I meant to mention that I had the pleasure of going on the London Eye (pictured right) the other weekend while I was down seeing Mamma Mia with friends.

One of the things I find sad about 21st century humans is how short-term their outlook is. The Egyptians built the pyramids which have stood for millenia and took generations to construct. The Romans left amazing temples and buildings throughout their empire that often took decades to build. I could go on with examples but the point is that nowadays if a building isn’t showing a return on investment within about 10 years it won’t get built. It’s sad and limits human achievements generally to those that bring financial rewards in the short term rather than something worthwhile for generations to come.

And so it brings me to the London Eye. I must say, it’s a pretty impressive piece of engineering. Anyone who found the industrial revolution interesting - with heavy machinery, precision engineering and so much power under control (you know, huge pistons moving effortlessly requiring enormous amounts of energy - that kind of thing) can’t help but be impressed by the London Eye. It’s like a giant, souped-up Ferris wheel that’s constantly in motion.

The views really are impressive (particularly on a clear day) and once you’re up top it is particularly high. As a bit of a techie and and an engineer I’m not sure if I was paying more attention to the view or the wheel itself as it slowly circled around with all its computer-controlled wizardry.

If you’re in the area it’s definitely something well worth checking out. I wouldn’t bother with a season ticket, but it’s something you should do once. I’m not convinced it’ll still be there in a thousand years time (unlike the Pyramids), but it’s a pretty impressive piece of kit nonetheless and showcases some of the technical capability of these near-sighted 21st century humans! They’re not all bad!

Last year I mentioned how after years in the wilderness I finally became an ABBA fan. Well, I spent this weekend in London with some good friends and went to a show called Mamma Mia.

To digress slightly, when I saw Quentin Tarrantino's classic Pulp Fiction for the first time in the cinema, I knew absolutely nothing about it. I hadn't seen a single trailer, didn't know anything of the plot and didn't even know who was in it (I nearly fell out of my chair when I saw then-time has-been John Travolta in it). And you know what? Not knowing anything about it and having no idea what to expect made the film 10 times better. As a result I try not to watch trailers for films - I prefer to go in with a clean slate and an open mind.

And so it was with Mamma Mia. I suspected it might be the story of ABBA in the format of a musical (I did at least know it was something to do with ABBA). I pictured scenes like the band trying to get a record deal and bursting into "Money money money…" at the drop of a hat. My preconceptions turned out to be quite wrong. It was in fact a story completely unrelated to the history of iconic band ABBA, it was about a girl living in Greece with her mother, about to get married, trying to figure out who her father is. And of course, the cast kept bursting into song and - you guessed it - every song was an ABBA classic!

It really was excellent. It was funny, emotional, entertaining, the dancing was excellent, the singing, the acting spot on, I really had a great time and thought it was superb. I'm the world's worst celebrity spotter so I couldn't tell you who was who (although I gather a good portion of the cast have been in The Bill* at some point) but they did a great job. If you're even the slightest ABBA fan - which you will be, everybody loves ABBA - I'd highly recommend you go if you get the chance. I haven't been able to stop their songs floating around my head since and that's the way I intend keeping it!

* - Interesting note about the classic long-running British TV show The Bill. I used to watch it back in the 80's and 90's in the day of DI Burnside (or was it Sideburns?) and Tosh Lines and loved it. When I went to Australia last year imagine my surprise when it turns out that The Bill is extremely popular over there! They brought us Neighbours and we return the favour with the Bill - it's a strange world.

Last year we were thrilled to find that a duck was nesting in our garden. She went from romping to nesting to rearing 14 new chicks in a mere 28 days (give or take). We were keeping our fingers crossed she'd come back this year - although since she arrived in May of last year we thought we had a few weeks to go. But while my good lady was doing some gardening she heard a familiar hissing noise and it turns out our duck has come back a month early:

It's been unseasonably warm this year which no doubt explains her early arrival and this time she's created her nest so we can actually see it from the window. I'm sure she's done it so we can keep an eye on her and make sure everything's alright. How thoughtful…

Shortly after I took the photo above she just about flew into me - I guess spending all day on the nest made her wings pretty stiff and her flying a little rusty. Welcome back young lady!

I’ve had the weight of John’s Background Switcher 3 on my shoulders for the last 6 months or so and I’m glad to finally say it’s done, it’s out there and now I can have a rest from it all! In my opinion it’s vastly superior to all previous versions and has some really cool features including being able to create montage images and choose from lots of photos sources on Flickr, Phanfare, Yahoo! or your local computer. I’ve put a great deal of thought into each feature and it’s implementation and never compromised my initial design goal which was to “keep it simple”.

One of the things people probably don’t realise when you develop software in your free time is just how much work it is and how much it can take over your life. JBS consists of over 30,000 lines of code and for version 3 I completed over 130 pieces of work ranging from 5 minute bug fixes to multi-day new features. Since I have a day job and a private life, I’m only left with evenings and weekends doing this work which means it’s slow progress compared to working full time on it. It has meant many late nights staring at a computer screen having spent all day at work doing exactly the same thing.

I’m not complaining though - I really enjoy working on it and love getting emails from people saying how great they think JBS is and how much they’re enjoying using it. I don’t charge money for using it because it’s a labour of love and to try to make money out of it would sour the experience somewhat for me. Also, I use the software myself so at the end of the day I’m really writing it for me and can therefore make it exactly the way I want it!

A few weeks ago I still had a long list of things I wanted to put in JBS 3 but I was starting to realise that without a release date in mind I’d potentially be working on it forever. I also knew that the number of people uninstalling JBS 2.5 who filled out the uninstall feedback form that comes up were asking for features I’d already implemented in 3.0. So I decided I wanted to release 3.0 by the first week of April and cut features accordingly from my list.

With this goal in mind I worked a few late nights and weekends to get it done - I even dedicated a full 4-day bank holiday weekend to it! I updated the documentation and tentatively put the final version up live waiting for things to go wrong. JBS checks for a new version every 4 days (unless you turn that option off) which is handy as it means that rather than everyone updating at the same time, it takes a few days for it to happen. This means if some critical bug suddenly turns up I can fix it and put up a new version before too many people have downloaded it. I had to do this twice with 2.5 and expected to do the same this time. Except it hasn’t happened.

If JBS crashes it gives you the option to send in a crash report and that gets directly fed into my defect tracking software. I can then figure out what caused the problem, get the frequency of crashes and decide if I need to roll out a new version. Thus far I haven’t had a single crash report for version 3. I know it works as during beta testing I had many crashes crop up but frankly I’m amazed I’ve not heard anything live. I’ve also not had anyone emailing me about problems which again is very surprising. Hopefully I’m not just experiencing the calm before the storm!

A great deal of credit must go to the people mad enough to have joined in the beta testing of JBS. I can’t thank them enough as I’d quite often be releasing new betas every day or so and to have people other than me testing them out and giving me feedback is priceless. When you test your own software you tend to look at it through rose tinted spectacles and only test it in the way you designed it. Other people will naturally use it in a completely different way and do things you wouldn’t think of and this sort of testing massively cuts down on the number of potential problems you’ll hit. So thanks to you all!

Anyway, if you’re on a Windows computer and you’re sick of your boring, static background, then you owe it to yourself to go and install John’s Background Switcher! Oh, the release notes are here. Now, I’m going to go and relax away from a computer screen for quite some time!

Whenever I see someone driving along a road, open their window and throw some litter out, I could quite easily drive them off the road, drag them out of their car and beat them unconscious. Without any hesitation. Setting their car on fire would just be the next natural step.

Trouble is, it wouldn't do any good. There are far too many people out there with the attitude "out of sight, out of mind" who simply don't care. Like a baby who throws a toy out of the pram, once someone throws an empty crisp packet out the window, it ceases to exist in their mind. It's no longer their problem. "Someone else will sort it out".

Now I see a great deal more of the countryside than most as I spend a lot of time walking around taking photographs and have had many a summer's day covering miles on my mountain bike. So when people throw out plastic bottles, crisp packets or plastic bags full of rubbish out, I know that it eventually finds its way all over the place. Stuck in ditches, up against walls or fences, wrapped in tree roots, it ends up anywhere and everywhere. It looks terrible and I can only guess what these synthetic products do the the environment. It makes me sick.

Although to be fair sometimes they make for interesting photos (as above). But if you take a long term view of it, I wonder what the countryside will look like in 50 years time. The throw-away society we seem to be a part of is still relatively new, but I don't see it disappearing any time soon. It's not going to be pretty if things carry on the way they are. I just wish people would take pride in the planet on which they live - it's my planet too.

I’ve been a Microsoft Windows user since Windows 3.1. I remember the day I upgraded to Windows 95 and it felt like going from the stone age to the iron age - the Start Menu seemed like a great idea and it looked fantastic - my world was changed forever. I’ve been using Windows ever since and as soon as the latest version - Windows Vista - was released, I installed it and started using it day-to-day as I mentioned before.

Initially I liked Vista, I was impressed by some of the cool animations and effects, I liked the icons and there seemed like a few decent improvements over XP. It was quite snappy and everything appeared to work rather well. Of course, as is to be expected of Windows, things degrade over time. It’s slowed down a lot, various pieces of Microsoft software crash from time to time and the “Do you want to perform the following action?” dialog that pops up often from UAC just gets annoying and seems like a poor solution to spyware and viruses after a while. Frankly, I think Vista is a huge disappointment and my disappointment was about to get a lot bigger.

While attending the Future of Web Apps conference in London I noticed a lot of attendees used Macs. My friend John Topley, who I was attending with, has been trying to get me to buy a Mac for years and had a MacBook with him. As he started showing me the software you get with it I was blown away. It was absolutely clear that a lot of the new GUI (Graphical User Interface) in Vista is directly copied from Mac OS X - except it makes more sense in the Mac as all of the GUI conforms to the same rules. Straight out of the box there’s a bunch of useful software to let you create music, video, photo books and a host of other things you have to pay for with Windows. I looked at the Mac vs. PC adverts and they started to make sense - Windows machines are work-orientated and pretty dull on the whole, whereas Macs seemed more fun and creative at heart. And I’d lost count of the number of bloggers out there who’ve switched from PCs to Mac and never looked back.

John then wrote ‘The Case For The Mac‘ on my site (a very good read) and I was sold. I finally ordered a MacBook with a view to replacing my Vista laptop and desktop. I didn’t want to write about it immediately as I decided to live with a Mac for a month or so to really get a feel for what it’s like. That time has come.

Quite frankly, I’ll never buy another PC. Everything they say about Macs is true - “it just works”. You get so used to having to tweak Windows to get things to work correctly, from graphics cards to the registry to a hundred other things. Not so on the Mac. One of the first things I did was connect to my home wireless network which was a simple case of picking it from a list, entering my WEP key and that was it. I went on holiday the other week and brought my MacBook and my Dell laptop running Vista. To connect to the local wi-fi on my Mac took perhaps 10 seconds start to finish and I was surfing the web. To do the same on Vista took 5 minutes. I had to connect and re-connect about 6 times before it would stick, each time I had to go through a 3 step wizard and I got sick of hitting the same buttons over and over again. I started to get frustrated with Windows in a way I never did before. I was being asked a load of questions it should know the answer to - and the Mac was smart enough to make these decisions itself.

I’ve had tears running down my cheeks making crazy photos with software called Photo Booth that comes with a Mac. You use the built in camera to take your picture but it applies some mad effects live that you can preview, like the one pictured right (I don’t really look like that). The software isn’t particularly useful but it’s a hell of a lot of fun and you just wouldn’t get something like that bundled on a PC.

As I mentioned you get lots of useful, creative software bundled with a Mac, called iLife. The software all integrates really well and lets you create music using Garage Band (there are hundreds of loops you can use to create very professional music - oh, and you can sing or record your own instruments too), manage and edit your photos in iPhoto, play music in iTunes, make movies with iMovie and there’s a host of other things that are fun and creative. The software is very well thought out and easy to use, taking the power of great GUI design to a level I’ve never seen before on Windows. For the first time in a long time I’ve felt a surge of creativity since getting my Mac - suddenly I want to try and write music, create a movie and do a whole bunch of other things I’d never have thought about on a PC.

I’ve often wanted to create a DVD you can play on any DVD player with a slideshow of some of my photos - that way I could send it to my dad and he could see my holiday pictures, etc. Can you do this on Windows out of the box? I’ve never been able to - so I’d have to go and search and buy some software and it’s just never been worth the effort. Can I do it on my Mac? Easy, I can go from start to finish in a couple of minutes and it’s really obvious how to do it. And that’s just one of a hundred common things you’d want to do that would require buying more software on a PC that comes as standard on a Mac.

The MacBook itself is really well thought out. Having a magnetic power lead means if someone trips over your cable, it just pops out and doesn’t drag your MacBook onto the floor. This has saved my skin several times already! When you shut the lid it goes to sleep, but a little light on the front slowly dims and lights up to indicate a heartbeat so you know it’s in sleep mode rather than off. Open the lid and it springs back to life - do the same on a Vista-powered PC and it springs back to life after a little while, but then it has to re-connect the wi-fi and all in it can take a couple of minutes. That’s not good enough.

The lid of the MacBook doesn’t have some rubbish catch you need to slide across to open, it’s magnetic. The built in camera is pretty impressive and “just works”. They even look incredibly cool (and I love that the Apple logo on the lid lights up when you use it). It’s amazing how beautiful design can influence your thinking.

I read the OS X Missing Manual to really get to grips with all the shortcuts and differences between the Mac and PC but within a week or two I was quite at home on my Mac. I doubt you could switch from a Mac to a PC and be as settled so quickly.

Regular readers know that John’s Background Switcher 3 is just around the corner (a few days away to be precise). They’ll also know that it’s written on Windows but I’ve got a Mac now, does that mean it’s dead? Well no.

I also bought Parallels which allows me to run Windows applications inside my Mac - the best of both worlds. I installed Windows XP (because I trust XP) and can run Visual Studio 2005 alongside my usual Mac software. In fact the last few beta builds of JBS 3 have been built on a Mac and you’d never know! It just works.

I find myself going into work - where I use Vista - and cursing at how slow it is, being frustrated at how it forgets all my folder display settings, gnashing my teeth every time I’m asked to confirm that I really do want to run an application I’ve just launched (like Visual Studio 2005), swearing every time software hangs or crashes and getting annoyed in a hundred other tiny ways. They’re just little things, but they add up and I find myself thinking “it’s much better on a Mac”.

So far I’ve managed to persuade one friend to buy himself a Mac and you might be next! The thing is, you just need to sit down and use one for 5 minutes to realise that you’ll never want to go back to a PC again. Do believe the hype.

My good lady and my wedding was a wonderful day. But we both have regrets from the day and things we'd like to have changed. It took her a while to admit to me that she really loved my white suit and imagined herself wearing it instead of her dress. But it took even longer for me to admit to myself and then to her that what I really wanted was to wear her dress myself for the day.

Well, we decided the only thing to do was to recreate the entire day and do it a bit differently. We booked the venue, re-invited the guests (most of whom we were delighted to find attended) and this time she wore the suit and I wore the dress. I think you'll agree this is how we should have done it first time around:

She looks amazing in my suit doesn't she? We stopped short of re-issuing a wedding list but if you feel like you'd like to send us something to congratulate us, then don't let me stop you!