Two batches of congratulations in order I think.

First of all (and most importantly) to Mary who has just landed herself a job as Keystage 2 Co-ordinator at quite a nice looking primary school deep in the depths of the Garden of England. Well done you, we knew you could do it, kentish phrasebook in hand. Go and knock ‘em dead. Figuratively of course… actual fatalities would be bad ;o)

And not to leave anyone out – well done to Greebo for managing to stay up for what is, quite frankly, an obscene amount of time, if you consider that he is made from spare parts and he is sat with his case half off (and has been since his last reboot).

matt@greebo:~> uptime
 12:11am  up 208 days 12:46,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Is it a bad sign when your job title is “IT Application Developer” yet there isn’t a single development tool on your Windows XP ‘Most-used-apps’ list? Hmmm – food for thought…

Last weekend was one of those strange summery weekends in May that England foists upon us every now and again, and in truly predictable style most of it was spent outside.

Saturday meant a trip down to the other coast and a picnic and attempted kite-flying. I’m sure there’s some kind of principle that states that if there’s enough wind for one kite, there’s enough wind for a hundred. Well… maybe our kite was defective. We were mocked by Bob the Builder, flanked by the Red Baron, and just looked upon in disbelief by the many swooping stunt kites. There was even one family that would reel one kite out, stick their handle in the ground, and reel another one out with almost insulting nonchalance. And still we couldn’t get our one kite in the air with every bit of our attention! Pfft. Oh well… the picnic was nice and the company was even better.

And then to Sunday and the typical Englander sport of food-cremating ) Or maybe I’m being harsh – the Gibsons’ BBQing skills have been honed over the years, and nowadays everyone usually gets enough edible food to tide them over The oh-so-cute niece and friend serve to keep everyone busy throughout the day with important tasks – swinging, sandcastle making, more swinging… A good day was had by all. And then a good kip was had by most as the effects of beer and sunshine became apparent

And the obligatory blog links… I know this is all you people come for:

• The Swedish Dancing Cow (thanks to Garry and Ant for the memories and the link)
• Lego Star Wars – Star Wars scenes in lego. Impressive because these are all done without the cheaty Star Wars sets. Look out for yoda
• Signs of life – humourous signs – this one for you dog-lovers out there (c’mon, someone must like dogs…)

Yeah yeah, no entry for weeks on end and then two in one night… but I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t lose the link to MJ Hibbett & The Validators – the artists behind the Hey Hey 16k song in my previous entry, along with so many more, including Programming Is A Poetry Of Our Time. Wonderful stuff

“I wonder would Wordsworth have written in Perl?
Would Keats have used Notepad for HTML?”

No blog for a while – I would like to say ‘sorry’ to my established readership, but seeing as you’ve probably all buggered off to read blogs that actually get an update now and again, I get the feeling I’m actually talking to very little except the odd search engine bot, and I bet they’ll get bored and wander off soon, too. I have a theory that blogs fail to get updated for one of three reasons:

1. the author is so busy living his jet-set lifestyle that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to find ten minutes to sit and type
2. the author actually doesn’t think he’s done, seen or thought anything bloggable for a while.
3. sheer laziness.

I think I fall somewhere between reasons 2 and 3

Anyway – on with the blogging…

Duran Duran were really quite good. No, no, I can hear the mocking calls from here, and I know they’re not my usual concert fodder, but they really were surprisingly good. They carry off the night with real professionalism – and actually see it out without need for a single zimmer frame ;o) Their cover of Grand Master Flash’s ‘White Lines’ was pretty good too

Memorable moments of the night include the point where it was noticed that the guy without a map was navigating (as I sailed past the correct turning off the M4 – oops…), the bloke behind us moaning that ‘Meat Loaf didn’t have a sax break’, the Simon Le Bon look-a-likes that seemed to have broken out of wichever institution they usually have to stay in, oh and don’t forget the strange restaurant where it took forever to get our bill, nanoseconds to have our cash taken, and a special request to get our mints ;o) It was a cool night out and I was sad when it was over and my companions and I had to part company.

Other recent activities have included a trip to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust at Arundel. Sadly the geese, swans, ducks and moorhens were rather overshadowed by the sight of a small Tekelbury Dachshund attempt to try its luck with a field of cows, including one very prolific and quite fearsome-looking bull. Fortunately its owners pulled it along to the next field where it continued to bark at anything it could find that might be able to squash it – ducks, sparrows – that kind of thing

Oh and finally… the reference up there in the title. After my recent 48k eBay success this tribute to all things 8-bit seems so suitable. It made me smile, anyway