Ying Tong Iddle I Po

BillyG and the Monkey claim they still have hiring power.

If we all turn off our zealotry for the moment and concentrate on non-political and non-religious reasons, which would you rather work for, Microsoft or Google?

Personally although I know the great working conditions at MS and there are a goodly number of projects I would like to jump in and help with[1], I think Google wins for one reason only: they let their employees spend n% of their time on their own projects. I can only imagine the level of satisfaction that, to take a hypothetical example, one might feel if one’s pet project blossomed into something like Google maps or Google suggest.

[1] I am really enamoured with the whole .NET thing. It has all the advantages of Java without the mind-bending complexity[2]. Also I really like C#. This shouldn’t be a suprise given it was partially designed by the author of my all-time favourite language, although Objectionable C is coming close.
[2] As in it works. Java always seems to have that last 10% of code there just to find the interpreter, setup the class paths, find the native code implementations[3] and make it work.
[3] Something that P/Invoke does so much better!

I took the What will your epitaph say quiz but wasn’t happy with the result. I think mine will either say ‘410 Gone’ or ‘301 Moved Permanently’ based on my religious beliefs at the time :).

Google is 7 years old today.

I remember the first time I saw Google. I remember there being grass-roots murmer at Uni about how it was so much better. I remember the day it became my home page. I remember all of this as being around the day before yesterday. Now I find it is 7 years later, I’ve blinked and missed it. Weird.

What do people think of the Toshiba Portégé A200? I’m thinking of getting one. Note this will be used as a laptop so the shitty graphics & HD size isn’t an issue here.

Also landlady of doom is moaning that the carpets downstairs are dirty two weeks after we moved out and after her being there for a week and one new tenant leaving his stuff there.

I haven’t done one of these in a while :).

38,200 words in 184 printed pages. Not much net word count increase but what words are there I’m happy with. I’ll expect the final wordcount to level off at about 40,000—42,000 in around 200 pages.

Update: Heh, I just found an old post where I estimated the final word count at 34,500 in 186 pages by drawing a straight line through one point :). Not too bad considering. I’m a month behind schedule though…

Imagine a man who only drinks alco-pops, will only use Windows, pronounces Linux as ‘Ly-nux’, mandated Visual Studio for development, believes DirectX is the only sensible graphics platform, who supports hungarian notation as valid, thinks Exchange is a sensible place to store docments and believe Excel to be the best programmer tool available today. You have described the anti-Rich. You have described my future boss.

Oh dear.

Update: That said he isn’t actually a nasty chap in himself, just completely opposite to me in idiology and technical religious beliefs :).

What a nice evening. Totally devoid of any ‘heavy’ content and just some nice low-level chatter at t’pub. I’m quite relaxed[1].

[1] Using the American ‘quite’ rather than the English.

It seems I’ll never have peace when moving… The inventory company claim that they did not recieve our amended inventory despite it having been posted first class a week ago. I’ve emailed them a list of our amendments. If they don’t accept it I shall have to phone and complain loudly. I hate doing that :(.

Not only does plugging my iPod into my Ubuntu-based laptop just damn work in rhythmbox I now find that thos little volume up/down/mute buttons on the front just work in breezy. Please stop making Linux work Canonical. I’ll have no way of avoiding work soon!

We had a friend come around last night which was nice because it gave me the opportunity to cook the first real and meaty dinner in the new house. It was just a basic lasagne (or so I though) but it turned out really nice. It did get me thinking in an interesting direction however. I would classify myself as a fairly competant cook which is due in no small part to encouragement by my parents (both of whom can cook wonderfully) and playing Ready, Steady, Cook… with my mother during my GCSEs whereby she would come back from town with a bag of whatever was reduced in Waitrose and we’d cook something exciting. I learnt a large amount of my cooking skill both from watching and emulating that programme.

I was wondering if people’s parents cooked and whether that was an encouragement to them to learn. I certainly know a large number of people who can’t cook beyond microwave lasagne and similarly massive group who can. Is what distinguishes the ‘can cooks’ from the ‘won’t cooks’[1] their parents? Have we finally got the first fully ready meal generation?

[1] With appologies to Ainsley Harriot.