Having read Wil’s blog for a long time now, it’s great to see something really good happen to a nice guy — he’s landed a voice over job at Nickelodeon. Congratulations, Wil!
Apparently he’s got more than one brain. Go read the post if you want to know. Okay, one pedant point to me. Go me! ZOMG!!! 
We went to an open day at the Berkshire College of Agriculture on Saturday. It was a great day out; I think Ben’s favourite part was getting to sit inside a real tractor. The only downside was that Louise and I got lightly sunburnt. The forecast looked to be entirely overcast and we got caught unprepared. Thankfully the children got away scot-free. A warning to be heeded, so the sun block has gone back into the changing bag.
I believe that Jessica’s first word, generally recognisable, should be recorded as Boohbah.
I’m glad to see that trials for terrestrial HDTV will start soon. I’m not so glad to hear that, “Freeview has no capacity for more national networks, and will not have enough room for national high definition broadcasts until at least switchover when existing analogue signals are switched off”.
Listen up, my Entreprenuer Friends. Yes, you know who you are. Joel has some important things to say to you about The Development Abstraction Layer. Some of you have probably read it already, even.
Which reminds me… About a year ago Mark asked me, “What are your top 10 books for programmers?” I hummed and hawed about that for a bit, drafted a blog post in my head, thought a bit about the question, drafted another blog post in my head, thought about just firing back another question… and never got round to actually taking any of it outside of my head.
Several months ago, randomly — okay, not randomly, via some long-lost blog post — I came across Joel’s management training program reading list. This had a few good, recognisable titles in, so I considered sending a link to Mark… and never got round to it.
Now, the whole point of this ramble is that while I was looking up the address for the link above, I came across Joel’s Programmer’s Bookshelf. This has books I’ve read and respect, books on my to-buy list, and books I think will be turning up there quite soon. It even has K&R, so Mark will be happy. Job done. Sorry about the wait.
I was on leave last week — gardening, DIY, helping to look after the kids — so I’ve built up another blogging backlog; a “backblog”? Anyways, I’ll try the post-a-day tactic to see if I can clear it. The posts will be a bit backwards as I pop items off my stack.
So, today I came across this amazing web service called CrazyEgg that shows a “heatmap” of where users of web-site have clicked. I love seeing visualisation techniques like this; something I doubt I would ever have thought of myself.
Mark, in case you haven’t noticed, the latest series of Doctor Who is being repeated on BBC Three — two episodes every night! Now’s your chance to catch up.
News for The Wheel of Time readers I know: Robert Jordan is terminally ill with amyloidosis but is undergoing treatment which may put him into remission. From Christian Schaller.
Via Zaheer Abbas Merali, I bring you why we wake up before our alarms go off. I’ve definitely experienced this on more than one ocassion. Have you?
After five and a half years on the web, http://www.fantasyfilmleague.com/ is no more. As the last active member of the FFL, I finally shut down the site a couple of days ago. We’ve handed over the domain, the code and the database to a good friend; hopefully the game, in some form or other, will come back soon.
It was fun but it was a slog. Eventually the slog outweighed the fun. I learnt a lot about how to run a site, from many perspectives: coding, administration, financial. If we failed anywhere, it was because we didn’t follow the mantra, be patient for growth but impatient for profit. We were impatient for growth and patient for profit, meaning we never broke even and that was the proverbially straw.
