I'm having a spring (?) clean of my journal and have pruned my friends list substantially. I think I've mostly removed people who either never update (or filter me out of all their updates), or people who I friended via common communities or mutual friends but we don't seem to have ended up with anything beyond an aquaintanceship (i.e. we pretty ( Read more... )

My friend Will was complaining about how cold his hands get when rowing in the winter. He mentioned that some people had special mittens that fit over the handles of the oars and allow you still to grip the oar properly... and I offered to knit him some ( Read more... )

Discussing some Subversion "feature", earlier...

Me: Does it really do that? That's totally bizarre.
Co-worker 1: No, it's not bazaar, it's svn!
[collective groans]
Co-worker 2: Ooh, you git!
[more groans]
[short silence]
Co-worker 3: OK, we're all trying to work out how to get an RCS joke in now, aren't we?

I decided to take part in caddyman's Halloween Ghost Story challenge. Briefly, the challenge is to write a Halloween story of exactly 500 words, based around a song lyric ( Read more... )

Grr argh. I'm trying to remember a carol we used to sing at school. It wasn't in our normal hymn books, it was hand-typed and purple roneo'd (OK, dating myself here). I've never heard it anywhere else but as far as I know it wasn't written by our music teacher or anything ( Read more... )

My back is doing much better now. It appears that when under doctor's orders to potter around, I turn to baking; I've made a meatloaf from my Mum's recipe (yum), a double batch of chocolate and cherry brownies from my Green and Black's chocolate recipe book, and Gloria's 5-minute chocolate-cake-in-a-mug recipe which is EXTREMELY tasty and ( Read more... )

Since Jif is going on sabbatical for at least a year, his company are looking to find someone to fill his shoes on a permanent basis.

More details below the cut if anyone's interested, or feel free to pass it on if you know someone else who might be.

( Embedded software job - details )

PSA for UK people ( Read more... )

I waver on how much I enjoy Joel Spolsky's opinion pieces, but this one is fantastic:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html

Anyone with even a passing interest in web standards should read it.

I'm a member of the Yougov panel and recently got sent a link to their latest survey. One of the questions asked me what I could remember hearing about from the Labour party in the last couple of weeks, and what had I thought about it, and the next question ditto for the Conservative party ( Read more... )