Another Friday afternoon is upon us and once more time has slowed to leisurely crawl. The web cam is currently focused on our exciting new air conditioner which is making the temperature at my desk more bearable.
Exciting things this week include:
Roasting a Chicken: On wednesday night A. decided she wanted roast chicken, the best I could find however was a whole uncooked chicken which I purchased and roasted. Now roasting a chicken doesn't sound like a big deal - but for a vegetarian it is a very strange thing indeed. The results seemed to be well apprecitated though both by A. and two small cats. Further experiments of this nature will be conducted.
Upgrading a phone: Not having bought any new toys for quite some time I figured on of minor expense should be investigated and so I changed my phone to the nokia 8210. I still have the old hand set in case I'm in the states and for the rest of the time I have a very small and very cool new phone. I have some excellent software to let me edit all of the settings and phone numbers and even edit the rings.
Life proceeds at a ridiculous pace. The webcam has been more popular than I expected - when I get a chance I will get a USB extension cable and mount it somewhere with a wider field of view (there is a good beam above my desk).
News as ever tends to be "work work work". We are back in a design phase right now so writing lots of specs. Last night saw a superb lightening storm over Glasgow. After A. went to bed I sat and watched for an hour as huge bolts of lightening forked across the sky at some points almost Continuously. Strangely there was very little thunder - not sure if that was acoustics or it was just a strange storm. It was one of those storms that make you realise just how powerful nature is.
Media wise still sadly addicted to Big Brother - other than that I've been listening to all sorts of things. Right now I am listening to the new Tricky album (Blowback). Its a lot more accessible than some of his more recent stuff - certainly not as dark. Its a good album though - I'm sure you will be hearing it on the radio and TV fairly soon. I have also discovered that I still like Jethro Tull - how scary.
I have a webcam connected at the moment - have a look at Webcam. Its on my desk looking at some bananas right now (but not for long 'cos I'm going to eat them).
Well it certainly seems as if junklight.com is getting a new lease of life. As you can see I have added a new journal mechanisim. It manages the archives and searching of the log and I just get to type the entries in in a form. Its got lots of features like comments and things which may well get turned on in the near future. Expect other new features too - I am setting up an electronic postcard mechanisim for the pictures page so that you can send the images to people.
I've been working on some music stuff as well so expect some releases over the next month or so. Work is going well - we are in a design phase again so I've been looking at some interesting technologies.
Media wise I've been rereading the excellent "A Man in Full" by Tom Wolfe. It is a wonderful book. Full of set pieces each prefectly observed. Its set in Altanta in the 90's and is about the financial crash of Charlie Croker a property developer and the effect it has on a number of other people. In music I've been having a bit of an explore through my old cd's (I'm converting a lot of them to mp3 so I can listen to them at work) - however I would recomend the Goldfrapp album "Felt Mountain".
Welcome to my new website. As you can see there is a new look to the site and there is a new pictures section. The old news archive can be accessed through the link below. If you have been visting regularly then you will have noticed there have not been any changes for quite a long time. This is primarily becuase I have been working very very hard indeed. The updates on this new site are unlikely to be as regular as they used to be but I will endevour to make occasional entries.
So whats been happening? Well the company I work for appropria have released their first product - my role for them is Chief Technical Architect - which basically means I am the main technical designer for the product. Obviously though its a team effort and we have an excellent team of developers. The product is written in Java and uses lots of cool technology like Jini.
In my personal life lots has been happening to - I live with A. at the moment and have been out and about a lot more. Still haven't got a car but that is a primary goal at the moment. The music front has been very quiet unfortunately - all of my creative energies have been going into the product.