Or for those in the know Weebles Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down.
If that makes no sense at all then it’s probably better not to ask.
Family Weekend
Simon and Fiona are down for the weekend so we have just been catching up and relaxing. Much needed after the last week which has not been the most successful. Yesterday was spent dealing with a fairly serious production issue which shoul dnever have happened, and which we don’t really have the time to spare for. It just means that next week is going to be even busier.
Things are going to be pretty quiet around here for the next few weeks until I get a chance to catch my breath.
Nobody was killed
I don’t cook for people very often but Sunday lunch at mine has just finished. It was only for five but still a fairly major undertaking for me. How Mum does it for more people with no notice is beyond me. Anyway, noone has shown any ill effects (yet) and at least I enjoyed the food. Maybe I should do it more often.
Matt Whites of the world unite.
Matt White (the owner of MattWhite.com) has now acquired MattWhite.net which he is devoting to all things Matt White, including a link back to here, currently the only blog by a Matt White in the world, or is it?
Quicksilver for Windows
One of the most useful little utilities on the Mac is called Quicksilver. It allows you to get at programs or data with a very few key presses and also indexes all of your user data such as contacts, calendar entries etc. So if I want to find a phone number, I can just type the persons name from anywhere, hit return and their contact record shows up instantly. The idea is so good that Apple have stolen it for the next version of OS X, it will be called Spotlight. This obviously takes advantage of OS X’s file store which Windows can’t even get close to currently. But there is a utility which gets some of the way there…
Called AppRocket it sits at the top of your screen and at least allows you get at your applications and documents in your My Documents folder quickly. Well worth a look.
Cracking Notes Calendar Tip
Alan Lepofsky’s Notes Tips site has a real cracker today. It shows how to print your calendar to a document. I can think of several manager type people for whom (or at least for their secretaries) this will be an absolute lifesaver for.
Berkshire
The second trip of the 2005 County Challenge saw me in Berkshire to the west of London. I get the feeling that a lot of the tourist bits that I’ll do will be to historic places and this was no different with a trip around Windsor Castle and Donnington Castle ruins.
Donnington was deserted, not surprising given the time of year and the weather but it was really interesting. You can still see all of the defensive earthworks which the cavaliers created during the civil war. In contrast Windsor is a thoroughly modern tourist attraction. Even on a cold, wet February afternoon it was absolutely heaving. I am not sure I’d want to go during the summer holiday season. But it is, without doubt, something worth seeing. Just the sheer opulence of the place is staggering so as a tool with which to manipulate visiting dignataries I am sure it’s very effective. Rather bizarrely for a British attraction the staf were great as well, more than happy to answer your questions and with a genuine affection for the castle and town.
A couple of the staff implied that the Queen was in residence and there were a couple of corgies running around the courtyard but I’m not sure if that was just for effect. The one thing you would notice if you lived there was the number of jets flying very low overhead, it is just on the flightpath as you come into Heathrow from the west.
Overall an interesting trip, hopefully the remaining 37 counties are as good.
Update…
I’ve uploaded the few photos I took to Flickr
We're on the offensive
It’s good to see Domino on the offensive for the first time in ages. Bill has written an article comparing Domino and Exchange from a mail point of view. In my own world I am involved purely in application development where we have just started a new project with Domino as the linchpin of an enterprise scale compliance application. The reason Domino is being used – speed of development because it does so much good stuff out of the box.
This is nothing new to those of us who deal with Domino and other platforms regularly but it has been nice to see the reaction of people who have never seen Notes/Domino for anything other than pure mail. Also entertaining have been the conversations with “experts” whose decisions not to use Domino are based on seeing an application written in 1996. The world has moved on since then guys, Domino has moved on further and faster than some seem to think.
Covering of Snow
I woke up to a couple of inches of snow this morning so decided to head out early as I was convinced the journey to work would be a problem. And yet I am here at the usual time. The roads to the station were pretty appalling, couldn’t go above 20mph as the gritters hadn’t been out but, shock and horror, the train was on time. Usually this sort of weather is the perfect excuse to have a 3 or 4 hour journey but credit where credit’s due, the train worked perfectly.
It’ll be interesting to see whether people who come in on other lines are as lucky as me.
National Obsession
Jake found a really interesting link for Our Property. It’s only going to be of interest to those of you in the UK but it fuels our national obsession of the moment – house prices. You can enter your postcode (or that of one you want to move to) and find out about the selling prices of nearby houses over the last couple of years. Useful if you are looking to move to a new area, even better if like me you are just nosey.