Neil Hopcroft

It’s not like i actually wanted to go home tonight anyway. With thanks to southwest trains for their utterly unflapable inability to run anything resembling a service. Just as i thought things were going well this week because yesterday mornings train ran on time, which already put them ahead on last week. Not to mention that it took three tube trains to travel the six stations from fulham to wimbledon.

If anyone needs me i’ll be whimpering in a corner or shouting at the public face of swt, who don’t deserve more hassle but the poster saying you can email their boss doesn’t have his email address on.

Its been a hard week….I’ve finally gotten a release out (its still got a few hoops to go through before it hits the live service, maybe more later if I’m still feeling excited enough about it by the time it hits the air), with a rejection on the final stage of testing because the test house don’t yet have the device its targetting. So much for pushing it through for sales start. Ho hum.

As ever, its something of an anticlimax. I’m feeling like there should be something new, fresh, exciting that I should be moving on to. Really its just more of the same. More raising defects to be ignored until someone else spots them. More wrestling with the project manager to describe the plan to him (I can’t help feeling this should be the other way around). More getting people who have no idea how to describe release contents to describe them.

And I keep looking and looking and looking (nice idea, shame their database is powered by hamsters). And I can’t help feeling I’m stuck in a 1.0 world where “We are going to target bloggers, because they are early adopters” is no longer an adequate answer.

I need to get out, play, do something useful (well, not really useful, but its a window onto what is possible without any knowlege of either perl or sql).

Meanwhile, it looks like there might be some changes afoot regarding my flat…my landlord is probably going to sell the place, which means I’m going to have to make a decision about what to do next. Theres a few conversations I need to have before I can figure out the answer to that.

Playing with eyemags beta, I made: Wrecked exotics and Theatre decay

(install on your java enabled mobile phone for broken cars ‘on the road’)

Flickr timegraphs

Need a warehouse in state of considerable dereliction?

Ate oponents brains and invented cocaine George Washington

I am the mighty finder, I can find anything

Steampunk keyboard

Its not every day that I wake up and think “I must go to Andover”. Having now been I think that is probably a good thing. It got off to a bad start when someone aspiring to be an Essex boy tried to scam me for his parking money – the walk from the car park to the town centre didn’t improve my level of hope, the bus station seemed to be full of bus drivers being utterly incompetant at driving around each other.

Its an odd town, full of Wilkinsons and Job Centres at one end of the spectrum with multitudes of estate agents at the other, and nothing in between selling the kinds of things that normal people need on an everyday basis.

After I had exhausted the town centre (the highlight was a man standing on a step ladder in a river – its not often you see someone in waders cleaning third floor windows) I headed out to the ring road where I discovered a bunch of out-of-town shops clustered around a roundabout. As is typical with these things its nearly impossible to get from one to another on foot, this though was one of the worst examples I’ve seen. My total score circumnavigating the roundabout was two fences (one with mesh on it to stop people climbing over), three hedges, two significant puddles, two pedestrian crossings, one DVD player and one phone charger

Trying to escape the town was interesting too, they seem to have taken the idea that towns have ring roads without understanding either that it should be a ring or that it should go around the town centre.

With thanks to Marcus Kuhn for his Unicode FAQ….without which I would be even more confused than I am now.

Who in their right mind books a dentist appointment on Monday morning?

I can’t be the only one who wants to add an ‘L’ to that bumper sticker, can I? Could be worse, could be a jag with ‘curse control’.

I ate too much chilli. Well, maybe it was just too hot, my face is on fire and I had to sit motionless for a few minutes before I could stand up.

Last night to Nils and Alexs birthday party, but I had to run away to catch my train, too sleepy to drive the car to central London, which makes me non-sociable and having to leave early. Wish I was less befuddled by social situations where I’m meeting people I haven’t seen for a long long time, making me look underenthusiastic about things that are actually quite appealling….contact details here (friendlocked, drop me mail if you can’t read them and you want to).

Last week was tiring, next week promises not to be quite so bad. Or maybe thats just me hoping.

16 ways to add cheese (worksafe but potentially not earsafe…especially for those of a non-metal disposition)