Dave's Grumblings

Several issues I've been meaning to blog recently:

Death

A work colleague of mine died on Monday. He was driving back from delivering something to a customer and suffered a heart attack. He was 46. As far as he (and the rest of us) was aware, Tim was in reasonably good health, so it's a big shock to everyone. I wasn't at work on Monday, but I can only imagine how difficult it must be to have been laughing and joking with him in the morning and to have lost him just a few hours later. His wife is only 33. It's a sad event when anyone dies, but for such a young family to be left behind is tragic. Needless to say, there's been a sad atmosphere at work, but the attitude of some customers is unbelievable. A man on Tuesday couldn't believe that we were unable to deliver a couple of items on Wednesday. Even when he the circumstances were explained to him he insisted that he needed them for a gift. Much to his chagrin and our relief the idiot left empty handed.

Music

Impulse buying is fantastic - I heard Plump DJs for the first time in FOPP on Monday and bought the CD while I was in the shop. Dance/Electronica is fairly far removed from my usual listening habits but the funk grabbed me and I've not stopped bouncing since. What is mildly annoying is that my brothers have latched on to it (as they seem to with most new music I pick up) and insist on playing the damn album on repeat. Also worth a mention is the new Finch album - I love how they've stuck to their guns and moved away from the mainstream sound and stayed true to what they want to do rather than bow to the record company's wishes. At the very least, they give a good impression of being able to do just that. :) Going in the opposite direction, Funeral for a Friend's new stuff doesn't have anywhere near the same kick as their last disc (which in itself was a step down from the raw hardcore sound they had before they signed to a major). Trivium and Avenged Sevenfold have also been assaulting my aural passageways and inspiring me to get a proper handle on how to use the double bass drum pedal properly - I swear some of these guys have 8 legs or something.

Games

I've been getting into Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and it's brilliant. Rock Star have really outdone themselves this time; the game is a thing of beauty. The story, the city, everything (so far) screams with attention to detail that I've not seen for a long time. Top notch stuff.

Code

I've been hacking on the SUCS Blog on and off since the exams have finished, it's progressing nicely. I read a few articles on AJAX which all seemed to be Ruby-related so I decided to pick that up. However I soon dropped it onto the backburner when I realised that the backend language was pretty much irrelevant. Javascript seems to get quite a bad rap, but it's actually damn useful. I've been careful to include backwards compatibility for browsers with disabled/absent JS support. The more I use AJAX, the more I think I'd find a custom library to handle it all generically quite handy, so that'll be something to code up at some point. The hyperbole has slowly been building up over the course of this entry, so here's the big one: I've been accepted on to Google's Summer of Code program! W00t! They had some 8700 applicants and 400 spaces, so I'm dead chuffed that they picked me. The application I wrote is here. There's a crap load of paperwork to wade through in an attempt to pay the least amount of tax possible, but either way it's going to be an amazing experience and will no doubt put me in good standing for 'real world' programming.