000+00:00

Finally this weekend I feel like I have caught up with life. Started a new phase on work projects, deadlines far off. Hit a happy point with a couple of personal projects and I'm ready to move forward with some others.

Now if I can just win at rolling tomorrow night ...

Many week rolling update ...

2009-03-17T23:49:00.001+00:00

... still not looking good for me.

Weekly 3 Game Average

4 Week Moving Average

If you wonder why developing a new rocket is complex and expensive ...

2009-02-16T23:17:00.002+00:00

People often wonder why developing the next generation of human rated rockets is so complex and expensive. I think the latest edition of The Big Picture from the Boston Globe answers this well. The sheer scale of some of the infrastructure, no matter the development of the multiple rocket stages, is amazing.

Whether you agree with human spaceflight or not, you have to be impressed by the engineering on show in these images.

I also have to recommend The Big Picture site generally, their collections of images from the various wire services and freelancers often show the many sides/faces of a story. Check out their coverage of both the Obama campaign and the Inauguration as examples.

Geeking weekend preparing for Snow Leopard ...

2009-02-15T16:46:00.009+00:00

While this weekend has involved great geeking with my Macs it was preceded by far more geek thought and concern. I blame it on/credit it to a couple of podcasts that I've been listening to for quite some time now; Adam Christianson's MacCast and The Mac Observer's Mac Geek Gab. I never used to worry about loosing data or machines getting fried from nearby lightening strikes, but a couple of months ago it began to creep into my nightmares.

You see, I"m a hoarder of data. I have the results of high school chemistry experiments, still have all the different versions of my final year degree project. Every CV I've had to write is still there, along with the letter of application for a years placement at CERN (I have the rejection letter in a file on a shelf somewhere too). However I always had a backup strategy of holding multiple copies of this archive on multiple PCs.

Then I moved to the Mac, and for a while I still had the drives and some of the PCs holding my archive, but eventually it just came down to bare drives that hadn't been used for years. I grabed myself a USB Drive adapter and copied the whole archive onto my iMac. At that point I had one single copy on one single drive. Then all I would hear in my head were the horror stories written in to the podcasts I mentioned. The constant advice of having multiple copies of everything.

When I upgraded to Leopard I bought a Maxtor 500GB external drive for Time Machine, which I thought should be enough to cope with my internal 300GB drive. After 3 months it start erroring on account of the fact that it was full. Time Machine dutifully started deleting old copies of things and I began to worry again. Finally I caved and bought a 1TB WD MyBook drive for Time Machine and then bought a copy of SuperDuper! to use the Maxtor for a bootable clone of my main drive.
Finally my mind could rest about only having a single copy of my data, I could handle 2 potential drive failures. At last restful sleep ... but of course not. My mind moved onto the next possible crisis, fried computer and all 3 drives(!) from a power spike, triggered by both the podcasts and the, getting more often, small power failures in our area. After a good search and taking advice from KC I've settled on the APC Back-up ES 700VA.

But that is for next month, this months tech concern is about the imminent release of Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard. For those that don't know, and are interested, there is quite a large set of unknowns about this next release of OSX. Apple has stated that it will be primarily an update to the internals of OSX, with few new visible features. This is a platform for future releases, but as such is almost certain to be an Intel only release.

Traditionally Apple removes the previous version of OSX from sale when the new one is available. If this happens with Snow Leopard then what are those people who have yet to update their PowerPC machine to Leopard to do? This was my concern, we still have the little iBook G4 which Carly uses a lot.

Of course, and I'm sure that this is no coincidence, Apple has recently released the new versions of iWork and iLife and made them available in a set with Leopard, the Mac Boxed Set, at an incredibly reasonable price. All together this works out really well, I'm a version behind on iLife and 2 on iWork. So I got the set, iLife and iWork for my iMac and another Leopard license for the iBook.

Before installing Leopard on the iBook though a little surgery was required, it only had the built in 256MB of RAM. A quick order from the wonderful people at Crucial, and a 1GB chip was in my hands (1.25 GB being the max on that machine). Using the instructions from iFixIt the installation was a breeze, and I finally figured out a use for OSX's CTRL+Mouse Wheel screen zoom (instructions on the 24" iMac across the room as the printer is out of ink).

While Leopard was installing I installed iLife and iWork on the iMac, now all is good. A great geek weekend, now I just have to wait till next month and the APC UPS and maybe I can relax ...

Best rolling ever ...

2009-02-11T11:49:00.000+00:00

... and I still lost :(

Weekly 3 Game Average

4 Week Moving Average

Another day, another coffee ... or 3 ... or ...

2009-01-21T13:19:00.001+00:00

GeoTagged, [N51.49327, E0.14871]

I think best with coffee. All of my good ideas can be traced back to a coffee moment.

Today I've been in an email conversation with Craig who is bored at work. Ended up describing an idea I had for stupid comedy show. An idea from 10 years ago.

It raised it's head from my the back of my mind because I was listening to the Propellerheads album Decksandrumsandrockandroll which 10 years ago I had on heavy rotation. On my MiniDisc player!

Way back then that idea had come to me during my morning coffees at Ostbahnhoff in Munich. I stopped there on my way into work each morning. Haven't thought about that place in a long while.

It's been nice today, through the medium of music, coffee and conversation, to be transported to 10 years ago. Happy times and happy memories.

There was so much foul language ...

2009-01-21T00:19:00.002+00:00

... from me on the lanes, directed at myself of course. Looks like Rogue is back on form, although he still needs another win to take him back to the top in the 4 week moving average.

Read them and weep/sigh/cheer depending on who you are.

Weekly 3 Game Average

4 Week Moving Average

Bowling scores at last ...

2009-01-17T00:17:00.002+00:00

Here they are. After too much time away we finally arrive at 2 new bowling graphs.

Weekly 3 Game Average

4 Week Moving Average

With getting on for 2 years of data in them the graphs are becoming a little confused, I hope to do something about that pretty soon.

In the meantime be amazed at how Rouge and Onepin have been fighting for the weekly win and how I've bounced all over the shop but generally just gone downhill :( ... till next week of course ;)

2009 ...

2009-01-13T14:14:00.001+00:00

I started 2009 with a plan. I was going to clear the decks of outstanding tasks and move on to new and exciting things.

Now, 3 weeks in that's all out the window. Some how I've ended up gathering lots of new tasks I didn't really count on. You might think that I should have expected this, but really most of these were not things that you would ever plan for.

At a time of credit crunch I have managed to be placed on 3 projects at once at work. These along side 3 internal projects. My main full time client work is also extending each time we talk to our client.

On top of that there are 3 personal projects each requiring some time.

All of this is sitting in my task list far ahead of the other, less familiar and therefore more interesting, things I want to get to.

It's time to sort all of this out and re-plan my year. So here and now I say to myself that by the end of the week I will have got my head straight and plotted a course to sanity.

I will have gotten ahead of the plan at work and effectively delegate that which can be.

I will have moved into the next phase of personal project 1.

Finally I will, by next week have sorted out our bowling score graphs! Only then could guilt be remove and sanity return.

C Bet

2008-12-23T22:59:00.001+00:00

C Jan 2010 or 15 st
K Feb
M May
J Apr

£20

24x24 ...

2008-11-30T04:56:00.001+00:00

It has been 2 years since our last 24x24 (a season of 24 in one shot, starting with Jack and finishing with Jack). With the delay to season 7, and my generally chaotic calender we have only just gotten to season 6.

This season is another tough one. Starting, and therefore finishing, at 6am. Much like the season 2 24x24 we made the mistake of staying up far too late last night. So with 3 hours sleep behind us we embarked at the appointed hour, I'll mention it again, 6am!

As always, because episodes are not actually an hour long, we bank a bit of time for some longer breaks like lunch or for a bit of Rock Band.

Right now is the hardest part. It's 4:47am local time. Jack has just hit 5am. In order to finish with Jack we cannot start the next one till 5:22am.

Mike crapped out about 1am, Jon has drifted in and out since 3am and now, in the 40 minute break they are all asleep.

So sitting here alone I write this. Marking our 6th 24x24 and my (unconventional) stag weekend. Even though they snore around me, I know I have the best friends in the world.

Who's doing QA on iPhone podcasts firmware ...

2008-11-25T13:13:00.001+00:00

Much as I love my iPhone I am begining to feel like a second class user in Apple's eyes. You see I don't listen to much music, according to some my taste is so bad I don't in fact listen to any music. Mostly I listen to podcasts.

Lots and lots of podcasts. So unlike some I have become very familiar with how awkward the combination of iPhone and iTunes can be when dealing with podcasts.

Firstly there is the annoyance that each firmware update manages to set all the most recently listened to podcasts to an unfinished state thus re syncing them rather than removing them. The whole new, started and finished status issue is confusing enough without randomly resetting some of them.

The 2.1 firmware update showed an attempt to improve things. New indicators showing whether you have unlistened or partially listened to episodes within a podcast were introduced. Great but then they set the ordering to be latest first and to automatically play through the full list. So on finishing the latest episode the iphone would start playing the previous one!

In the recent 2.2 firmware the date ordering is correct but the indicators are gone from the podcast level and are only visible at the episode level. Also video podcasts are still in the wrong order.

Podcasts are obviously a bit of a loss leader for Apple, but come on. This is basic stuff and if you are going to start trying to fix things then you should pay a little attention to checking in all areas. My guess would be they either didn't look at the video section because they were only looking in podcasts? Or they needed to protect the ordering of videos to support TV series in some way. Really annoying is that the video podcasts do appear in the podcast section, in the correct order but will only play the audio part!

Normally the details of user interface design is one of the things us Apple fans can hold up high. What is currently failing in the iPhone QA team to let these issues past?

2008-09-27T12:23:00.001+00:00

Deadlines stacked but not loaded ...

2008-07-29T00:50:00.002+00:00

Looks like August is going to be a crazy busy month. 3 deadlines each either just before or just after the big trip to Vegas with the lads.

A holiday is definately required, and going to Vegas with my best mates from all the way back in high school is something I've been wanting for ages. But also sometime away from normality with C would be amazing. The next holiday we have planned is the wedding which is not till December so I need to come up with something else before then. Even if it's just a nice weekend away somewhere quiet for just the 2 of us.

Down time is important and there's not been enough of that this past year. We need some to get through the next one.

Done

2008-07-25T01:49:00.001+00:00

Lunch as it should be

Current frustrations ...

2008-04-14T00:38:00.002+00:00

In no particular order;

The aftermath of the Hollywood writers strike

It's not that I was opposed to the strike in any way, I fully backed it. But being somewhat addicted to TV it is now very frustrating that so many shows have either been a) dumped, b) curtailed or c) confused through a large season break. The next autumn season cannot come round quick enough.

A frustration that was good to write but on reflection removed

Writing things down, or typing them up (why is writing "down" and typing "up"?), is a very cathartic thing to do. But looking back on the one that was here (work related) I felt it best that I remove it. Will write about it at a later date.

My bowling scores

Since I started my current project I have missed many weeks of bowling and it shows. Recent nights have shown and improvement and my 4 Week Moving Average is now almost back to pre-project levels, although that's still not great. I really do feel like I am improving but that I just can't get past a certain point. It's also a downward spiral in that my frustration has an adverse effect on my game. As with life in general I find it hard to push work out of my head and focus on what I am doing. It's hard to bowl with code compiling in your mind.

Conclusion

All in all there's not much there really. Life is pretty good at the moment, although there's a couple of frustrations that I don't want to write up here (inevitably the bigger ones). If I can get my current project complete, my personal project moving and one or two other things finalised then life will be sweet. Not much to ask for is it :)

Rolling scores update for 2008-04-08 ...

2008-04-08T23:30:00.002+00:00

Here is an automated post of the latest bowling scores. 3 Game Weekly Average 4 Week Moving Average

Update: You'll notice that I have fixed the calculations behind the 4 week moving average chart. They were way off and not showing the latest results. All fixed now, as you can see by the way I am rapidly catching up to STS (Seven Ten Split) Onepin! ;)