Despite term having finished last Friday, the monkeys all returned to the lab today at 11am to do some work
on our project, the topic-driven web crawler. Not just any kind of work; some serious XP (as in Extreme Programming).
Neil and I worked on data structures, whilst Derek, Gary and Mark focused on some of the primary entities. We made some
decent progress, and a good time was had by all. Or some such thing. I did wear my coding hat, though none of the others
did. Bah.
Eventually even we get tired (and indeed hungry), so after a quick trip to Curler's for lunch, with an amusing moment
as Derek (who is by far the tallest of our group) had to <a href="http://mattgemmell.com/images/phonepics/23-12-03-tuesday/derek_atm.jpg">use an ATM seemingly intended for children</a>,
we returned to the lab and did some hardcore chair-racing. Strictly speaking, they returned to the lab whilst I went
to have tea with a charming young lady, but whatever. When I got back to the lab 90 minutes or so later, chair
racing commenced.
Mad props to Gary for finally beating my record time by about a quarter of a second, despite having injured himself
twice on the straights during previous attempts. Further mad props to him for managing to look <a href="http://mattgemmell.com/images/phonepics/23-12-03-tuesday/gary.jpg">gormless</a>,
then <a href="http://mattgemmell.com/images/phonepics/23-12-03-tuesday/gary_evil.jpg">very sinister</a>,
and finally <a href="http://mattgemmell.com/images/phonepics/23-12-03-tuesday/gary_eating_chair.jpg">insane</a> all within the space of about two minutes.
Good job.
In other news, all my Christmas shopping is done; all presents wrapped and all cards written. What a relief. Now I just wait another
day and a half until I can see what Santa brings...