The Dancing Poodle

Just had my first experience at an auction, and it was mostly satisfying. All the equipment at my workplace no longer needed was auctioned today, and out of the two items I was after, I walked away with a very nice workbench for the shed for the princely sum of $20. There was a slide projector going as well, and I decided not to bid any more than $70 for it. Needless to say, it went to $70 exactly, but not my way. Funny thing is, the guy that bought it only wanted to pay half that amount but got carried away. If I’d gone to $75, he would have let me have it. Oh well, stuff happens. Now I’ve just got to work out how to get the workbench home…

Just realised that last Wednesday marked the first anniversary of The Dancing Poodle blog! Three hundred and seventy three days and 115 posts later, I think I still only have three regular readers (Hi to Glenn, Sim’ and Hannah). Oh well, it keeps me sane. That, and the friendship I share with my collection of singing potatoes…

Here goes another year…

OK, I’m back from holidays. Yeah, I could have blogged from home, but seriously, if I can blog when someone else is paying, that’s a much better option. (Oh, for any possible future employers, I promise not to blog on YOUR time… Honest!)

Turned on the laptop at work this morning and downloaded all my email from 4 weeks of holidays. Got a total email count of 576!! I’d upload a screenshot of it, but can’t work out how yet… Time to upgrade Wordpress, maybe. Anyway, out of 576 emails, turns out there were 31 I was interested in. Isn’t modern technology wonderful???

I’ve now added this site to FeedBurner.

To all of you who utilise the RSS feed for this blog (I think there’s still only one of you…), please change over to http://feeds.feedburner.com/dancingpoodle/ for your feeds. I’ll update the links on the site once I get to a computer with decent access to the ‘net…

This from Gadgetopia: Thought it sums up the situation so far. Particularly liked the comment about…

… attempting to rob a bank and finding that God Himself was in line to deposit His paycheck at the same time.

Certainly Sony are taking a lot of flack from this, and rightly so. There seems to be a movement now to boycott Sony music (and other products) - I’d join in, but I’m afraid that the amount of money I actually spend on Sony music (nil in the last 5 years) probably wouldn’t worry them too much…

In other news, I had a job interview yesterday for a defence company that would involve programming in Ada (among others). Grabbed out my Ada textbook from Uni the night before the interview and brushed up my fading memories of the language. It’s funny - when I learned Ada, I thought it was fantastic! The only other (decent) language I knew at the time was Pascal (upon which Ada is based), so I guess it was a pretty good step-up. Looking back now, comparing it with modern C++ and C#, the feeling is rather different….

Still, if they want to pay me to program in Ada, who am I to complain?

Clicky…

I finally got around to creating a project on SourceForge, so I’m now able to run a decent blog (decent system for the blog - the content is still the same). I was able to import all my posts from Blogger, thanks to this page by Andy Skelton.

Oh, please update your links…

That was a question asked of me at a job interview yesterday.

Excuse me?? I thought this was for a Software Engineering position?

Apparently so - basically it came down to whether I could approach a left-field question logically and rationally. The fact that I laughed and then ran from the room screaming probably didn’t give that impression (just kidding). Unfortunately, the one question they asked to check out my C++ skills was pitched just as my brain decided to run its monthly virus scan, and so my assurances that I was a C++ guru probably didn’t impress them either. Rats!

Anyway, another job interview today, so hopefully my brain will stay engaged for the duration… although it says it can’t promise anything…

I’ve just been on holidays for a week or so, and wile I was away, my work PCs cracked the one year mark in the World Community Grid! Next milestone will be getting within the top 1000 members by points generated…

Played Halo 2 over the weekend. First time on an X-box. Needless to say, I got flogged (Thanks Glenn). Anyway, I think I now have to agree witht the guys at Penny Arcade - the X-box controller really is like playing with a Kodiak Bear. Personally, I’m a mouse & keyboard man, but will accept a PS-2 controller when needed. The X-box variant just feels a bit unweildy.

Still, Glenn was kind enough to lend me a connection to his 1.5Mbps ADSL so I could finish grabbing a few Windows updates and the all-important Steam updates. Steam’s a bit scary, though. Data was coming down at about 1Mbps, and it took 4 hours to get everything up to date. Let’s see, 1Mbps is about 25 times the speed of an average 56k dialup connection (say 40kbps sustained, if you’re lucky?), so if I had used dialup to get these updates, it would take 4 x 25 = 100 hours (over 4 days continually connected)!!! Yegads!!! At $1.10/hour (my current dialup cost), maybe ADSL ain’t so expensive after all…