Andy Oakley

It recently dawned on me that I can’t actually remember the last time I heard silence – absolutely nothing, pure calm. By day, I enjoy air conditioning and the whirring of five computer fans and by night, the noise of traffic that never stops. Pins could be dropping everywhere and I simply wouldn’t notice. I have some memory, without place or time, of being in a farmhouse at night. It was so dark I couldn’t tell whether my eyes were open and every movement came with a jarring sound. I wonder whether there’s a market to sell the experience like the oxygen bars in Tokyo.

Sean has been trying to get me to start playing Age of Mythology for ages now and I finally crumbled. It only took an hour for me to remember why I don’t buy these games – it’s a question of addiction. I would have carried on at 4.30am this morning had the body been willing. I have achieved so little this weekend I’m proud.

It’s taken me far too long to discover Thai Rama II on Spring & Post Alley. I had a great green chicken curry (with bits of pineapple) which came very close to rivalling the fare of The Wrestlers.As an aside, I also came across the great 570bars.com site. A five hundred and seventy venue bar crawl requires some serious stamina and dedication. Well done to those chaps.

There was a lot of cleaning up to do after the release so this is a particularly welcome weekend.Meanwhile, despite being decidedly skeptical of the value of the new camera phones for some time, I bought a MCA-25 addon unit for my cell phone this evening. I finally get it. Enter On the move, my new mobile photo blog (presumably mo-pho for short).

After leaving work after 3am yesterday morning and a busy day of deployment today, Workspaces v1.0 is now live at http://www.gotdotnet.com/workspaces.I’m tired and I have to present all of this wonderful work early tomorrow morning to MSDN. But it shipped, on time, with the spec’ed feature set and few problems. Happy.

With an increasing number of important things to do, I decided to drop them all for an hour and put together a little perl script for posting images from mail straight to a Movable Type blog (or anything supporting the Blogger API).Time to get a camera phone and start seeing the world. Full source inside.

You notice some odd things when living in a building with 400 other people. Take phone directories – it’s that time of year when both the yellow and white pages come out and they’re all sitting there in the lobby for the taking. A veritable coppice of cheap grade paper, just waiting to gather dust for the coming year. How novel it will be, explaining to people in years to come how we once used these books to find everyday information.

Kudos to my mother, who recorded these words from a stone in Mark Laing Nature Parse, Goose Spit, Vancouver Island.Thoughts by Henry David ThoreauSimplify. Don’t waste the years struggling for things that are unimportant. Don’t burden yourself with possessions. Keep your needs and wants simple, and enjoy what you have. Don’t fritter away your life on non-essentials. Don’t enslave yourself for luxuries. A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can do without. Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.Live in the present, enjoy the present.Simplify your life.Be not simply good, be good for something.Of course, the full wording is there in Thoreau’s Walden, but who has time to read books? Maybe I still have a little way to go yet.

I’m both puzzled and amused by the flash mobs of NYC. I suspect the reason for such gatherings is as inexplicable to the participants as it is to the observers. What’s the point? I’m not sure, but I’ve a feeling if I was in New York, I’d be there to see if I could find out.

Will the economics of spam change? Maybe some high profile lawsuits will help. Certain hardcore spammers seem to be getting quite enterprising – block them from Messenger, and they send e-mail asking why they’ve been blocked – so I doubt this’ll really change their habits. Still, if it raises consumer awareness (when people finally discover you can’t really gain 6 inches over the internet), maybe conditions will change.I have to credit the guy who’s sending his resume out as mass spam saying ‘I’m not sure if this is the right address’. Nice try, but don’t hold your breath.