Right, so we had the best financial quarter ever and the CEO has given us all a half day today! Bit strange walking out the office at lunch time knowing ill not be back in the office until Monday. Pretty sweet. Kinda weird because I was sorta in the middle of getting something 'unbroke' so I could create some database tables... hey ho :-) I'm not complaining.

The interesting thing that I might do now is investigate how I could create a voice activated twitter client. The thing is I need to re-register with apple for £50 so I dunno if I want to do that just to fuel my little wannabe project idea.

Today I also learned a little about google+ and it irritated me as it seems it's another attempt to socially encourage you to 'be ever present' and interact with the world always - like Facebook - a means to draw you in and implement the need(an almost always unsatisfied need ) for you tell and show people who you are and what you are about and how awesome your life is compared to everyone else's. I hate that need. It's like Facebook, twitter, buzz, linked in - all in one so you just can't escape. I'm being dramatic obviously abs in sure it's ok but, for me, it's not. enough said really. I prefer to be happy in my own little space, free of social needs. I'm just fine being a loser. in fact I love being a loser, me me me me me! check out the muzzle velocity on that rant!

I love being trapped in my own predicament.

ok so that rant went on a bit - it's over now. Still haven't been sleeping well, didn't help with me heading to the gym on a a really empty because I kinda didn't feel well afterwards. sounds like the perfect combination to get sick and judging in my last bout of killer man knock-you-the-hell-out flu last time, I think I need a bit of rest and a good nights sleep. still, probably won't happen. Focus! I hear my conscious shout.

anyway, trains pulling into Wimbledon now so let's get this half day on the way!

Ok so recently, well yesterday I signed up for a blind charity - uh that is I'm donating £10 a month to a charity that supports blind people which I'm quite proud to do because it's often that I think how wonderful the world is and I qualify it with my sense of sight to a very large extent. So on a psychological level I feel that having that deteriorate or cease to function would quite possibly change an outlook on life so if there is something that I can do so that such an impact isn't as terrifying as I interpret it to be - that's a worthy cause. Its not a huge donation but it's a start. I do the same with a children's charity that looks after children who haven't got the means to look after themselves. Now that I come to think of it £10 monthly also is not much but it's something every month at the very least. Perhaps when I'm better able to contribute more, ill do more than the very least.

Also, I started thinking of writing a twitter based iPhone app for fun. Voice activated this time. Browsed through a API called openEars which looked promising. But essentially its what i called a gimic project, i want to do it just because i can and it sparks a momentary impulse. But we'll see, it might just get shelved.

it's been two days since I've left my iPhone at home, on purpose. It's been rather liberating not having to carry around another thing. I go into work with nothing in my hands and leave with nothing in my hands - really great. Except my keys and cards - need to figure out how I can make those disappear safely but for now they are back pocket bound. Stupidly warm this tine of year and being in England in used to miserably cold and essentially miserably weather and I'm finding it quite humerous that it's good weather, weather that I've known all my life that's messing with me! I don't know how good I had it.

Silly almost pedantic thing I'm doing of late, and I'm noticing it, is consciously turning off the main switches to groups of appliances 1. before I goto bed and 2. when I go to work. My seemingly compulsive disorder here is based off the reasoning that I dont use them during these periods and these periods are between 6 and 8 hours long. So like my broadband router - I don't use that at work so why have it burning up? so I don't know other people do it but there you go, I'm a bit wiered here.

The picture is from the Isle of Man trip I did, it's off the electric railway in Douglas.

Had a generally good day today. I converted all our internal projects from .NET 2.0 to .NET 3.5 which was great. Everything works now on a later and more feature rich platform. This upgrade was a requisite for another upgrade to one of our API sets, which too seems to have coped with the conversion. I spent most of the day working with the new API set to get a webpage to display sone data in a cool looking way with pictures and getting working efficiently etc... I got a result about an hour after work which is cool - at least I have something to talk about in our daily stand up meeting!

cool thunderstorm this afternoon and being on the 12th floor looking over London we could catch the bolts of lightening flashing across the scenery. Very cool.

I actually got a hell of a lot done today.

In other news, had a quick look into voice synthesiser APIs mainly for Java with the childish view of having my computer communicate with me, I'm sure it'll pass. In my optimism I'd like to somehow effectively model a mechanism to learn based on commands but many have tried and haven't really succeeded in bring a practical learning or AI to life as we'd expect it to - so I could be just setting myself up to fail but might get around to it - I like failing as much as winning or succeeding, ok s little less, granted.

right ok, I'm in the tube and thank god for earphones!