After a few weeks of relatively nice weather (for Britain) it’s started raining. It’s still April so it could just about be classified as “April showers” and while people may complain, it’s one of my favourite times of the year.

Some people like scorching hot summer days with blue skies, not a cloud in the sky, and just the sun beating down like it was the surface of Mercury. Others love the winter with the snow covering the countryside with a blanket of, eh, snow and the activities of the season (skiing and snowboarding to name but two). To be fair, I like both those weather extremes too. As a Scotsman I can always do with a tan (pasty white skin most of the time unfortunately) and I love snowboarding and the bitter, non-humid cold of winter. But back to my main point. I love rain.

I went to the supermarket to buy some food. Okay, I’ll admit that this paragraph could have started in a more interesting way - but it’s started already and it’s too late. I’ve got this habit of doing two things when I get to a supermarket car park: (1) I park in the first available space rather than search around for the closest one to the shop - I reckon that in the long run it works out quicker, and (2) I do nosey parking - reversing into a space leaving the nose of the car out so that I can get a quick getaway. Don’t ask me why I do this, I’m just strange.

Anyway, back to the main point. When I came out of the supermarket I was parked at pretty much the opposite end of the car park. I was just wearing a light, long-sleeved cotton top. And it was torrentially raining. People were sprinting all over the place and holding bags above their heads in a vain attempt to stay dry. Not me. I was just ambling along getting soaked.

It’s hard to describe why I like rain. One of the things is the fact that it puts you in perspective. You have no control over the weather, you can’t reason with it, and you can’t shout at it and expect it to go away. It’s there and it doesn’t care about you. It is unpredictable and you are totally at its mercy. I’ve been close to hypothermia on the mountains in Scotland before and it was a reminder that the weather respects nobody (it took a long time to get the heat back into my body and as is the case with hypothermia you don’t realise how dangerous your situation is until after the event).

A heavy rain storm is all-encompassing. It can completely engulf you and removes all distractions around you. And I like that. The smell of rain hitting hot concrete on a warm day is one of my top-ten smells (along with “new car smell” and “new tennis balls smell”) and always brings me back to when I was a kid playing football in the garden on a rainy summer day. So it has nostalgic value too.

But the number one reason I like rain is that it makes me feel alive. At one with nature and how hard it can be. And in this modern, hi-tech world that happens all too infrequently these days. Oh, and because I’m strange. But I mentioned that earlier.

For reasons I can barely begin to comprehend, going shopping for things like clothes is one of the most draining tasks that can be undertaken. After a few hours of trailing from shop to shop my normally loose back is tight and sore, my feet feel like they’ve run a triple marathon uphill, emotionally I feel like I’ve got nothing left to give, I’ve long since forgotten why this trip seemed like a good idea and I’m ready to drop dead to get out of doing any more.

My approach to shopping is rather militaristic. I normally only go shopping when I absolutely need something - like food or washing liquid. I’ll write a short and precise list of what I want to get, plot in my head exactly what I’m going to do and where, and then shop in as quick and efficient a time as I can.

It’s not as though I don’t like spending money. I do. Love it. Can’t spend enough of it. Neat piece of technology or shiny bit of kit? I’ll buy it right now. No problem. Especially over the net, it’s so easy and quick. But shopping for things like clothes is an inexact thing - you can’t exactly plan what you want beforehand - so it requires more wandering around looking for the right thing… And that’s only clothes shopping, never mind going to Ikea for furniture!

You’ll gather that I spent a good portion of my Saturday shopping. My girlfriend is going away on holiday for a couple of weeks to a hotter climate so she needed a couple of bits and pieces. We were up in Scotland visiting family so my brother tagged along. It didn’t take much time before we were all completely worn out and sipping cafe latte’s at Starbucks, talking about everything and nothing. For example: having lived in England for a few years now it never ceases to amaze me what the Dundee accent is like compared to other places. People seem to say “Ken” every 5 seconds, and I’ve never heard a Dundee accent that actually sounds soft, like in the north-west - it’s just a course, harsh accent and that’s all there is to it.

I suppose there are 5 stages I go through when I go shopping:

1. Anticipation: You’re looking forward to going out and looking at things you want and some you don’t. There’s going to be loads of choice and everything’s going to fit / look right / match the wallpaper.

2. Holding on valiantly to optimism: You’ve gone around a few shops now and notice that you haven’t bought anything you were looking for yet. But you’re not about ready to give up!

3. Reality sets in: You’ve lost the plot of what you were trying to achieve and you’re walking almost aimlessly from shop to shop. You’re not even looking properly because you know that they won’t have what you want. Although you’re struggling to remember what that was in the first place.

4. Desperation sets in: You’re wiped out now. You’re looking for any excuse to get in the car and go home, but something in the back of your mind keeps you there. You sit and have a cup of coffee with your co-shoppers and all try to persuade each other to go home and try again another time, making each argument sound more and more reasonable.

5. The end of the line. You’ve all decided to go to one last shop at the other end of town (seems like a good last-ditch effort). You get there, barely look around, and head back to the car to go home. You almost fall asleep in the car with fatigue but are glad it’s all over.

Maybe I’m just doing it all wrong.

Today I found a message left on my “leave a message for me” page and it goes like this:

“This is the most self-congratulatory egotistical look at me aren’t I great web site I have ever seen”.

And boy did I laugh. As any of you who know me will already know, I have a rather droll sense of humour. Life can be so shit and miserable (I’ve been to far more funerals of friends and family than weddings and I could write many articles that would make you wonder how so much bad luck can hit one family) that I’ve long since given up trying to take it, or myself, seriously. If you take a pinch of salt with every paragraph I write you’ll start to get what I’m doing.

If I’m honest, I can’t really put a finger on why I’m doing this site. I may get bored in the future and go on to doing something more interesting with the odd hour here and there (I can hear you crossing your fingers). But until then, what the hell. I’ve got friends and family dotted all over the place and I can point them at photos of where I work or what I’ve been up to recently.

And it could be worse, I could just write about technical things and believe me, that would be even less interesting. I guess that being a software developer doesn’t give me the chance to write much and tell stories - that sorta thing. So why not?

So Brenda, you’re probably quite right. The intention isn’t to come across that way, just wrap a few words around some pictures. I guess that so far my articles are just the wrong side of cheesy. Still, if you read it and think “damn, I’m glad I’m not that sad” then maybe you’ll feel better about yourself and the site is doing some good after all (clutching at straws there)…

And if anybody can find a more egotistical, aren’t I great website out there, please drop me a line!

P.S. This site is basically a diary. And isn’t a non-egotistical diary an oxymoron? After all, a diary is about yourself!

I never thought I’d see the day that Henman would be a top clay-court player

I’ve just watched Tim Henman getting knocked out of the Monte Carlo masters series event and it was quite a match.

For most people their only exposure to tennis is Wimbledon in the summer. As far as they’re concerned that is the only tennis tournament in the world and all tennis is played on grass courts. This is of course bollocks.

These pros spend most of the year playing in tournaments all over the world on all sorts of different surfaces (and only about two or three on grass courts, by the way). SW19 followers won’t have heard of players like Alex Corretja, Juan-Carlo Ferrero or Carlos Moya. But these guys are predominantly clay court players and are masters of that surface. Whereas grass courts are very fast and a rally lasts perhaps two strokes, clay court tennis is slow work and players have to earn the right to win every point (I’ve seen 60 stroke rallies point after point).

Pete Sampras may have been an excellent grass court player, but he was always terrible on clay. You can’t play a serve-volley game on clay and win. He proved that point - as the best serve-volleyer of his time he still couldn’t trouble your average Spaniard clay court specialist. So the point is that to win on all surfaces you need to be able to play several different variations of tennis. And Henman has always fallen into the fast court category of player, never really troubling on clay.

All that changed last year. Suddenly he seemed in less of a rush to play from the net. He would play long rallies and pounce when the moment was right (it was always cringe-inducing to watch Sampras running into the net on every point on clay to be repeatedly passed on either side by his opponent). Tim may not have won any tournaments on clay but he was getting better. Well, this week in the Monte Carlo (on clay) he stepped it up.

He was awesome. To watch him you’d think he’d grown up playing on that surface and had never even seen a blade of grass. He wasn’t hitting power serves - there’s no point, the surface takes all the speed off. He was patient. His ground strokes were solid and precise. His net play, when needed, was superb (there’s no doubt that he’s taken over from Sampras as the best serve-volleyer in the business, so his net play ain’t bad). Gone were the momentary lapses in concentration that used to plague him. Had he won the tournament he’d have risen to number one in the champions race, which shows you how well he’s playing this season.

I’ve got a great deal of admiration and respect for Tim. He may not be a great entertainer on the court, but he’s a warrior and never gives up. He’s worked really hard to get where he is today, hours in the gym and on the practise court, to let him defy the doubters. Through his own hard work he’s no longer a one-dimensional, predictable player. He may not have won a Grand Slam yet, but I’m confident he will some day.

To see him battling against Carlos Moya (a seasoned veteran on clay) in the semi-final and be the better player for a lot of the match was incredible. It was the most tense match I’ve ever watched, had me on tenterhooks all the way through, and I’m normally a very calm guy. I was virtually falling off the edge of my seat while watching. He may not have won, but he’s put the hammer down to a lot of other players out there that he’s a force to be reckoned with on any surface. He’s got the skills to pay the bills indeed…

Roll on Wimbledon.

All you need to run is a pair of shoes, some shorts and a top.

Just been watching the London marathon and it started me thinking…

My personal best time over 10K (running) is 34′57″, which requires holding sub 6-minute-mile pace for 6 miles. All I can remember of that particular run (on a sandy surface I might add) was that I started by running flat out and basically spent the rest of the time attempting to run as fast as I possibly could without dropping dead. It was extremely hard and required a lot of concentration, pushing myself damn hard.  It doesn’t surprise me at all that people at the top of sports say that winning is something like 70% mental and 30% physical. It also made me realise that no matter how hard you train, you can only go so far. We all have a limit or “terminal mediocrity”.

That’s not a bad thing. For many years now I’ve enjoyed keeping fit. Not to compete with others, but just to push myself that little bit harder every time. When I moved to England I cut my training regime to almost zero (I’d been swimming, running and biking 6 days a week). I discovered instead the delights of eating curry and of not spending all my waking hours fatigued and in pain (when you train real hard it’s the day off that’s the worst, your body spends the time trying to repair itself - and that hurts too). Laziness was nice.

So after maybe 18 months of being comparatively unfit - playing a bit of football and tennis - I decided to get back in shape (up until my layoff I’d always taken my fitness for granted but discovered after a hard mountain biking session that I’d lost it somewhat). I bought some free weights and dusted off my running shoes. Swimming was out because I’d pretty much burned out of doing that - I can still taste the chlorine. So running and weight training would be my way back to full-on self-respect!

It’s been 14 months now and I’ve been doing pretty well. Picked up a few injuries here and there but I’m almost in the shape I was a few years ago. It’s all relative of course, because there’s always someone better, fitter and stronger than you - my rationale is that I’m only competing against myself (at least I have a chance of winning then). I won’t bore you with how much weight I can bench press or squat because it doesn’t matter. The point is that I’ve been pushing myself and I’ve improved. And I feel much better for it. I’m not close to beating my p.b. for 10K and I may never do it. But I’ll try for what it’s worth.

I suppose my thought for today is that nothing worth doing is easy. I probably need to think less. Especially on a Monday.

On a techie note, I was reading that Microsoft has decided to axe it’s Hailstorm project. If you use Hotmail or MSN Messenger you’ll have come across Passport. The idea is that instead of having separate logins for every site you go to, you login to Passport and it logs into all the other sites for you. Hailstorm, or as it was later called “My .NET Services” was to take this to another level. You could access your e-mail, contacts, store your interests and preferences, track online orders and do all sorts of other neat things from any device, be it a PC or a mobile phone. You could browse to the Blockbuster Video website, it could read your preferences for sleazy porno movies and automatically send you a notification message when the next big hit comes in, if you know what I mean. (Note: this doesn’t actually happen at the moment, it’s a purely hypothetical situation, no need to worry about your porno fixation getting out).

It all sounded like a neat idea. Apart from the fact that one monolithic corporation would hold all your information in one place. All sounds a little bit Big Brother to me… Anyway, it seems that Microsoft couldn’t get any partners to use the technology. Apparently the big players didn’t want to have someone between themselves and their customers. Not surprising really. But don’t count them out just yet…

When I first moved down to Yorkshire I drove through Skipton. It’s a nice little market town just on the edge of the Dales and has even appeared on a couple of UK travel shows as a holiday destination. One thing I noticed was that there is a rather large hill just to the south of the village and I thought to myself how nice a view it must be from up there. I decided that at some point in the next few months I’d wander up there and take some photos. Well, nearly three years later I’ve finally made it.

One of my friends is leaving the country (for a warmer climate) and is making a last-ditch effort to get to see the area a bit better. So I went with him and another of my countrymen mountain biking around the moors behind Skipton. And very nice it was too. The thing about Yorkshire is that within 5 minutes of leaving your car you can be in almost total wilderness, untouched by human hands. The weather was pretty good and the fitness is gradually starting to come back.

It’s grand prix weekend again. This means that I’ll be watching and hoping and praying that David Coulthard will finally shrug off some of his bad luck and mount a serious challenge for the world championship.

Begin rant>>>>>>

I’ve been watching formula one racing since before I could drive a car - I’ll never forget the weekend Ayrton Senna was tragically killed (and the fact that during the race he was carrying the Austrian flag in honour of Roland Ratzenberger who was killed in qualifying the day before, which he planned to wave when he won the race). And as long as Coulthard has been driving a formula one car he’s been plagued with incredible bad luck. The days of spinning off on the parade lap before the race may be over, but random engine failures and electrical failures still keep cutting him down.

He’s a quality racer. He’s got the skills to pay the bills. But while his teammate for the last few seasons (Mika Hakkinen) was winning a couple of championships, Coulthard was leading races, having his engine explode, and then Hakkinen going on to win. So far this season he’s had problems during almost every practice session that has cost him in testing time which has reflected during races. Well, it would have reflected had his damn car stopped breaking down on him!

So before watching the qualifying this morning I knew that his new rookie teammate was going to out-qualify him on account of some mechanical problem or other. Sure enough, he spent the first 20 minutes of the session in the garage while his engine was replaced! So he only qualified in 6th place, behind his teammate… Typical.

I’ll watch the race. But I already know what’s going to happen…

<<<<<<End rant

My father always used to regale me with stories that happened “20 odd years ago” and, as a 12 year old, I couldn’t even fathom how long ago that was. Jump to a few years later and when he’d re-tell the same story I’d smugly point out that it actually happened “30 odd years ago” and I found this rather amusing.

Blonde hair seems like a good idea but seldom is…

You know what’s coming though. Yep. The joke’s really on me because now I tell stories that happened “20 odd years ago” and it doesn’t seem like such a long time after all. Does this mean my appreciation of time has normalized? Or that I’m getting older and it’s a downward spiral? I prefer the former but at the back of my mind is the latter.

You know what? The more I think about it, the more amusing the irony is. I clearly remember listening to older people in their late twenties talking about how the years were just slipping away (see where I’m going with this?). I’d always assumed that suddenly you click and become a fully featured adult and you just want to do adult things like spend a Saturday afternoon at a DIY superstore and all of Sunday washing the car, doing the garden and using all the things you bought at the DIY superstore yesterday.

Well here I am. 27. Not much different than when I was 18. Bit bigger and stronger. Maybe a bit wiser. Less inclined to ponder the world and try to solve all its’ problems. And less hung up on my appearance or other people’s opinions. I’ve had more than my fair share of both good and bad experiences and that’s changed my point of view somewhat. So I suppose the moral of the story is that you get older. Some stuff happens. You learn and adapt. The things that mattered to you when you were younger are replaced by some other stuff that matters right now. And that’s that.

You can believe that if you like, but I just said that I don’t try to ponder too much in the world (weren’t you listening?) so I’ll stick to living in the moment. Right now. Because that’s all you’ve got. Well, apart from memories of course. But they’re done and dusted. And there’s plenty new ones to make. So you won’t catch me down a DIY superstore on a Saturday. And the car can wash itself (I live in rainy Yorkshire you know) and I don’t care if the grass does need cutting. I’ll prefer going running, mountain biking, hiking, bowling, playing tennis, golfing, driving around Scotland, eating good food and living life to the full any day to writing some tedious assessment of how old I feel…

D’oh!

Had a nice weekend of action-packed bliss. It started by watching a beautiful sunset from a hilltop high above the Aire valley. It’s strange to just go a 10 minute drive from civilisation and feel suddenly so detached from it. Watching cars driving by way below and picturing people in the houses in the distance arguing about who’s turn it is to wash the dishes always makes me think about what really does matter in life to me. And it ain’t washing the dishes.

Went out for a nice meal after that to the local Thai restaurant (why is it that it’s taken 2 years for me to go to a nice eatery only a 5 minute walk from my house? and why have I only visited one of the half-a-dozen pubs in my village? who knows). Lovely.

Spent Saturday doing probably the best combination of things possible. A hard (due to lack of fitness) mountain bike ride followed by a few drinks and a top-class curry. They seemed to balance each other nicely and I’d gladly spend every day doing just the same. Trouble is that one of the guys I was with gave me a quick shot of his superstar full suspension bike - and it makes me want to go and buy one right now…

Woke up on Sunday over a period of about half an hour. I’d forgotten how punishing waking up after a day’s mountain biking can be. Stiff legs, tight thighs, tired shoulders, shaky arms… What better way to shake out the cobwebs than a nice game of tennis? What, you thought watching premiership football? No chance. The sun was shining.

I was playing my arch nemesis. I’ve never beaten him before and normally lose by two sets to one. It’s always close but he just seems to play the big points better than I do. I had everything to play for. He had everything to lose. The game was set… Actually, I don’t take tennis THAT seriously, it’s just for fun (although a win is always nice). As it happened I did win (which is unusual) 4-6 6-4 6-1. But, to be fair, my opponent did suffer a back twinge (enough to give Henman cause for concern).

The rest of the day was spent enjoying the sun, walking around the local village (it’s amazing how many places you find by randomly walking around). And now back to work. Still, at least it’ll be the weekend in a few more days…

As far as I can tell, I am driving my car along a dimly lit road. I say dimly lit, but I’m not really paying attention. I’m looking at the passenger seat next to me. I’m not alone. Somebody else is looking too. Then they say what I’m thinking: “That milk’s never coming out”. And I have to agree. Suddenly the passenger seat is under water and my passenger is gone, and this doesn’t seem strange. Silence. And then noise. A piercing, all-encompassing noise. I am looking at the thing that is making the noise, but I can’t understand what the hell it is or how to shut it up. Then it comes to me. It is my alarm and I need to press the “off” button. Which I do.

7.30am Now I am awake, and the dream is fading away. Logic and sense is starting to return and I realise that it is time to get up and have a shower. Which I do. The usual nausea hits me, but not for long. And soon I’m brushing me teeth, trying to shake off the urge to close my eyes and go back to bed. Focus!

Clothing selection for me isn’t very hard. I just grab a bunch of clothes and put them on. I’m a bit of a GAP kid and therefore have a wardrobe full of plain, uninteresting clothes that can be worn in almost any configuration (I do have a large collection of Hawaiian shirts, but that’s another article altogether). As a programmer I don’t need to wear a suit so I just try to look semi-respectable, with varying degrees of success. I drive straight to work and arrive by about 8am (first in). Now the day begins.

8am After dropping my packed lunch off in the fridge, I sit down at my desk and switch my monitor on. Okay, I’ve got a tried and tested routine for the first thing in the morning at work that I fondly refer to as “getting up to speed”. First I check my e-mail. Nothing interesting. I log into Yahoo! messenger, ICQ and MSN messenger. A couple of my “buddies” are online, but I’ll leave them alone for now. They probably feel as lethargic as I do. I’ve got a message I missed from yesterday saying “cool”. [Mental note: reply to it a bit later].

8.15am Now I try to figure out what interesting things have happened in the world since last night. I go to BBC News Online and spend a bit of time doing exactly that. David Beckham (the saviour of English football, apparently) is going to be fine after injuring his ankle. The Queen mother’s death is still top of the UK news. And the Israel-Palestine conflict rages on as it has done for my entire life. I’m starting to feel ready to do some work now. But just before I do, I go for a bit of light entertainment and have a read of Dear Deirdre on The Sun website - there are so many people out there that seem to have enough complicated sex lives to fill a thousand years of Mills and Boons novels.

8.35am Okay, figure out what I was doing at the end of yesterday so I can pick up where I left off. The development team I’m working in is in the middle of re-writing the user interface (the bit you see and use) of a large piece of software. I’m currently tasked with re-writing a small part of that large project (like eating an elephant, you need to eat it a small piece at a time).

I check my notes and see that I was in the middle of figuring out the use cases for the software component I’m working on (i.e. writing down all the possible things a user would do with it so I can figure out if the spec is missing anything out). So I fire up the previous version of the application and have a run-through of the existing system (i.e. look at the component I’m re-writing to get myself into the flow).

9.30am Everyone else is in the office now, although it’s pretty quiet, and I’m hungry. So I take a packet of Quaker Oatso Simple and wander down to the kitchen and the awaiting microwave. After two sessions of 1.5 minutes punctuated by stirring, I’m walking back upstairs with hot bowl in hand. Of course, I can’t do any work while eating a hot cereal, but I can quickly read a few weblog articles on the net. Which I do.

9.45am Okay, back to work for real this time! Rather than writing code today I’m really wracking my brain instead. I’m basically taking a specification for a piece of software, making it exist inside my head, and then using it (inside my head) and seeing if it all works according to plan. It’s surprisingly hard to do actually, because it’s too easy to just think “ach, nae bother, it’s all fine, back to the net”. But the trouble is that when I come along and write the code and it doesn’t work, then it’s about 100 times harder to sort it out. The key is to work out all the problems on a piece of paper first - it’s easier to change a piece of paper than 50,000 lines of code.

11.00am A short burst of swearing from behind me alerts me to the fact that two of my colleagues are playing Yahoo! Pool. This breaks my concentration sufficiently for me to go downstairs and make myself a cup of tea. Remembering to put the milk in AFTER the tea bag (27 years before I learned that lesson), I make and proceed to drink an almost perfect cup of tea. Apparently, if you are in “the zone” and someone distracts you out of “the zone” (like by asking “are you in the zone?”), it can take up to 15 minutes to get back into “the zone”. Read more about “the zone” here (scroll down to point 8). Eventually I get back to writing down the fruit of my thinking - a bullet pointed list of tasks users will perform on the software.

12.00pm Lunchtime! After eating my sandwiches (prawn cocktail and ham actually - very nice), I challenge one of the guys to Yahoo! Pool. Naturally I lose both games (potted the black and the cue ball on the first game, just got beaten by better play on the second). Then I play another colleague and luckily manage to win. In the process I keep missing long pots to the corner pockets, so I go on a practice table and proceed to miss 12 identical long pots in a row. I give up, close the game down, and do a bit more news surfing (seen a picture of David Beckham’s ankle bandage - very flashy). I also have a quick conversation on Yahoo! Messenger (do I sound like a Yahoo! salesman or something?) about the bowling game last night (won 2 games out of 4 - I normally come last in almost every game), and how drunk he got, and how hungover he is.

1.00pm Back to the grindstone. I’m playing around with the screenshots of the software I’m away to write, moving buttons around and that sort of thing. Having finished that I’m writing more detailed descriptions of the use cases for the software, really fleshing it out. For that I am periodically calling on the services of my esteemed colleagues for some quick chats. I guess the thing about working in a team of software developers is to work as an individual and just communicate with the team members when it’s required. If you sit 6 developers around a table and try to get them to make a decision, it just won’t happen. Any more than 2 will bicker until long after the cows have come home. I’m also updating the full system source code to pick up changes other developers have made so I’m working with the latest version of the software.

3.00pm I’ve finished writing the list and confirmed it with another couple of guys (it’s impossible for 1 person to see all the angles at once). Peer review - it’s the only way to avoid major cock-ups. Time for another cup of tea.

3.20pm It’s schedule time. Using an Excel spreadsheet, I’m working out how much time each step of the development is going to take. It’s confirmation really as the guy who wrote the spec also wrote a schedule. But it’s suicide to agree to work to someone else’s schedule without even looking at it. A fair bit of the work has been done already so I’m deducting the time that’s been spent.

4.00pm I feel happy about what I’m doing now. I suppose with experience you get to know when you’re ready to stop planning and start writing code and I have an internal fear-sense that makes me worry that I’m getting in over my head. Once that fear disappears (by figuring out what I need to do) I know I’m ready to go. And I’ll start delving into the code and actually writing some tomorrow morning. I’m just writing my to-do list to order the main pieces of work I’ll need to do over the next month or so and inserting little things that are too small to go in the main schedule but will need to be done. If I don’t write it down I’ll have forgotten in 24 hours and it’ll never happen.

4.30pm The end of the day. Just enough time to do some last-minute email checking and news reading before packing up my troubles in my old kit bag and nicking off home.

4.35pm Now I’m driving home, listening to some Teenage Fanclub on the stereo and singing (out of key) along to the lyrics. And very quickly work is out of my head and I turn back into a dithering Scotsman.

5.00pm I’m winding down by doing keepie-ups with a football and kicking it against a wall.

Well, I’m not going to bore you with what I do on my evenings (leaving room for future articles). What? You think that was a pretty boring day and you were right all along about computer nerds? Maybe. And I don’t like your attitude by the way! But it’s fun. A chance to be creative and organised. It’s full of constant challenges and you get the chance to solve a problem in a clever way, patting yourself on the back for being so smart. Although if you do your job right, the users of the software don’t even notice they’re using it. So by being successful you keep a low profile. Strange way to make a living? Maybe. But isn’t all work?

Well, it’s the 2nd of April, and the clocks just went forward at the weekend. This has the immediate effect of losing an hour’s sleep in the changeover. It has the slightly less immediate effect of making the sun set an hour later in the evening.

Everybody feels alone sometimes.

While you can argue for hours as to the point of British Summer Time, it has the bonus of heralding the start of the run up to the summer. The trouble is that the British summer doesn’t seem to appear like it used to. I remember the summers of my youth - the blue skies seemed to last for ever, the sun was always baking hot, weeks would pass with not a cloud in the sky. It also used to snow in the winter (even on Christmas day) and, basically, there were four seasons (you know, spring, summer, autumn and winter).

Nowadays, thanks no doubt to global warming and not being 12 any more, we seem to be stuck in a state of perpetual autumn. Frequent cold spells, lots of rain, occasional blue skies. Maybe I’m just depressed because I’m back to work after a lovely, relaxing, long weekend… Yeah, that sounds about right.

I’ve been playing around a bit with PHP and mySQL to do some more interesting things on John’s Adventures including revamping the mailing list (you subscribe, it sends you an e-mail that gives you a link to confirm the subscription and everything lives in a mySQL database table - no more Perl required). I’m also working on a discussion list, although more for fun as I can’t see anyone using it for anything other than slagging me off (you know who you are). Anyway, it’s pretty straightforward, which was a nice surprise.

Had a nice few days off, by the way. It’s not often that sunny in Scotland so you’ve got to make the most of it!

And why is internet access in the UK so overpriced?