Work is fine. Tiger is fun. I'm single.

Just some miscellaneous updates on what's been going on in my life recently.

This has been limited to work-related coding. My present task is to port an 
MS Visual C++ app to work on the web, via a combination of a Java servlet 
(running via Tomcat on Apache), an Oracle database, and some client-side 
JavaScript. It's all going well so far. I got my keys to the department 
recently, including electronic fob. Chris and I continue to pimp it up 
large-style with the academics.

I had the opportunity to play with Tiger recently, in the immediate vicinity 
of microwave burgers, beer, Ribena, dodgy cigarettes and a huge quantity of 
bootlegged DVDs. Seems incredibly stable for something that's only going to be 
released next year, which is a good sign. Dashboard is cute, though I'm not 
convinced that its modality is a good thing. Sometimes I'll want to just pin 
a widget to the screen all the time. Maybe it can do that, and I just haven't 
bothered to check.



Oh, and Automator is indeed incredibly exciting (though 
it seemed to be called Pipeline in the build I used, and was accessed via 
contextual menus in the Finder).

After nearly 3 years together, Fi and I broke up last weekend, very amicably. 
We're still living together at the moment until other arrangements can be 
sorted out. We have good days and bad days emotions-wise, naturally, but 
we're both still incredibly good friends, and I'm sure we always will be.



Thanks to all the folk who have been supportive and offered kind words. We're 
both doing quite well, all things considered.

I got an email from Neil the other day (who's now back down south working for 
Macro4, after a week of triple-X-rated debauchery in Amsterdam, which I've been 
explicitly forbidden from posting details of, sadly). Here it is:

You know it.



Fiona said something kind of funny too; yesterday morning was her first ever 
cervical smear appointment, and she was naturally a bit nervous. The nurse 
talked her through it etc, and it all went fine. She was telling me afterwards 
that, before the exam, the nurse had described the dilating device as "like a 
plastic penis", and that if she found it uncomfortable, there was a smaller one 
which could be used instead. Fi told me that she didn't in fact require to have 
the smaller one used, and that she guessed she could thank me for that. As if my 
ego isn't out of control enough already.



(Incidentally, I post the above with Fi's express permission.)



Lastly, Chris and I were playing snooker in the QM games room (which has a nifty 
new small bar in the corner now), with Rachel ("Lord of the Rings") and her 
boyfriend Craig from last year's 4th year. Craig for some reason was convinced 
that I was actually called Mike, and that Chris is in fact Steve. In deference 
to this, we called him Colin for the rest of the evening, and Chris created the 
first of a series of web-comics chronicling the uncannily true-to-life 
<a href="http://chris-miller.org/comics/mike_and_steve/">adventures of Mike and Steve</a>.



That'll do for now.