Neil Hopcroft

John Updike – “America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.”
(from motivationquote)

1. What did you last read? The contrarians guide to leadership – Steven Sample
2. What are you reading now? London Orbital – Iain Sinclair
3. What do you plan to read next? In the shadow of the American dream – David Weinarowicz or Intimacy and solitude – Stephanie Dowrick
4. What would you like to read, but don’t have? Anything else by Machiavelli
5. What would you recommend for others to read? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S Thompson, Peopleware – DeMarco and Lister
6. What’s your favourite book from childhood? I hated books as a child
7. What book last made you laugh? Dunno
8. What book last made you weep? Dunno
9. What book last made you angry? Michael Moore

as when talking to a bunch of Californias who introduced themselves to me tonight – a truly surreal experience where while we were basically speaking the same language I understood everything they said but none of them understood a word of mine. Is my accent really that strong? We managed to establish a protocol where they’d ask me to repeat three or four times and communication was successful.

The club itself was not as good as last time – the venue a bit smaller and there was less music I knew. Sadly Falcos Tango the Night Away was one of the few – there has to be a time when its turns from parody to something else.

Upon leaving I discovered one of the Americans looking a little lost outside, turns out he was trying to navigate to Shinjuku using a pocket compass – I’m not sure how he was going to do that, I don’t think he knew either. So we wandered together toward Shinjuku – it turns out it was only one of the others who couldn’t understand what I said.

Damn you all! You’ve all gone quiet. Anyone would think it was Christmas or something… I expect to find accounts of your Noel joys and horrors when I get back from Cyberage Voodoo…

Further on down the down

…mostly clumsy.

I started the day waking myself up by throwing coffee grounds over my bare feet. Joy. And have just dropped a bowl to land perfectly in my rice-cooker after folding itself into three pieces, knocking the lid closed on its way in. Neat.

Work went well today, since we solved most of the problems we are going to Finland to solve in a couple of weeks, theres still more to do but the difficult bits are out the way. Yegads, I’d forgotten how difficult other peoples protocol stacks can be to debug. Still, we comprehended the communications between four processes it seems are required to run what should be a (relatively) trivial bluetooth stack, found the problem was the simple one we had ignored at the begining of the week, expecting to find some other trouble before we got to that, fixed it and set ourselves discoverable.

Memeing again

Year end meme

And while I’m still awake and posting, who invented the Porsche MPV? Please can someone explain to them that Porsche make sports cars (tacky yuppie sports cars, but so are most sports cars), they don’t make MPVs. There was one parked in the office car park today and its just wrong.

…full of Santas. Fluffy easter bunny santas, black clad top hat santas, kinky valentines day santas, pizza delivery santas (admittedly he was outside, on a pizza delivery sleigh^Wmoped). The vast majority of these santas will be female.