The Lair

Ah, the seven facts. I’m sure quite a few of the people who read this blog already know a couple of these. I may have even mentioned them before. I’m nothing if not unoriginal.

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Work. Stress. More work. More BS IMing when I could be wresting stuff out of people’s hands and coding it myself.

…

Calm down, drac, old boy. It’s called delegation. We all need to do it, at one point or another.

Comic relief.

Sophie Ellis-Bextor has been found dead in a hotel room in Portugal. It was believed she was seen out last night being wined and dined by one of the stars of the French Football Team. This morning, a cleaning lady, who works at the hotel where the French players are staying, found her mutilated body and quickly alerted the local police.
A full investigation is still ongoing although the chief of police has already given a press conference. When asked what he thought of the situation, the police officer replied: “It’s murder on Zidane’s floor!”

One source from many. Yes, I like Sophie and her works of art (*cough*, sorta), so bite me.

Oh noes. I’ve been tagged.

One year ago:
The final stages of the grand escape from my then-blogging haunt. I was busily burning boats, spreading my soon-to-be-vacated blog URL around to all and sundry – preparing an escape to a slightly less visited haven. An year on, I’d have to say that things turned out exactly as I would have wanted… the domain and hosting does far more for me than provide an address for a blog; it also allows various experiments and installing software that strikes my fancy. I’m not necessarily more productive as a result, but I’m definitely having fun.

Elsewhere, things were quiet – nothing particularly memorable about an year ago.

Five years ago:
Apachecon 2001. I also remember dabbling with Perl golf during this period; mostly influenced by the other golfers at Perlmonks. Things were beginning to blur though – I was burning both ends of the candle at a startup. 16 hour work days were normal, I’d be juggling so many different things that it was a constant struggle to stay ahead of the workload. The suspicion that my place of work was slightly evil (yeah, so I was naive and didn’t read the signals early) was beginning to dawn on me.

I think I’ve grown up a bit as a coder and programmer – the golfing contests still happen; but as a means, not as an end. I look back on the mad days of startup life with a certain degree of trepidation; but it was the right place and the right time to see computing (and stock market) history being made. So, what if it wasn’t exactly the good sort of history? It’s still history, innit? I learnt absolute loads from the experience and the money hasn’t hurt either.

Ten years ago:
Just finished writing a really challenging (my first!) low level project in raw C. It later transpired that being lined up against a wall and shot wasn’t really an option in event of my failing to deliver. I didn’t know that at the time, however – so there was an added element of zestfear to the project. Strangely enough, this was also the beginning of the end for my hardcore C programmer era – there were simply too many things that took too long to write in C. I think this project has also led (in part or in full) to my absolute hatred of writing printer drivers and controlling printers through software.

Oh, and a bit later in the year: I’d start my undergrad degree. I honestly find it hard to believe that it’s been a full decade, but well… that’s how it is.

I’m not going to tag any more unfortunates with the meme – but feel free to pick it up and scribble about your own flashbacks – on this day, week, month or year in (2005, 2001 and 1996).