Unlikey to be wiser

Posted on Mon 17 August 2009 by alex in general

Well I'm now a year older* although not necessarily wiser for it. With Fliss back on her feet after enforced invalidity we spent the Saturday mooching about (Fliss preparing food, me doing washing up) before heading over N&MA's house warming BBQ/party thing. They have recently taken on a fairly extensive renovation for their first house. When we first got there much time was spent admiring pipe work and talking about the thermal store. My attempts at working out the energy stored in my head failed (but hey Wolfram Alpha can't even start working it out yet). For what it's worth I think it's roughly equivalent to a 6.6kw/h boiler.

Sunday was fairly lazy and I spent most of the morning watching Tron while enjoying the Tron themed cake F had made for my birthday. I also spent a while going through the extras on the second DVD. I remember the CGI in Tron being fairly groundbreaking at the time but I didn't realise quite how much work had gone into the live action footage. Apparently the "backlight" process they used was so labour intensive (24 cells per frame!) they never used the technique again. I assume the forthcoming Tron Legacy does actually do it all with computers.

I spent some time doing some recreational coding and coming to the decision that despite Banshee being funky I can't be arsed doing any coding on it until the debugging tools get better. It's no fun debugging crashes in generated code and I'm fairly sure part of the point of having a managed environment is not having to chase down NULL pointer bugs. As a result I dusted off my Work in Progress on Rhythmbox.

We got a slew of documents through for the house and am now going through them. Hopefully we'll be set for a fairly quick move but we'll see what gets thrown up in the meantime. Our weekends are actually fairly booked up all the way through to October so we have no idea when we can actually move at the moment.

Cheers for all the various multimedia/multiband birthday greetings. I haven't thought of what I'm going to do to celebrate today apart from go to work (although hopefully I'll be back on paid holidays soon). I suspect birthdays are starting to become less of celebration and more of a marking of time passing.

* It's all relative of course, I'm technically only a day older than I was this time yesterday ;-)