100% organic

A personal post: I've gone organic. But I mean this personally. *I* am now organic. For the past two years I have had a titanium intramedullary nail in my left tibia. On Friday last week, Mr Robinson removed it. (If you don't know what one looks like; mine looks like the one on the right here.) As Peter puts it: I have been de-bionic-ified.

Somehow I thought it wouldn't be too bad - but it turns out to be very painful :-( Naturally I was still at work the following Tuesday (Monday being a national holiday). Clearly I hadn't read this.

This area of medicine is a combination of high science and brute force: I love this sort of picture in a medical science journal article! It looks like something from a DIY store leaflet.

Bachelor days

I'm by myself at the moment, which gives me an opportunity to watch some episodes of Seinfeld (I have all 9 seasons on DVD - and Mateja doesn't like it). I had previously worked my way through to season 7.

Boy, has season 7 screwed up my plans of working in the evenings! It's genius. I thoroughly recommend it - you can get it yourself for a mere £13! This season seems more self-referential than others and the writing is all the more smarter for it. Moreover the season's story arc of George's wedding is a goldmine! Wonderful.

[ps: even though I'm a Seinfeld fan, none of my passwords are "Bosco", so try again hackers!]

Notepad goodie

I'm really an emacs user, but when you live in the Windows world (or maybe I mean the Microsoft world) the infamous "notepad" application ends up being a very convenient app to write little files. One thing I always hated about notepad is that when you fire it up, type in your two-line masterpiece and then save it always adds a ".txt" to the end of the filename you supply even if you had already given it an extension, e.g. you type fermat.sql then it saves it as fermat.sql.txt. Ug.

I just discovered a way around this - perhaps I'm the last person to learn this but... : if you type the filename with quotations notepad doesn't add the .txt. For example if you type "fermat.sql" then it really saves it as a .sql file. Hurrah!

The next laptop?

I'm a happy user of my Dell X1, but that's getting a little old-in-the tooth. I don't dare run Vista on it, but I have to run Office 2007/Visual Studio 2008 so combined with the usual cruft that one accumulates over the years it's getting very slooow!

Unfortunately it's not easy to find a lightweight laptop (around 1kg) with a decent screen resolution. (Oh, and running Windows, before someone suggests a MacBook Air :-))

Finally after months of rumours, Dell has announced a very nice new machine (here). Dual-core, SSD, 1kg, 1280x800 12.1" screen, and pretty cool looking too. No prices yet, so not sure what our IT manager will say...