With my C++ project crashing visual studio a lot today, I’ve been reading a few blog entries.

Alex pointed out Wes Dyer’s blog, so I’ve been reading my way thought his recent posts.

The Visual Studio “MSDN: Visual C#” feed has a link to Charlie Calvert’s interview with Anders Hejlsberg on LINQ and Functional Programming. A very worth while watch (@118MB download) Anders explains things so well.

Eric was talking about wrongness that geek bloggers vs. Grammy winners, and that due to the nature of the web that geeks ranked higher than real world popular personalities.

So inspired by the potential I went search for my ranking against Simeon, and I’m 187th (at the time of this posting).

Woot take that.

What I did find interesting was the Wikipedia Simeon entry, how the biblical Simeon is a son of Jacob, I think Jacob will find that funny also.

With my ego safely checked, I also point out that I think Eric’s post is very good.

OH MY GOD: Just before posting this I remembered there are other search engines, So I went to Bing and I’m 809th.

I have been swimming since September. As I get bored with front crawl I have often done underwater lengths to improve my hockey game. I’ve not played any hockey over the uni-holidays (as all the students leave town), so am not sure if my games has improved.

Reading Larry O’Brien’s blog this morning he posted about 365 day challenges, and a possible counter challenge of underwater swimming. He replied to my comment and introduced me to the term dynamic apnea - underwater swimming, I then spent the next while reading sites talking about training.

Reading the Wikipedia Free-diving entry I noticed Underwater Rudy, sounds fun.

My current bests are: 50m no fins, 75m with fins.

Offtopic: Larry’s 15 Exercises to Know A Programming Language looks like good fun too.

indexed.blogspot.com has some great humour, displayed via hand drawn graphs. Favourites so far.

This is a yeam. It puts the “WHY?!?” in team.

Who wins?

This one took me a few seconds, but so poignant, just swap Sports program with On computer…

Side note: got my a->g when Tim posted that Rowan has a blog, and Rowan’s current post is also about indexed.blogspot.com

Was reading LiveJournal, and came across this icon in the comments. Just had to steal it.

At lunch time today I went to Harvey’s shop The Beer Emporium. His shop looked fantastic, look a book shop, but with the walls covered with beer bottles instead.

We sampled two beers, a Petrus Tripel, it was fantastic. It went down very well, but I didn’t feel I needed to rush it. The second was a Saison Dupont, which was nice in mouth, but had a bitter after taste. Apparently it very good for it’s type, but I suspect it’s not my type.

I brought four other beer to try-out at cards tonight, a Petrus Oude Bruin, Sleemans Honey Brown, Warsteiner Premium Pilsner and fruit beer De Troch Exotic (pineapple). Quite excited.

Last week while driving to work I was singing the flipper theme tune. Badly, mainly because I could remember the lyrics. Anyway I decided I was bored of the tune in my head, so turned the radio on, and as National Radio is the only thing that turns in well, I listened to that. After about 2 minutes of talking, the presenter played a retro song from the 60’s… it was the flipper theme tune.

Doo-eee-woo!

Adam Cogan blogged about the problems of listening to music while working. Dr Neil replied it has it place.

I agree with both of their points, I wear headphones to help block the team noise when I am doing a known task. Mainly house music.

An issue Adam missed was:

People throwing objects to gain attention. I just had a lunch box crash into my desk, because my house music so was funky that my legs were jiggling ( E-Smoove - I Hear The Music off Nice ‘n’ Urlich 2) that my chair was squeaking. I had not noticed the paper and rubber bands so the projectiles had escalated. I was then told be thankful it was not a book!

It took about 5 minutes to calm down enough to even find out why I’d been attacked. 15 minutes later, I’m almost feeling calm, but not at the funky happy place I was. Now that productive time lost. All because of music.

So I started playing the vanishingpointgame, add it behaves very oddly.

Problems notes so far:

1. if you open a sub puzzle, then close it, it is shown as solved.
2. after solving the sundial puzzle, I had 20 points, even though it is a 10 point puzzle.
3. I solved the 50 point hourglass puzzle, and I still had 20 points.
4. I re-solved the sundial puzzle, now I have 30 points.
5. Now both the sundial and hourglass puzzle don’t let me play, as makes sense, but still only got 30 points. But it I close the 01.08 puzzle, and reopen it, but let me play (as they are shown as unsolved)

So um, I don’t think I’ll bother playing any more….

Edit: yes I running in FireFox, but it’s all flash, so it should be sweet?

I love Gmail, it’s where ever I have Internet access. I can use pop to download the mail (do this at home). The online search is fantastic. And I have been singing its praise when ever possible.

But, the last few weeks, it has been behaving like a dog.

• Searches fail (timing out)
• Sending emails failing. This is the most annoying, as you don’t know if it’s been sent or not
• Changing Label views failing

This has been happening from both work and home. So I don’t think of it as the IS boys playing games here at work. But it also hasn’t been just a one off things. Something has changed, and the service is now intermittent.

I now have doubt I’ll get my mail when I want it. That I’ll be able to send when I want. It took a few weeks, but I now have changed my mind set from, are they having problems today? to will it work today?, and it feels like are huge change to me. Before Google knew how to do large scale systems, and just have them work. Now my trust is broken, and maybe they are just luck cowboys like the rest of the world. I’m not sure how long of good service will it take for me to sing there praise again, or will I forever remember the intermittence of ‘07