Springtime for Hitler

Submitted by mike on Mon, 2008-04-07 10:37.

Spring has sprung, the grass has been nibbled bare by the sheep and the snow is falling. Welcome to Scotland. My Spring toilet book is the Bodleian Library tome about the Invasion of Britain by Hitler - it is a fascinating read in the 'see yourself as others see you' genre where the Germans marvelled at our roads but poopooed everything else. To balance this I of course have the Commando 12 action comics together at last with a sprinkling of Achtungs, Gott Himmels and take that you Nazi swine.

This time of year is one where I indulge my passion for technical books and fill my desk with Ajax, Model-View-Controller Patterns, LINQ and C#/F# tomes all held up by a strong lime green man bookend, which doesn't impress people at all that I am a learned man. What does impress people is my new 30 inch Mac Monitor though cos it is just gorgeous - finally I can see my photos at a grand scale and spot all the defects and where I have been going wrong for all these years (purchase a gitzo tripod with a really right stuff ballhead immediately young man). My working world is now a blur of Microsoft research tools and beta versions running on Apple equipment - the best of all possible worlds? Microsoft have finally bought up all the bright people in the world that don't work at Google and some great work is coming out - finally the world of computer science is coming into its own with fast hardware capable of doing interesting things. My Mac Pro has 8 cores with 18G RAM and 2 x 300G fast disks running several VMWare virtual machines to slow it down. This machine is faster than I am, which is probably just as well.

Another new toy is my GPS attachment to my camera which now automatically maps photos I take to a Flickr map. This will be great for aerial photography with our first test flight over East Lothian showing up camera shake and general crapness (turn the autofocus off for godsake) when wobbling around in turbulence. The new plane was great though (Mainair GT450) handling the winds well and accomodating my zoom lens in the back.
GPS is ruling our lives with a new one attached to the plane, one in my Meade MySky controlling my telescope, Mariella in the car and one on my camera - and the weather has been so poor we haven't even gone geocaching this year... although some people have visited our Geocache at Lempitlaw, lazily driving down to it.

Stuart went Spainward on a Geology field trip in the north (although he didn't get to do the Caminito Del Rey in the south, which looks awesome although my imbalance would probably see me plunging, screaming... He returned via Terminal 5 stuck for four hours but managed to force their way into the BA Executive Lounge to sit sipping cocktails under the horse lamps.

Alasdair had a near death experience closer to home on his motorbike when travelling to Galashiels a car overtook him, lost control hitting a corner turned over a few time and bounced back towards him. He missed the car by inches but stopped and almost got run over by one of his teachers who romped onto school, whilst Ali went to see if anyone was injured.

New googles can only mean that Mike is going to do the crawl again - avoid Kelso Swimming Pool at all cost as the masked avenger gasps for breath and forgets his stroke hitting the lane markers and takes in a mouthful of chlorinated water instead of air.

Still armed with a superb cold reading book and GPS driven camera I am off to a ghostly 'Fright night' with poledancing Sally and her sister in law to sit huddling in the dark whilst Derek Acorah (mystic or mad you choose) speaks to the dead Fraudulent Medium Act and fears the dark shadow of the trading standards wraithes.

Now on twitter I am destined to get no work done at all - if you are of a like mind click on the twitter link above. There are ten times more access to twitter through an API interface rather than people typing things so it is destined to be as big as rickrolling.

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