Neil Hopcroft

Lunchbox-a-le-le

Augmented trampoline – playing with fire

Porsche remember they make cars – though I’m somewhat disturbed that the three pictures on that page show such different cars, wonder which one they’re making?

“You may think while reading this that it could be a “troll”, a humorous invention for the amusement of its author. It isn’t; the enumeration of verifiable events (even if those events are difficult to check) should prove that. You may also think that it’s close to the symptoms of psychiatric illness and can be explained in those terms. But the reason this type of harassment was started in the first place is because those initiating planned to simulate the symptoms of illness; any complaint of harassment would be seen at first glance as indicative of psychiatric illness and “treated” accordingly. The fact that so many people now have a good idea of the truth makes it difficult for that position to be maintained.” – theres a part of me that wants to take the ‘evidence’ and remix it into a semi-consistent story, just to throw more fuel on the fire, but I fear thats a touch cruel.

Your light cone

“Sweetheart or psycho? Can’t make your mind up if they’re too good to be true or a total nutter in sheep’s clothing? Stay Safe…”

Tree house

First week down and I’m still alive. Its been a close call thing with rather too much sitting on trains and rather too little sleeping. At least I’m getting some reading done.

The job itself is going OK, I’m taking over from someone I worked with a long time back, which is cool ‘cos that means I can already understand his coding style, as well as catching up with him. I’m working on Mobizines, doing mobile client programming, but won’t bore you with more details than that.

Its unusual (for me at least) not to be hit by a wall of doom entering new offices – these guys still have something of a startup buzz to them, but with a little more world-weary cynicism than my last proper startup. How bright the future is I don’t know, and I’m sure theres someone, somewhere, with their hand just reaching for the ‘doom’ dial, but in the meantime it’ll be nice to see how these guys think it should be done.

The trains this week only had one bad day (out of ten journeys), where they’d lost a train somewhere near Biggleswade and dug around in the sidings to find us another. The tubes had a couple of busy days, but not quite as bad as the days of pushers on the Yamanote line at Shinagawa.

I think I’ve remembered how to fall in love. Totally inappropriate, as ever, but so so eloquently broken.

Why aren’t the girls I meet like that? They’re just broken.

Once again my mp3 player is mocking me, ‘the begining of the end’ as we pull into kings cross? It’s a bright new future and i’m not going to have technology tell me anything different.

Now, though, is waiting. I’m due to arrive in 25 mins, so i’m just catching a quick coffee before going to the new office. If all the journeys are like today it’ll be ok. Except for the getting up so early.

During my putting-everything-in-boxes routine I again found my cache of old film photos. This time I actually had a scanner handy and have started scanning them….theres a disproportionate number of pictures of my thumb, something I have managed to learn to put out the way now.

They’re mostly pictures from festivals, by looks of things – I’ve put some of the more presentable ones up at flickr, they were mostly taken with disposable cameras so blame the (lack of) quality on that rather than the photographer…

I found a few more games:

– Settlers III
– Populous, the begining
– MegaPak (Carmageddon, ecstatica and apocalypse)
– Theme hospital
– Diablo
– Sim City 2000

No boxes for the last three.

…well, kind of, if no-one here wants these things they’ll go to the local freecycle group. I have the following games (all on CDs, most in original packaging) to give away:

– Transport Tycoon
– Bloodnet
– Settlers II
– Tycoon collection (Transport Tycoon Deluxe + Rollercoaster Tycoon, Railway Tycoon disk is missing)
– Sim Isle
– Pizza Syndicate
– Worms
– Sim City Classic
– Railroad Tycoon II
– Warcraft II (no box)
– Autoroute express UK&Ireland, probably *very* old now

Happy to post them in UK if you’re interested, or figure out a way to get them to you.

Whole new meaning to “What platform are you running on?”

Adjustable sauce

MC Plus+ in da house

Wow, its taken me all evening to repair my CPAN setup to the point where I can bring it up to date. Howcome these things rot so badly so quickly – its only been a few months since I ran a days worth of updates on it….all I wanted to do was some simple proxy prototyping and I’ve spent all evening faffing, the moment is lost now.