Open Water Diver

I spent a good part of my week-end in the swimming pool at London School of Diving, doing the theory and confined water part of the PADI Open Water Diver certification, which teaches you the basics about diving. I now have to do the open water dives to complete the certification. Hopefully, this will happen in two weeks time. And then the world's my oyster... literally!

vox.machina

vox.machina has got a new skin and it looks great!

Henman's out (again!)

Once again, Tim Henman nearly made it but not quite. Coria proved too strong for him at the French open. As one of my colleagues just said: I'd like to see one Englishman win a grand slam during my lifetime but it's not likely to happen, is it?

Finite Monkeys

Andrew Yahner has been reading his SPAM email rather than throw it away and has come up with poetry on his Finite Monkeys blog. I particularly like A Simple Life.

The Opte Project

The Opte Project is quite cool. It is all about building a colourful map of the internet, using different colours depending on domain names and/or IP addresses. Here is an example:

400x400 map of the Internet

You can also see the maps in VRML. Cool!

SpaceShipOne ready to go

Scaled Composites have just announced the date for the first space launch attempt of SpaceShipOne. So, if you're anywhere near Mojave Airport on the 21st of June, go an see it.

Travellers Hit by Air Traffic Computer Failure

Apparently, today was not a good day to be traveilling by plane in the UK. But what on earth where they thinking? Doing tests on a live system? Any IT professional worth his salt would tell you this is playing with fire. If you want to do tests, have a test system, that's what they're for. An organisation like NATS should have test systems that mirror the live ones and on which they can perform tests. If they don't, it is gross negligence.

Trying block quotes

I just modified my template slightly to support block quotes, as in the one below, taken from Mighty Quill:

It's so nice being a baby camel
And I don't give a damn
For being a wild tiger in the jungle!

Wave Messaging

Nokia have just come up with yet another fun (or useless might say some) way of communicating. It's called wave messaging and enables you to make a 15 character message float in the air. The BBC has an article that explains how it works in more details. Potentially a great way to find lost friends in big noisy crowds.

Arranged Marriage

I went to Northumberland over the week-end and took the train from King's Cross station, which is currently a bit of a mess due to some redevelopment work. On the train, I found a 4-page document that someone had forgotten, entitled The Nine Rules of Arranged Marriage. It was apparently written by someone from Indian origins, who got married through an arranged marriage. The 9 rules (in fact 10 because there are two number 6 rules) are meant to give advice to other fellow countrymen who are considering an arranged marriage. What stroke me is that the advice sounds very much like what you'd say to someone who wants to buy a new car, the way he speaks of elligible women as girls being just an example. Some of the comments also show complete lack of experience in terms of relationship with women. So I showed the document to a colleague of mine who is of Indian origin and just got married through an arranged wedding. His comment was The guy is an idiot. Not just me thinking this then. Now, I'm not making a judgement on the practice of arranged marriage but I just hope people get better advice than what I found in this forgotten document.