If I never have to set foot in another government building or bank branch it will be too soon.

But, on the up side, after a morning of admin, we're one bank transfer away from the search for number three.

It's been years since I've done any serious gaming. During high school I was addicted to, amongst others, Sid Meier's Colonization. Unfortunately it doesn't like running as a 16 bit app under Windows, but a friend pointed me at DosBox earlier and I'm one happy camper all of a sudden. Pure 320x200 256 colour goodness. I'm sure Wes would be proud.

To give you an idea of this game's addictiveness, I installed DosBox and got Colonization up and running at about 4pm. Since then I haven't left my keyboard.

Always code as if the person who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.

John F. Woods (quoted on Usenet) -- 20.08.1997

I just looked up and realised how surreal this evening has become. I'm a few glasses of wine up on the rest of the world, Oprah is on TV (yes, sadly that's the best on offer and the latest Daily Show is only at 77%) and through all of this mental haze (which is more debilitating, a bottle of red wine or Oprah?) I'm slowly working my way through the predecessor to the Java 5.0 Pack200 file format specification (it's the best I can do without downloading the final JSR specification; that comes next).

I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. I was expecting some miraculous insight (reports range from a 10% to 55% reduction in JAR file size) but if it's anything like this then it seems to be a lot of cunning tricks all combined together to produce a reasonable improvement over the original file size). One aspect worries me: eager class loading. This was done away with in version 2.0 of the Java Language Specification (or maybe it was the JVM spec, I can't remember exactly) and it's handy not to have to have everything available to the class loader when you know something won't be required in a given environment. But eager class loading makes that impossible. I'm curious whether this particular optimization made it into the final implementation.

I've been told I should at least mention that I'm also getting a back massage as I write this ;-)

Today was a really, really long day. I think my problem, at least in part, is that I really can't just walk away from something when I believe a mistake is being made. Even if it's not really in my field of speciality (a weakness I associate with programmers: they believe everything can be fixed, and that a programmer is the best person to fix it.)

And that was just the morning. Hell, I only got to my first email (not counting the mail I answered from home before leaving this morning; ADSL is a wonderful thing) after 10am.

In an ironic twist of fate, the hardest stuff seems to be the soft stuff. I have yet to meet a programming problem I can't lick, given some time, good coffee and a little peace and quiet (maybe throw Google in for good measure). But the simplest people problems keep me awake at night and resist resolution to a degree that beggars belief.

Part of me feels like saying "bugger this, give me a compiler and some code to write and leave me alone; this soft stuff is for social science students" but I know I'm not capable of keeping my nose out of things, or offering an opinion (a very valuable opinion ;-) on anything and everything.

But it takes its toll, usually in the form of days like today. I've said before I find it hard to take leave, and it took a lot of persuading to get me to agree to take the rest of this week off. But in retrospect, it couldn't have happened at a better time (for me anyway, the 5.0 project, well there's never a good time I suppose).

I'm really looking forward to just stopping. I think I'll reread the Hyperion Cantos.

Less than a day after "putting it up for offers" and we have a taker. He's sitting with a 99 model CBR600F4 engine looking for a body.

I'm not getting quite what I'd hoped for it but we've found acceptable middle ground. The first thing I was asked is whether he'd sell the engine. From the sound of it he's not really in a position to sell the engine and write his own bike off (not that I'm really there either but I think I can take a bigger knock than him). And irrespective, it will cost him far less to get his bike back on the road. Body work is much cheaper (and more common) than aluminium welding the engine block.

So next I have to figure out the best way to get at the cash I have "offshore", and then we start looking for bike number three.

Hopefully "third time lucky" holds true.

Stumbled across the error dialog above on The Daily WTF. If I were the big man in red with a forked tail I'd set up a software company to produce software with error messages like this.

Imagine how quickly you'd paralyze the most loyal of the faithful?

Stumbled across the Fractint homepage earlier. I didn't realise they were still going at it but there they are hacking away.

I spent way too many hours (days, weeks, months) playing with fractals. My two pride and joys consisted of frac256 and JGFrac (very original dontcha think?).

Frac256 collected together all of my attempts to automate the selection of an area to zoom in on. This was back in the days of the 386 (actually I had a 486 but it was an SX not a DX so the FPU was disabled) and so generating an image at any reasonable depth took forever. So the idea was to let the software do it overnight, which meant automating the selection of where to go next. I had a reasonable amount of success and it was an interesting aspect of "machine intelligence" to play around with.

JGFrac was more of a "finished" product. To be honest it was modelled very closely on Fractint. Basically it tried to cram everything fractal related I could think of (or figure out) into a single app. It let you play with a range of fractal types (that list is Fractint's, not mine, I only had a small subset of that on offer), palettes (I had just discovered palette manipulation on the VGA). Eventually frac256's autozooming got incorporated into JGFrac. I think both apps are lying around here somewhere on a discarded HDD.

Hey, it kept me off the streets :-)

Interesting article on Slashdot today. The Forrester research group have released a paper (unfortunately not freely available) on Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP). I haven't really played with AOP but I have to admit to a general feeling of unease since stumbling across it. It has some nice aspects to it (pun intended) but the Forrester group seemed to have put their collective fingers on it. They're calling it the GOTO of OOP. Their work apparently leans quite heavily on this paper.

The Slashdot loserbase added their usual 2c worth (which is about all their opinions seem to amount to these days).

On an unrelated point, I've been playing with ANTLR recently and I'm pretty impressed. It really does seem like a step forward from lex and yacc. Takes a little getting used to but it seems to be pretty straightforward and I think has terrific potential for use within at least one of our internal projects. A have one gripe though. ANTRL is a parser generator. So once you've written your grammar you point their command line tool at your grammar file and out pops a parser. Simple enough so far. But, once you've mastered the cut-and-paste getting started sample (an idea I really like, up and running in 10 seconds) usually the next thing you want to do is tell the tool where to put the generated source code. Since this is probably a command line switch the next step is to figure out which switch. And here, it all falls apart. Why, why why why, must I resort to opening their source code to figure out the command line switches for what is arguably the most important tool in their project?

Feeling a bit bummed about the bike this morning again. Mandy and db1 were at Suzuki South earlier in the week and pointed out they have a CBR600F4 in. Similar colour scheme to mine. Took a drive out there this morning to look at it. Looks to be in good nick. It's a 2000 model, with about the same kms on the clock as mine had. It's been dropped (the exhaust is a bit banged up on one end) but it doesn't look to have been serious. They want 56k for it, a tad more than I paid for mine. So it seems to be a reasonable deal. They also had a 2001 F4i in. A silver model that looks to be in really good nick, but the pipe looks like a no-name-brand. Very odd. I didn't realise the F4i had the same seat as the F4, for some reason I thought it was closer to the seat you see on the RR, or on the Suzuki GSXRs.

I've given up on finding a replacement motor. There appear to be none available anywhere in the country. So I think it's time to move on, sell the bits I still have, recoup as much of the loss as possible and just write it off as a (very expensive) life lesson.

I really struggle with this bike thing though. I definitely want to replace mine. Outside of programming (aka work) it's one of the few things I really enjoy. But it's a large amount of cash and part of me feels guilty even contemplating it. I should be thinking about bonds and the like, not about a shiny new 2005 CBR1000RR.

And I know the bike worries some people (you know who you are), which just adds to the guilt.

And this is a natural point to run outside, jump on my bike (ignoring the crap weather outside) and go for a long contemplative ride.

On the upside, I think I'm closer to resolving at least one of those life decisions that featured earlier. And I'm feeling far more positive about things (discounting the bike) than I did at the start of the week.

A rather amusing thing happened at work today. Someone, who shall remain nameless, came round the corner of our corridor, obviously on a coffee mission and gunning for some of my team members to join them. But I was standing in the corridor, about half-way down and as they saw me they stopped dead in their tracks and did that odd kind of twitching dance which indicates an inner struggle between the fight-or-flight reaction.

Apparently I'm now the big bad boss and inspire the same reaction teachers and other authority figures did (and still do it seems).

Perhaps its just because I'm "substantially" older than the other person ... :-)

Feeling considerably better about things today. I suspect this is largely a result of having sat down and written some code this afternoon. Not a lot, fixed a handful of small outstanding issues on the 5.0 project. Really nothing to write home about. But the sense of accomplishment, although small, dwarfed anything else I've felt in the past few weeks. Some days it truly does feel like we're swimming upstream.

Absolutely bizarre dream last night. Act I seemed to consist entirely of connection proxies. Most of the dreamed seemed to involve trying to decide how to go about profiling connection creation. Act II involved a girlfriend at varsity. Not an actual girlfriend, but rather a female character who was flagged as my girlfriend. Yes, someone I knew (many) years ago, but only fleetingly, and certainly in a non-romantic way. The act consisted entirely of me sitting in a lecture theatre (one of the UCT Maths building first year rooms the swoop down towards the blackboard from a dizzying height) waiting for my "girlfriend" to arrive. At some point I realised she was already present, and a few rows down from me. I tried to get her attention but failed and watched the room slowly fill up. Eventually the lecture started and she grudgingly gave up the spot next to her she had been reserving for me. I was crushed. Funny how your perspective on relationships change.

Oh, and all through acts I and II there was a vague background theme of me being chased by a very angry Amazon goddess. That, I think, I owe to Ilium. Thanks Dan. Thanks a lot.

The decision's actually getting harder as the days go by. I never expected that. I suppose, if I'm completely honest with myself, I was kind of hoping (at some level anyway) that if I ignored it for long enough life would make the decision for me (in the form of a timeout on one side or the other). But nope, no obvious timeouts pending, and I'm no closer to any sort of decision.

It's tough because we're all going through a rough patch right now, and I've been deliberately trying to avoid letting that influence me. But perhaps that's not the right way to go about this. Maybe it should influence me? The problem is, although I'm fairly confident that things will get better down the line, I think they're going to get worse before they get better. And I don't know if I really have the energy to push through the initial slump.

Today ended in a heap of exhaustion. Three hours of talking about the future, where the group is going, and where we'd like it to go, and all I have to show for it is bags under my bags and a slow sub-dermal ache in my shoulders and back.

I think perhaps that part of the problem at the moment is that I'm just too busy. I don't really have enough time to think about anything in any meaningful way. My days at the moment are divided among the 11 people in my team, managing two projects, and writing code myself. In all my team is responsible for somewhere in the region of about a million lines of code, perhaps more. That count is over a year old).

And my evenings and weekends too often consist of getting to the things I didn't get to during the day, or testing or reviewing code for parts of one of the projects. Granted, this is all my own fault: I could just say no. But history suggests that's unlikely to happen.

I've been fighting the idea of time off and going away for a bit but I'm starting to think it might be a good idea, and perhaps too soon isn't possible.

Bah. I'm not equipped to make Life Decisions^TM. Technical decisions, yes. In fact, bring 'em on, anything to avoid the inevitable. But it seems like the big decisions are out in force at the moment and not even Google has the answers.

Picked up my new phone this morning. A Siemens CX65. Not the most advanced phone compared to what's on the market these days, but advanced enough for my needs (especially compared to my current CrappoMoto).

I spent an hour this morning waiting to get the phone. In that hour I was subjected to the most unbelievable FUD I've heard in a long time. These people think that because they're behind the sales counter at a cellular outlet, suddenly they're world experts on anything vaguely attached to the topic. They don't even have the grace to say "Hey, I don't know", they're more than happy to just make shit up.

First there was the girl who's trying to replace her stolen phone. During the course of this excruciatingly long process she remarked on how expensive phones are. She's seen all these cheap new phones in the classifieds. The sales rep explained that they're stolen phones (true enough). The girl's mother remarked quite acidly that perhaps the cellcos themselves are stealing phones to force people to buy new ones (the logic here is a bit daft, but hey, leave it be). In answer to this, the sales rep explained how it's not the cellcos, and that the people doing it make it hard for the cellcos because they steal expensive phones and sell for ridiculous prices, and how can the cellcos compete with this?

I'll tell you how. BLACKLIST THE FUCKING PHONES. Morons. That would shut it down very quickly. But they won't. You see, a stolen phone is a revenue stream for them. Someone has to buy a SIM, and air time, and accessories eventually. So why would they want to stop the phone from working?

Idiot number two was helping a gentlemen who wanted his upgrade and was discussing phone options. He asked, as an aside, if they had the concept of a SIM card with two numbers attached (presumably so he could share his phone with his wife without requiring they share a number or get two phones). The sales rep mentioned that others had asked for this, but that, no, that kind of SIM didn't exist. Instead of stopping there he tried to explain why. His theory started with "How would you design a network to handle this?" (huh?) followed by "Think about the billing system you'd need. How would the phone not get confused between the two numbers?"

WTF? Software doesn't get confused. Yes, bugs exist, but it doesn't get confused. And incoming calls include the number they're calling, while outgoing calls would be from a session on the phone (which usually requires a PIN which is associated with a SIM/number). Technically there's no magic here. Some UI changes and what amounts to two SIMs logically glued together. But that's about it. This guy was a moron. He tried to bring up dual slot phones but got the concept there wrong. The guy he was helping quickly moved on (I have to admit I jumped in here and pointed out the sales rep was a moron, albeit without using that phrase) and asked about phone options. These days they try, instead of giving you a cheaper monthly rate, to foist all sorts of shit onto you. The customer explained that if they had to give him something could it be something useful like a bluetooth headset. They could, but only on another phone which meant he would have to pay an additional R600. He wasn't keen so the sales rep offered him a DVD player. A DVD player? Pleasantly enough this guy wasn't taking any shit and pointed out that you could hardly fit a DVD player to your ear (I couldn't resist chipping in that it could certainly be done: you'd just need a fair bit of masking tape).

Customer number three wants a demo of this newfangled Vodafone 3G thingamajig. My word, the bullshit that spewed forth during this episode was something else. The sales rep assisting starts by pointing out that 3G has a theoretical limit of 2Mb/sec (it turns out he seems to be right on this) but then, without even pausing he mentions that "in the UK they're running it at 4Mb/sec". These strike me as somewhat contradictory statements. Perhaps local caching or advanced compression give the illusion of breaking the theoretical limit, but I suspect that wasn't what he was trying to imply.

So, if you're ever bored and want to go make fun of someone less intelligent than yourself, why not spend a morning with this lot.

I think I'm coming down with a mild case of the flu. I've been feeling like crap since the Monday night headache-from-hell episode and I'd pretty much chalked my general state of unwellness up to that. But I don't think so. The way I feel right now is consistent with the flu, but with very mild symptoms.

So I'm loaded up on lightsabre juice and something the chemist recommended and now we just wait and see.

Just about the worst headache I've had in years woke me up at about 3am. This alone is an indication of its severity: I'm a pretty sound sleeper. If you've never experienced nausea-inducing pain then rest assured it's not something to look forward to. Ice-packs, paracetamol, Myprodol and a little cursing at the gods eventually saw me pass out, only to be awoken far too soon by the alarm clock and the glory that is Tuesday morning.

This headache may strike you as having been inevitable, given my previous post, but I actually felt calm and relaxed when I went to bed. The rant got most of it out of my system.

Someone forwarded this to me today. I've ranted before about some of the ideas Paul Graham has vomited up. He was an interesting read to begin with but more and more of his writing seems to be nothing more than masturbatory preening.

Had a bit of a think on the way home (and a bit of a rant).

Today felt a little like being pulled in three directions by three brutes with little or no regard to the fact that two other brutes were just as interested in having their way with me (that last bit didn't come out right). I'm under no illusion that this position is unique. I realise that we're actually all part of a graph and that each of our groups can pull just as easily as being pulled. At some point every one of our groups ends up looking like the center of that graph. Take it from me, when it happens, it sucks.

Our QA group is trying to defend the quality of our product while being subjected to insane pressures. Our spec group is trying to defend the consistency of our product in the face of constantly shifting terrain. And our dev group is trying to implement the blasted thing, all the while staying within the constraints imposed by the laws of Physics.

But today it felt like none of them was prepared to see the others' point of view. And I was caught in the middle trying to pacify the lot of them.

And I'm buggered if I'm keen to do that again anytime soon.

What really sucks is that I went to work looking forward to the week. Yesterday evening I added a very small change to our SDK which will simplify tremendously finding a particular kind of deadlock in our database code. And I'm giving a workshop on Wednesday covering the magic we're doing in our JDBC layer to compensate for the various database platform and driver oddities, and some of the debugging and profiling enhancements that will be available with 5.0. And I'm really looking forward to the workshop.

So to get into the office this morning (late because of traffic) only to walk into a complete shit storm of emails from the various regional teams, spec inconsistencies, problems from one of the dev teams just coming on board, problems because of dev work that slipped through cracks on our side of things, the list goes on, well, frankly, you reach a point where you just overflow and can't be damned anymore. I think my problem is it takes a lot to overflow me and the journey to that point isn't particularly pleasant.

This begs the question: after a day like today, should I even bother opening my personal mailbox to find out what lies in wait there?

There seems to come a point in any large software project where you start to doubt yourself. Especially one where you've delegated a lot of responsibility.

Very quickly you find yourself facing the inevitable questions: "Should I have been more involved in more of the code?", "Should I have insisted on reviewing everything?" or "Should I be sleeping on weekends?"

I don't have answers for these.

It's been a pretty smooth ride so far with our ADSL connection. No hitches for just over 3 months. This morning was the first problem we've hit. No connection. I checked the logs and our credentials were being thrown back in our face (you could almost hear the French accent).

Tried the guest account the engineer who installed our line "left behind" (always keep pen and paper at hand) without any hassles. So I phoned tech support.

For the life of me, I just do not understand why companies even bother with tech support when all they're going to do is staff them with a collection of monkeys with a list of rote "solutions". Reboot. Reconnect. Try reconnecting again. Reboot again?

Eventually I got passed on to someone who sounded marginally more clued up. After a little nonsensical running around I finally figured out why they kept asking how many computers I had connected. I'd studiously avoided telling them two because from their side it's one logical machine because of the power of NAT and I had no intention of trying to explain NAT to the monkeys on tech support. The reason they were convinced was because they could see an active connection on our account (they never actually told me this; it's inferred from the cryptic "we reset something" response to my "so what did you do?" question after they fixed it).

This is interesting, because we've never (never) shared our account details with anyone. This means one of two things:

1. Their software suffers from a bug that allows it to get into a state where it thinks you're connected, and they only allow a single connection on an account at a time. This is troubling since it appears that they require manual intervention to correct this and there was no indication that the system monitors itself for these types of problems (i.e. there is no indication of any sort of automated alert; we have to report it to them to get it fixed).
   
2. Account details are being leaked, either because they're poorly guarded or, more likely in my opinion, someone at Telkom is handing them out.
   

The latter fits with some other "facts" I've heard repeated via the grapevine, mostly around people with multiple logins. I know two people personally who have more than one account at their disposal, and I guarantee they've not been obtained legally.

Dropped Mandy's bike off just now. Riding over Ou Kaapse weg was challenging: about 2m visibility, wet mist clouding up my visor, and a lunatic woman in a white Corsa sitting right on my ass (~15 cm behind me). I don't understand motorists like that? What the hell is she planning on doing if I have to stop suddenly?

The ride reminded me of the long Sunday ride with Riel. One of the passes (I forget which one) was one of the most terrifying rides I've ever experienced. The conditions were much like this, with the difference that the road was winding up the side of an extremely long drop, it was the first time I had seen the road and had no foreknowledge of its layout, and I was trying to keep up with iron-butt-Riel.

But I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Damn, I miss my bike.

For some reason, I've been wandering around for the past 6 or 7 years with CGI's GET and POST all mixed up in my head.

I was convinced that GET passes it's parameter string in on stdin and POST passes it in via the environment. But, it turns out, it's the other way around.

Random. Technical. If you're not interested turn away now. Maybe this warning should have been at the top of this post.

Marte's 30th last night, at the old Firth Rd digs. Weird to be back there after all this time. I lived there for just over 3 years. It was like going home. Not much has changed.

Overindulged in the luminous blue punch and am regretting it now. It always seems like such a good idea at the time.

Pirates and prostitutes. Perkimon's sword was by far the most impressive. Essentially a large piece of pressed metal. It makes me wish we'd been attacked by an (inept) Ninja clan. But alas, 'twas not to be.

I wish. Nothing like a little experimental diagnosis-by-drug-trial for a day of entertainment.

Periodically my left wrist seems to stiffen up and get quite painful. It seem to happen every few months at its most frequent and last for a few weeks. It's not a ganglion (my first thought) and I'm fairly sure it's not CTS.

This time round is the worst its ever been. Simple things like typing and changing gears is painful. It's been about a week since it began and I'm hoping it will sort itself out soon. Someone mentioned today that it may well be arthritic and that a cox-inhibitor would sort that out, so I'm trialing a cox-inhibitor come anti-inflammatory. So far, beyond the warm fuzzy glow I normally associated with Myprodol there's no obvious improvement.

Bah, I fear even my body wants me to take time off. And I was hoping to return Mandy's bike tomorrow and take advantage of the ride to do some long, hard thinking. I want to make a decision by the end of the weekend.

Isn't coincidence an odd thing? A rather unexpected phone call today and life is suddenly more complicated.

If I told you anymore, well, you know what they say. And to be honest, I've more than enough on my plate at present without having to hunt down every last one of you and murder you in cold blood.

I think that paragraph, along with a few key words like "president", "America" and "Bush", is probably enough to set off alarms all over the offices of the FB-aaaie.

Maybe in my wildest conspiratorial dreams.

Dreamed I was trying to pick up a blind girl last night. I can just imagine the conversation:

"I'm six feet tall, well-built, with a gorgeous smile and a body to die for."

"You sound shorter than that."

"Hey, who are you gonna believe, me or a blind gir ... er I mean ... ah crap."

I've been waking up the past few weeks with the occasional headache just off the edge of consciousness. It's incredibly uncomfortable until I get up and start to move around at which point it seems to quickly evaporate.

I hate headaches.

Nope, not a Java post.

Have you ever watched a praying mantis eat it's prey? It's like magic; as if the insect in it's grasp is simply being erased.

Can't be all that pleasant from the other point of view though.

It irritates the living shit out of me when someone who's technically competent, smart and generally sufficiently able to function in this industry can't use a search engine.

I've lost track of the number of times I've been able to answer someone's question, or just get them started on the path to a solution with less than 5 minutes on either Google or what passes for newsgroups these days. And I'm not talking about people who are in their current job despite any obvious strengths. I'm talking people who range all the way up to some of the strongest programmer's I know. Maybe I need to reevaluate my metrics.

How? How is it possible that they are so incapable of helping themselves? I can forgive the first half a dozen instances because they may not be familiar with it, practised, hell it may not even occur to them if they're completely wet behind the ears. But after I've shown how effective it is time and time again, why do I still get a "No" when I ask "Have you tried Google?".

Picked up Mandy's bike this afternoon so I can drop it off at the workshop tomorrow morning. He didn't feel happy riding it all the way out here in morning traffic and I don't blame him.

It was great to be on a bike again. It always surprises me just how much I enjoy it. Especially when you get out onto the freeway where you can just open the throttle and watch the scenery turn into a big green blur. Warp speed Mr Sulu!

Sigh. I've started trawling through the biking classifieds to see if anyone might have a second hand motor going. But I'm starting to think it's not really going to be worth it financially to have it repaired. Perhaps I should just sell it as is, get whatever cash I can for my 250cc bike in Oz and go from there. Perhaps this just needs to be written off as a (very expensive) life lesson.

Feeling particularly depressed about the bike this morning. I suspect it's the uncertainty in the air. When one aspect of life is less than stellar I tend to cope with it to some degree by shifting my focus onto another aspect that's going particularly well. I'm struggling a little to find something to focus on.

Don't get me wrong. I don't for a second believe that I have anything but a great life. I'm healthy, I do well enough for myself financially, I get to do something I love and get paid for it. But these are all rational responses to what is essentially an irrational depression.

Maybe if it were raining I'd feel better.

Vodacom owe me an upgrade, I'm going shopping.

Our company had it's 11th birthday celebration today. It was a thinly veiled (but deliberate) "seeya" for one of the two founding members who is moving on (the company was bought by a larger American firm towards the end of last year).

Lots of speeches, a few nearly-tears, a few actual tears, the usual furore associated with things of this nature. I was surprised at how little I felt. I've always been quite heavily emotionally invested in the company. I've always been immensely proud of who I work for, the people I work with, and the product and services we deliver. So events like this have traditionally been accompanied by an upwelling of pride. They're usually a bit of a back-patting session, but I don't think they've ever been undeserved.

But not so today. Today, I was remarkably detached from the whole thing. I felt very little towards the company, good or bad. It was kind of like a celebration was going on around me that had nothing to do with me. Some of it could probably be written off as the end of a long week, but I think it's more fundamental than that.

I think it's a few things, actually. My role has changed substantially over the past year and a half. That makes it harder to be one of the lads. My peers are a smaller group, and my pressures are different. Different, not bigger, not more important, just different. But I think that's a small contributor.

I suppose inevitably the buyout means that it's no longer the same company. That shouldn't matter, certainly not at this point, because the people are the same, the product is the same, almost nothing's changed (email addresses are transient, they don't count). But it does matter, and I'm pretty sure it has contributed.

Then there's this opportunity floating off on the periphery. To be honest I couldn't imagine what it would be like to leave these people. To give up the work I'm involved in. Especially at this juncture, 5.0 is almost ready and I want to see it change people's lives (okay, I'll settle for just making their lives a little easier). It's been on my mind lately and is something else to take into consideration.

Oddly enough, while I think I've grown less attached to the company, I've grown more attached to the platform. This was probably inevitable, I've poured my heart and soul into it. One of the reasons I love working here is that I get an opportunity to do just that. Here, if you believe in something and have enough confidence in yourself you really can make things happen. That plays to my strengths. And with 5.0 I really have invested a significant part of me in something pretty big, quite daunting, and, if we pull it off, pretty amazing.

But whatever the reasons for today's malaise, it certainly feels a little like the end of an era for me.

To the next five years, whatever they may bring.

Yesterday morning I had the first blue screen of death in, ooh I really can't remember. Windows 2000 has come a long way since the days of 3.!fun.

But it's still not quite there. Earlier this evening I was forced (yet again) to reboot because the DHCP client had lost it's allocated network settings. Trying to bounce the DHCP client service left me with a hung service (stopping .... stopping ... stopping ... STOP ALREADY!) and because Microsoft thought it was a good idea to roll a whole heap of system services into a single process I can't even forcibly kill the bastard.

So a reboot is my only recourse, and, at least for the more technically aware users, is why Windows isn't a patch on BSD (or any other Unix or Unix-like system, I'm just naturally biased in favour of BSD).

Gah!!