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Hi, I just thought I’d make a quick post saying what I’d been up to. I came down to London on Monday to stay with Philippa, and have been down here since then. The weather hasn’t exactly been the best it could have been, in fact it’s been a bit miserable, but we’ve had a good time nonetheless.

Monday was the best day, so in the afternoon we went out for a good walk! On Tuesday we went into Bromley to have lunch, and then in the evening we went to the cinema to see “Hitch”. It was very good, quite silly but a good Rom-Com! One of those I don’t mind going to the cinema to see, although probably won’t buy on DVD…

Yesterday we went into London to have a look round the GLA building – it was very interesting! Go just to have a look at the big aerial photo of London including greater London, it’s really cool. And in the evening we had a curry with a couple of Phil’s friends.

And this evening we’re going to a concert, with the BBC symphony orchestra or something like that! I’ll let you know how it is – all for now 🙂

Just thought I’d post up a message saying – Happy Easter!

Um, and – now for the reason I made this post… I bought a couple of albums on Friday. One of them was ‘Parachutes’ by Coldplay, which has been one of my favourite albums for a long time – I’m just getting around to making my collection completely legal 😉

And I also bought “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys. It’s a classic album, and for a good reason: it’s really good! It’s definitely worth a place in the collection of any music lover. Brian Wilson was (is) a musical genius, I’d post up a link or two but I’d have to find them first and I can’t be bothered right now.

Speaking of audio type stuff, I listen to music quite a lot on my computer. Up until now I’ve used MP3s, they’re pretty much the standard. However I’ve just got into “Ogg” files – basically an open-source standard for encoding audio, similar to MP3 except with better compression so that you get a better standard for a smaller filesize. A popular implementation of Ogg is Vorbis. For players, Winamp has native support for .ogg files (if you download the full version, as I found out the ‘Lite’ version only contains the basic file format support).

Anyway, there are lots of good points about using the .ogg format over .mp3, I recommend checking out Vorbis and having a look at the FAQ for more details 🙂

This is really for a friend of mine (Joe), as one of his many goals in life is “World Domination”. I have found a web page that might help.

I particularly like this one:

Law 17 – Keep Others in Suspended Terror: Cultivate an Air of Unpredictability

Humans are creatures of habit with an insatiable need to see familiarity in other people’s actions. Your predictability gives them a sense of control. Turn the tables: Be deliberately unpredictable. Behavior that seems to have no consistency or purpose will keep them off-balance, and they will wear themselves out trying to explain your moves. Taken to an extreme, this strategy can intimidate and terrorize.

*puts little finger up to mouth in doctor evil style*

Muahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!!

I ordered a book called “Religion is for Fools” the other day, and I’ve just started reading it. It’s shaping up to be very good, and from what I’ve read so far I’d certainly recommend it!

Anyway, there’s a rather good quote in it that I’d like to share. The quote is actually taken from another book – a psychiatrist called James T. Fisher said in Case Book of a Psychiatrist:

If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified of psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene – if you were to combine them, and refine them, and cleave out the excess verbiage – if you were to take the whole of the meat and none of the parsley and if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge concisely expressed by the most capable poets, you would have an awkward and incomplete summation of [Jesus’] Sermon on the Mount.

Happy Easter folks, hope you have a good one!

Well, I don’t have much to say, except that (as I don’t know whether I’ll get a chance to update before) — have a good bank holiday everybody! Hope you have a great time, whatever you do.

And try and pop into your local church at some point, they work very hard at this time of year so it’d be good to give them some support 🙂

Um, haven’t updated much the past couple of days! The weekend was good, went to Colchester as per usual. I did the sound for Dunamis on Sunday night (an event put on by the Christian groups on campus), that went well! It wasn’t any of my equipment but I managed OK.

Oh, and I watched “Finding Neverland” on Saturday night… good film. Not one I’d buy on DVD, mainly because it’s not really my kind of style – I would recommend you to watch it though!

Simon’s just put up a post on his website, more labour lies (you’ll need to login to see it). In case you can’t, here’s a quote:

posted at 11:24 PM

Anyway. I think I agree with him… one thing that I really hate about today’s political parties is that all they seem to focus on is comparing themselves to the opposition favourably. Admittedly it’s been going on for a long time, but when you get a campaign by labour which basically equates to: “oh, vote for us, at least we’re not the tories!” – I really think that pushes the limit.

Do you really think we are so stupid, Mr. Blair? Do you think we’ve got memories short enough to forget things like Iraq? Or Afghanistan? Or those 1997 election pledges…

And I’ll stop being political now because I don’t know anything about it 🙂

It seems like spring is finally here! The past couple of days have felt very spring-like. I just hope that the weather continues – I’ve got the week just following Easter off work. It wouldn’t surprise me if it was snowing that week though, knowing my luck with weather…

I’m glad it’s the weekend now, I am feeling rather tired! Good night everybody, I’ve got to go, got to leave you all behind and face the truth… Mama… *ahem* sorry. Night…

Zeth sent me an email last night about software patents. I don’t have it here, but suffice it to say I think it might work… maybe. He explained it a bit more. Anyway, um, not much to say really, other than – it’s Friday, yay!

That wasn’t much of a post… nevermind. Yeah.

Zeth wrote on his website about software patents etc. I wrote a response to him in the comments system, but thought I’d reproduce it here because I haven’t said anything for a while and I need some content to pad it out a bit…

Zeth, you have lots of ideas. Some are good, some are bad. Some, like this one:

“A technical problem needs a technical solution – not a legal one. A far cheaper option would be an EU software repository. Any company that wants to sell software within Europe must send a dated copy of the source code to the repository. The small team would then go and buy a shrink wrapped binary version, run the compiler and check that the two are the same.”

Are crazy… do you have ANY IDEA AT ALL how ridiculous it would be to have a team do that? Every piece of software in Europe? Every revision of every piece of software in Europe, every bug patch, what? My company churn out a fair bit of code, and we’re not even a big software house.

Not to mention the fact that there are as many development environments out there as there are PCs… getting a “small” group (although a group like that would probably have to be the size of Microsoft to do what you’re suggesting) to compile everything would be a total nightmare. Anyone who’s ever tried to get a piece of software compiled for Oracle Application Server will tell you (like I’m telling you now) – it doesn’t easily port between PCs, not with all the different versions of libraries and so on.

I don’t think having a centralised European software library (or something like that) is the answer, not in the way that you were suggesting anyway!

Normal service will be resumed next time I post 🙂