Catching up

published: Tue, 9-Sep-2003   |   updated: Thu, 27-Oct-2005

It seems forever since I updated the site, however it's only been a couple of weeks. We went away to England on vacation to celebrate the fifth anniversary of our wedding (according to my Mum, it's the wooden one). It's amazing that it has been five years; amazing in the sense that it's just flown by, rather than the sense that we're still married (although at the time, there were some naysayers who were "predicting" an early end to our union).

Every anniversary we try and go somewhere special. Last year was Paris and Normandy; the year before, the Kent coast near Rye. This year was Thomas Hardy's Wessex. We stayed at Plumber Manor, near Sturminster Newton, however we wandered far and wide, visiting Glastonbury, Wells, Lyme Regis, Cerne Abbas, Stonehenge, Avebury, and Old Wardour Castle.

(By the way, the final comma before the "and" in that list is known as the Oxford comma. I first learned of that in reading one of the Inspector Morse books by Colin Dexter. Who says you don't learn something from detective fiction, eh?)

Some quick items:

Whilst I was away, Falafel Software uploaded the next article in my series on writing parsers in C#.

On holiday, I started reading a new author (at least to me), Ian Rankin. He's written a whole series of detective books starring (if I may put it that way) D.I. John Rebus. I read the first two in the series (Knots & Crosses and Hide & Seek). Extremely well written, with an emphasis on characterization. My only problem with the second was an observation (attributed to Chekhov, if I remember rightly) that everything Rankin described played a part in the plot. For example, he describes a squalid bathroom and bath in detail in a squat early on: lo, it becomes important later; a colleague on the force always seems to be around, and it transpires that he knows more than he lets on, etc. For some reason it became obvious to me (and should have to Rebus) that everyone he met and everything he touched had something to do with the murder. Nevertheless, the ending was justly shocking for what wasn't said.

On a different note, Dr Charles Suscheck, with whom I worked for a couple of years at TurboPower and Aristocrat Technologies, turned me onto Diana Krall just before I resigned from ATI. Chuck lent me three of her CDs to listen to. I did more than that: I ripped them to play later. I was so impressed that I've since bought all of her CDs, including the three I ripped. She has a wonderful, sultry voice that just opens up vistas of love, heartbreak, happiness, sadness. She also plays piano (her first few CDs are in fact her in a trio). Beautiful jazz standards and ballads, sung with passion and feeling, with an emphasis on arrangement and quality.

On yet another different note, this is exactly the path the recording industry should be taking: let your customers sample the CDs you sell, reduce the price, and people like me will buy the good stuff (be it as MP3s or as CDs) rather than have the samples. Even better, set up a "print-on-demand" publishing system. If some nutter like me really wants to buy The Colourfield's Virgins and Philistines on CD then send him to a web site where he can select it, it gets printed with its liner notes there and then (cost? about $1), and sent out for $10. That way I — er sorry, he — won't have to haunt eBay hoping that it'll come up at less than $20 (of which the record company will get exactly zip since it's secondhand).

On getting back, my old TurboPower email address (it's being redirected for now) had well over 600 spam emails. This was friggin' nuts. I started sifting through the headers left by my anti-spam program with the best intentions, but after five minutes I was deleting like crazy. So, who knows what was killed (apart from several exhortations from several people in several African countries asking me to join in multimillion dollar frauds).

Talking of best intentions, I really was going to write the code for the next parser installment on the plane (United had bumped us up to Business Class prior to the trip: the joys of being Premier Executive 1K). However, it was a vacation, dammit. Also, I'm a little stuck somewhere and couldn't find the energy to concentrate on it...