About me

A manager was about to be fired, but a programmer who worked for him invented a new program that became popular and sold well. As a result, the manager retained his job.

The manager tried to give the programmer a bonus, but the programmer refused it, saying, "I wrote the program because I though it was an interesting concept, and thus I expect no reward."

The manager, upon hearing this, remarked, "This programmer, though he holds a position of small esteem, understands well the proper duty of an employee. Lets promote him to the exalted position of management consultant!"

But when told this, the programmer once more refused, saying, "I exist so that I can program. If I were promoted, I would do nothing but waste everyone's time. Can I go now? I have a program that I'm working on."

-- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"

I don't know what it says about a guy who keeps forgetting to update the 'about me' section of his website. Average, if the rest of the internet is anything to go by, I feel. I could update the quote, too, but it still describes me pretty well.

Well, I completed my final year at Warwick with a 2.ii, which is less than I'd hoped for, and probably slightly unrepresentative - my final year project, for instance, got 74%, which would be a first (not the first time I got 74%, I mean of the quality expected for a first class degree). Apparently I suck at exams (even so, I got 79% for compiler design, though that's probably predictable, given the subject matter of my project).

Since then I've restarted work on Impulse, finally kicking the old C ROWS out in favour of a new, improved, C++ system. C++ sucks quite a lot more than C, but C is hopeless for dealing with Unicode strings. C++ is fairly hopeless, too, but it masks it in several ways that will probably annoy no end of people. GCC also seems to produce giant sized programs even for C++ that does not use the evil that is templates. I can talk at length about why templates are evil, but I won't. Someday I'll finish off the implementation of CINTOL and we'll finally have a type-safe, imperitive language. Until then, I'll be rude about C++ (and Java, but for different reasons).

On the non-computer-related front, things are fairly quiet at the moment. I still enjoy walks in the countryside, which I can do more often now I'm back in Suffolk, and I still enjoy going to the theatre. Not a lot changed there, then. Occasionally I go to see a film, but the drek Hollywood churns out is so awful I mostly don't bother. Many non-American films are good, though... Hmm, last good film I saw was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. I've got the DVD, too, which lets me hear the dubbed version. They really managed to mangle that :-) Good job DVDs let me turn that particular guff off, it's distressing to watch a two hour film whose dubbing makes it sound like one of those hair product commercials we get in .uk (and it's always hair products, for some reason) where the company has been too cheap to get English actors and hopes that we won't notice the very poor dubbing. The *really* good ads have been converted direct from NTSC. Now, we use PAL over here, which is of a somewhat higher quality than NTSC, and it is really, *really* obvious when this sort of thing has been done. I think I'll risk grey hair, rather than risk being out of focus and talking with no lip sync. (It's not even as if I watch very much TV these days, and even when I do, most of it's the Beeb, who tend to avoid badly-translated American rubbish, and who have no ads, bad or otherwise, woohoo!)