The Lair

We’ve all seen and heard them. The zombies of the modern age. Get on public conveyance of any sort and there are always a few; earbuds (usually brilliant mug-me-and-take-my-expensive-player-please white) and tinny music blaring out of them. For the past few days, I’ve been that guy to my cube mates - only without the brilliant white earbuds. My litany of playlist miserabilia starts with Blue and goes onto Matchbox 20 (or Twenty). Stop looking at me all funny like. For the past few days, I’ve been inflicting my cubemates with this admittedly middle of the road choice of music and the worst part is, I’ve been generally oblivious to how bad it is myself. Things have not been good. Only a little bit of RHCP and Blur separates myself from the (admittedly deserved) tag of teenybopper. How did I descend so far, so fast?

The girl who got away after 8 years. Now that’s a scary story. the Daily Mail comments seem accurate to me though, the escape is possibly the first step in what’s going to be a traumatic existence… The first I heard of the story (a few days ago) I was reminded of the James Hadley Chase novel “No orchids for Miss Blandish”. Just hope Natascha K.’s (umm, no not her [zomg, Wikipedia has an article on Natasha Kaplinsky?! Go, go Wikipedia]) story ends better than the fictional Miss Blandish.

James Hadley Chase also wrote under the name Ambrose Grant? I-did-not-know-that. Woo.

I’ve been delving (of all things) into the weird and wonderful world of CRMs and bug trackers and task list management tools recently. I remember a complaint earlier about the lack of nice, slick looking Ajaxy todo list and task management tools. Well, I haven’t found what I’m looking for yet; but a few worthy contenders are out there waiting to be evaluated. Been quite tempted to install Mantis and retrofit it to suit but then I discovered ActiveCollab - which looks like a nifty Basecamp clone. There are also the better known dotProject and NetOffice apps which seem vaguely interesting. A definite minus point with the otherwise nice looking ActiveCollab is that it only works with PHP 5; making it slightly awkward to deploy on shared hosting (but not a problem if you’re keeping things inhouse like we are). So, it’s probably going to be ActiveCollab then. I’ve always had a weakness for eye candy.