This Makes me MAD!

Steve P just sent me a link to the Cam­paign for Digital Rights sum­mary of Sony’s new set of non-“Red Book” audio CD releases. Thanks Steve.
I hadn’t real­ised this was so wide­spread and so dam­aging! The Celine Dion album causes a Power­Mac G4 to require repair by an Apple dealer! What’s next, only Sony CDs will work in Sony play­ers?
They also have a good Dmitry Sklyarov FAQ

TeeVee make me SleePee

Watch­ing TV make my brain go to sleep. It really does. I nor­mally stay awake until at least 1 or 2am. Pretty much every night. Yet, last night and tonight after sit­ting watch­ing the Com­mon­wealth Games cov­er­age, in which I’m tak­ing an interest, I’m drop­ping off in my seat by 11pm. What it going on?
I can only ima­gine that it is because I’m being pass­ive. When I nor­mally stay awake until 1am or later, I am either read­ing, cod­ing, brows­ing web­sites, email­ing, or chat­ting. I’m using my brain, I’m act­ively engaged. Yet watch­ing TV seems to turn off my brain. The funny thing is that I can watch a film through to the early hours. At least if it’s an inter­est­ing one, even if I’ve seen it before. So like books, films hold my interest.
It may also be true that sit­ting in the lounge means that I am not sat upright. The so –called com­fort­able seat­ing in the lounge only allows one to slouch, lean­ing back. Whereas sit­ting read­ing in the kit­chen or sit­ting at my com­puter I tend to sit upright with quite good pos­ture.
So after fall­ing asleep in front of the TV at prob­ably around 10:30pm, I’m now sat in front of the com­puter feel­ing quite alert.
Very strange. Per­haps this explains why I don’t watch TV at all. I reckon that the nearly eight hours I’ve watched in the past two days has doubled my TV con­sump­tion this year!

Manchester 2002

I’ve just fin­ished watch­ing the open­ing cere­mony for the Manchester 2002 com­mon­wealth games. I really enjoyed it. It was actu­ally very good. Much bet­ter than many open­ing cere­mon­ies I have seen. There’s going to be sat­ur­a­tion cov­er­age on TV for the next 10 days. I guess I’ll get to see a lot of it. Jan and Jamie are going to see the Women’s Gym­nastics on Sunday at the GMex centre.

Merge City

Well, I finally fin­ished all those merges I needed to do. It took about 3 days longer than expec­ted! And there are more pain­ful merges to come. :-(
I’ve still to fin­ish pack­aging up the release. But I’ve stopped that while I have to branch from a pre­vi­ous release of another pro­ject coz, the cli­ent doesn’t have time to test the last release! So they want the pre­vi­ous release (which hasn’t gone live yet) PLUS one more piece of work.

Mergin’ Blues

So far I’ve spent three and a half days doing the merges I men­tioned recently. Here’s a big tip. When the cli­ent wants you to do some­thing nasty to optim­ize through­put, which you know will mean harder main­ten­ance and devel­op­ment later, res­ist with all your might! This is just tak­ing forever, and I’ve got another two merges to do yet.
In the next couple of weeks there are three more to do! In the weeks fol­low­ing that there are even more. All of them are going to be pain­ful because we were per­suaded to hack in some really dirty optim­iz­a­tions! :-(