Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Took these two photos when Maeve was three months old – I can see that she is a “natural” software developer…
Looking intently at a bug on screen, trying to figure out why things are going wrong…

And then all those late nights coding catch up with you….

I really enjoy being a Dad.

On the train in this morning I came across a little article which blew my mind away – the very odd story (listed in many places) about an American woman who has sat on a toilet seat for two years!!! so long in reality that her skin had melded with the toilet seat. In the end they had to use a crow-bar to remove the seat and cart the lot off to the hospital where they managed to eventually separate woman from toilet. Bizzare or what!!!
Why did not the boyfriend do anything sooner rather than just leaving her to sit on the loo – not feeding her I would have thought would have helped her leave the safety of the bathroom. Anyway its nice to know that life definitely has it whacky side.

I was down grocery shopping at my local mega-store “Tesco’s” yesterday where I came across a very odd sight in the “Cheese” and “Yougurt” section… There was a middle age lady, shopping basket half-full flurtively looking around to make sure she was not being watched and then using a Digital Camera to photograph a shelve of Yogurt; she then repeated this in the cheese section and other places. Very Very Odd I thought. It is amazing what some people do for a hobby. You can just imagine the lady showing her extensive collection of snap-shots to her close friends (well you would not want anyone you work with seeing them otherwise they would consider you a candidate for the local psychiatric hospital) and say “here is a strawberry surprise collectors edition yogurt I photographed at Tesco’s in Dublin last September – lovely carton isn’t it”.

The world is a strange, strange place – would be rather dull if we were all the same.

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Rick Cook, The Wizardry Compiled

I don’t know who originally said this but it had me in a fit of giggles; and as with most humour there is more than a grain of truth:

“Skill without imagination is called craftmanship – from which we have many beautiful and useful things; a good example would be furniture. Imagination without skill is modern art”.