Happy Christmas to all

I hope you have all enjoyed a Happy Christmas. Nothing technical today. I just wanted to share with you something my six-year old daughter made for me:

Say hello to a hatchling: Seaturtle Software Ltd is born

Two months ago I handed in my notice. One month later, Seaturtle Software Ltd was hatched. I shepherded its dash to the ocean. And now I hold the reigns as it begins a journey in the vast ocean that is the international software industry.

To put it another way, I now own a software start-up.

And what a surprise that is. Three years ago I was in negotiations with my boss looking for a way to escape the slippery slide into management. Today I’m a business owner.

What changed?

Recession, and a radical restructuring changed the landscape at the company where I worked. Of all the former employees, I was the only one remaining. I stayed to make a last-ditch attempt to launch the product we’d been working on for two years. But it was not to be.

The directors and I explored several avenues for re-building the business. Eight happy and fulfilling years I’d worked for them, starting two weeks after I completed my Degree (my honeymoon occupied the interval). In that time they’ve given me fantastic opportunities to grow as a person and a software developer. I was hesitant to move on from a relationship that has blessed me so well for so long. But in the last couple of months I’ve come to realise that I have the skills to go it alone. And I’ve discovered that my taste in challenges has diversified beyond the merely technical.

Most importantly, I learned that starting and running a business is not as scary as you might think. Creating a company is just a legal formality (you can do it online for much less than £100). There are clever websites backed by smart accountants who will handle your book-keeping and tax returns for a very reasonable fee. The wonders of cloud computing provide infrastructure on demand.

All I need is a quiet room, a desk, a PC – and some bright ideas.

So Seaturtle Software is open for business.

Consulting will be my initial line of work, specialising in the things you know me for here on Functional Fun. So if you have a knotty WPF problem to solve, a tricky algorithm to implement, or simply want a leg-up with your UI Automation testing strategy, get in touch.

sam@seaturtlesoftware.com

(Simon Squared) x n: The Multi-player Challenge

A new year, a new challenge.

The end of 2010 found me scrambling to build a Windows Phone 7 game in 3 days using the XNA framework, spurred on by a competition deadline and the potential reward of a $10,000 prize. The challenge was to “build something that developers will love”, and who doesn’t love reading of a race against the clock?

Well, I got the game done (Ok, maybe not done done – it will still stand some polishing) only to find the deadline moved by two months, and thus my unique selling point rendered an unlovely shade of void. So I need a new challenge, a bigger, a bolder challenge.

How about making a multi-player version of the game?

Using GPS to locate players nearby?

In 3 days?

Oh, and I nearly forgot the geeky dessert topping: I’ll be using Windows Azure to pull it all together.

Now, just to be clear, my calendar doesn’t contain three consecutive day-sized gaps, so these 3 days will have to be spread out over the next couple of weeks. In betweenwhiles, I can’t guarantee that my eye won’t stray to the MSDN pages about Windows Azure, or that my brain won’t allocate a background thread to designing message protocols. But I will promise to keep my Visual Studio solution firmly shut whilst the clock is not ticking.

if (DateTime.Now.Month == 8 && DateTime.Now.Day == 25) { age++; }

It’s OK! I’m not old yet – 1 year to go till the big Three O.

I have to share with you the birthday card my wife drew for me. It depicts an essential tool of my trade – Seagull Surfer 2010 (aka 2008 R2!)

Scott Hanselman interviews James Bach

To enliven my journey to work this morning I listened to Scott Hanselman’s interview with James Bach, an international consultant on software testing. They were talking about James' new book Voyage of a Buccaneer-Scholar.

James has led an interesting life. He was kicked out of home when he was 14, so moved into a motel room with his computer. There he taught himself Assembly language programming. When he was 16, he dropped out of high school and started a career as a video game programmer.

Listen to the interview to find out how he made the journey to tester, speaker, writer, and proponent of Exploratory testing.

Flattery (almost) works

I checked my email using my smart-phone the other night, and found this:

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "I'll be speaking at PDC 2008...":

Masters thesisI have been through the whole content of this blog which is very informative and knowledgeable stuff, So i would like to visit again.

How nice. I'm always chuffed when somebody takes the time to leave an appreciative comment on my blog. And this one stoked my ego. At a glance it seemed that Mr (or Ms) Anonymous was likening the quality and content of my work to a Masters thesis; though the wording of the message was a little strange ... perhaps English was not their native language?

Ever polite, the next time I went to my PC I fired up the browser and found the appropriate page on my blog with the intention of thanking Mr (or Ms) Anonymous for their kind words and inviting them to visit as often as they liked.

But the browser revealed what my phone's mail client had concealed. The words "Masters Thesis" were underlined in blue - a hyperlink to a site whose page rank I will not promote by repeating the link. Cue sound of hissing steam as ego is rapidly quenched.

Out of curiosity at the wares being peddled by these flattersome spammers, I followed the link, and found offers of written-to-order essays or Masters Thesis - guaranteed native English, and plagiarism free. The kind-hearted scholars at the site will also undertake to complete assignments and exams for online courses and can guarantee to ace them all - for a small consideration of $2000 plus $300 per exam.

Needless to say, I put my blog's trash-can button to good use.

Googling a tribute to my Grandfather

My Grandpa, Dr R.A.F. Jack, passed away a few months ago, aged 89. It was a comfort at his funeral to see how highly regarded he was in the community and beyond: as well as being the village doctor for close to half-a-century, he was a respected and well-loved elder in our church, and he was known in the medical field for his work with homeopathy.

Though he pre-dated the internet by many years, when I googled his name, I turned up several references. Admittedly, these results were somewhat drowned out by pages referring to a certain aviationary body born two years before him. But once I’d filtered those out, I found a few gems.

I discovered that Amazon stock his book, Homeopathy in General Practice, currently number 1,252,945 on their Best Seller list. I found a bibliography of his other published works. Then there was a magazine article about his work written by an appreciative patient. She records his unorthodox method of checking that she wasn’t suffering from a trapped nerve – putting a sandbag under her knee, and bouncing another on top!

And finally, in the Letters page of the British Medical Journal from June 1955 I found this:

Redundant Circulars
Dr. R. A. F. JACK (Bromsgrove) writes: My young family have
helped me to-deal with the surfeit of advertisements that daily
swell my morning post. The elder two, who by now have lost
all interest in opening them, content themselves with collecting
the stamps and bemoan the fact that so many envelopes these
days are franked. -They then pass them on to the younger two,
who, armed with a pair of scissors each, cut out patterns or any
interesting figures or illustrations that take their fancy. They
preserve all blotters for me; and all large white envelopes that
can be ungummed are put aside for subsequent painting practice
or for conversion into paper darts. The result is that my wife and
I get an extra quarter of an hour's peace each morning, so that in
one way or another we all benefit from the unremitting onslaught
of the various drug houses.

The eldest of the two stamp collectors mentioned is my Dad, now himself a GP, and semi-retired!

Introducing HymnSheet – free, simple song presentation software for Churches and Schools

Our church jumped into the computer age a few years back. We ditched the Overhead Projector that had served us faithfully for many years, and acquired one of its digital brethren, along with a laptop. Ah, OHPs – those were the days – amazing what they could do with just a few lights, lenses, mirrors, and on a good day, no smoke. Anyway, I volunteered to sort out some software to do what the old OHP did for us – display songs on the screen for the Sunday School scholars to sing.

Powerpoint was an obvious first candidate, but rejected after a few moments consideration: our Sunday School leader likes to be able to add choruses to the mix at a moments notice: imagine try to insert slides into a Powerpoint presentation on the fly!

Then I scoured the ‘net for more specialised alternatives – and found plenty.But I noticed two things about all of them: firstly, they cost money; and secondly, all of them did too much – we prefer not to have our attention distracted from worship by snazzy graphics and alpha-blended video, or by nursery notices popping up to inform Mrs Jones that little Johnny needs his nappy changing.

What self-respecting programmer would not see this state of affairs as a challenge? Surely it would only take a few evenings to bash out something that would work exactly the way we wanted it to?

So (a few)^10 evenings later I had a little application ready to use. And we’ve been using it successfully for the last four years. Dragging and dropping song titles into a playlist sure beats sorting through a deck of transparencies.

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve been intending to put the application and source code online in the hope that others will find it useful. Finally I’ve got round to it. It is my birthday gift to you all (28 today – I reckon I’ll start feeling grown up in about two years time!).

What you should know about HymnSheet

So here it is, imaginatively named HymnSheet: simple song presentation software, especially suitable for children’s services, and, I imagine, School assemblies and music lessons. It features:

• Support for dual monitors (or a laptop and a projector). One monitor displays the control screen, the other the song display
• Drag-and-drop interface for putting songs into your play-list and for reordering them on the fly
• Ability for you to highlight the current line of the song, to assist children learning to read
• Easy to use song editor for adding your own songs to the song library
• Whole song displayed at once on screen, with key shortcuts for scrolling between verses and the chorus of the song.

Get started by downloading the installer (note that you’ll need the .Net Framework installed on your computer) and reading the user guide. I’ve also made available some sample hymns and choruses (mostly of the more traditional kind) to get you started.

If you find this useful, you might like to help me persuade my wife that it was worth my while - if you’re sufficiently persuasive, she may allow me the time to add some new features:

Points of interest in the Source Code

For the more technically minded, I’ve made the source code to HymnSheet available – feel free to adapt it and add to it if you want – I’d love to hear from you if you do. Some points of interest in the source code :

• The code is written in VB.Net.  I know, I’m sorry. Reason is, I started working on this in the days before I had broadband. At the time I only had a CD of Visual Basic 2005 Express Beta which I’d picked up at a conference. By the time I had a a proper language installed on my machine, I didn’t fancy the job of rewriting ;-). Maybe one day…
• Songs are stored in xml format. I use an XSL transform to turn this into HTML (with CSS to style it) and then display it in a Webbrowser control (maximised to fill the whole of the display screen). This gives you complete control over the way songs are presented. In particular, you might want to change the fonts or colours – the settings for these are in the songs.css file.
• If you’ve never taken a look at the Webbrowser control, you should – it’s cool. As well as letting you load HTML from memory, it provides a managed DOM view of the HTML document, complete with events; you can also invoke any scripts embedded in the page.
• I use some Javascript to animate the movement between verses. From IE 7 onwards, the default security settings prevent javascript from running in a HTML document that is loaded from memory (as is the case in HymnSheet). If you host the Webbrowser control in an application and want to enable javascript, you need to set a key in the registry: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE or HKEY_CURRENT_USER]\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_BLOCK_LMZ_SCRIPT\[You executable name.exe], with value of 0. I do this in the installer, but I’ve also created a class with a method that will enable scripting for the current application: look for it in the source code – it’s called EnableWebBrowserScripting.
• I’ve included the source code for the installer (see HymnSheet.wxs). If you want to build this, you’ll need to install WiX, the Windows Installer XML toolkit; you might also want to try out the excellent WixEdit for editing Wix scripts.

Shipped!

I’m pleased to announce that acceptance testing has been completed, and Baby Jack 2.0, now officially named Alaric Nahum Jack, was successfully delivered late last week.

The last few hours of the shipping process were rather gruelling for certain members of the team – my wife was allowed to bliss out on Gas and Air (known to the trade as Entonox), but I was not permitted ear plugs!

Unfortunately, no documentation was provided, but I do have two weeks off work to try to figure out how he works!

Are Biology Students devolving?

As if she wasn't busy enough bringing up our daughter, and growing the new addition to the family, my wife is a part-time private tutor to several A-Level Biology students (A-Level, for those not from the UK, being the final hurdle students have to clear before University). These students must all have passed their GCSEs before being accepted on to A-Level courses, with exams including core subjects like English and Maths. But you'd never know it from the answers they give as my wife goes over practice exam questions with them.

Take percentages. One question involved converting a percentage to a frequency: if 5% of the population have the recessive form of gene X, how many is that out of 100? Blank stare.

Then there was a question about interpreting Echocardiogram (ECG) traces. You’ll have seen one these in the movies if ever there was a hospital death scene. As the patient breathes his last, the camera invariably pans to an ECG monitor at his bedside. The sound-track turns somber, the sun is blotted out by a cloud, and on the monitor the peaks and troughs of heart activity subside to the infamous flat line.

On an ECG, the trace shows activity up the vertical axis and time along the horizontal, so to calculate the heart rate (as the question required) you begin by measuring the distance between peaks on the chart to get the duration of each beat. The student could do that - counting blocks was within her skill set. But the next step was to convert that to a rate in beats per minute.

"It's not fair that they ask Maths questions in a Biology paper!", complained the student. My wife was taken aback for a moment – the girl apparently wasn’t joking.

"So what do you do now?", my wife prompted once she’d recovered.

"I don't know", began the student; then with sudden inspiration: "It's got something to do with 60 hasn't it?".

"Well, yes, it has,", my wife said encouragingly. "You know how long each beat lasts. Now you need to work out how many of those beats will fit in a minute. So what do you do?"

"Ah, I've got it now". The student's face lights up. My wife smiles hopefully. "You divide the time by 60!"

Broadband woes and customer service triumphs

My Broadband router died the other day. One night it worked, the next morning – caput! No lights on the front panel, no response even when I prodded the reset button with a pen. Our house seems to be an unhealthy environment for electronics. I blame my wife: when she was at university, she could crash a computer just by sitting down and putting her hand to the mouse.

But my luck was in. This was a Belkin router, and it came with a lifetime guarantee – and not a gnat’s lifetime either, as it turned out.

I suspected a fried power supply, so I got chatting to technical support (Live Chat does an excellent of rendering an Indian accent intelligible to British eyes!), intending to ask them to replace it. I got more than I bargained for.

Having cleared the hurdle of First Line support, Second Line agreed that they would give me a replacement – of the whole router. In fact, they would give me an upgrade, since the model I had was obsolete. And to top it all, they emailed me a postage-paid label by which to return my old router.

Now get this: I bought the router for £20 second-hand from a colleague more than a year ago, yet that didn’t concern Belkin – at no point did they ask for so much as a whiff of a proof of purchase.

The router duly arrived, I plugged it in, and – no connection. I borrowed a friend’s router – no connection on that either. Clearly my line had rotted from lack of use.

That was when I discovered the magical iPlate from BT. It’s a widget that costs less than a tenner, that really does install in minutes (on top of your home’s master socket), and it brought my line back from the dead. It works, I’m told, by cutting out the bell wire (used, in the olden days, to ring your phone’s bell, but now defunct and the cause of much interference on the line). My download speed is pretty much as it was before, but my upload speed has almost doubled!

So now I don’t even have dead Broadband as an excuse for not updating my blog in over a month!

Functional Fun on Twitter

I’ve just taken the plunge, and started tweeting on Twitter, user name @samuel_d_jack.

There have often been times when I’ve been intrigued or amused by something, but haven’t felt sufficiently creative to make a full blog post out of it: micro-blogging on Twitter seems to be the ideal solution.

I’ve added my Twitter feed to the right-hand side of my blog; and if you don’t find my drivel to be too deleterious you can even subscribe to the RSS feed.

Observing a bug in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Just occasionally the self-censorship feature in my wife’s brain malfunctions, with amusing consequences: it kicks in the instant after she has spoken, so that her next words are “don’t tell anybody I said that!”

But I’m sure she won’t mind my sharing a few choice moments with you.

First I should point out that my wife graduated with honours from one of the top medical schools in the UK, so there’s clearly nothing lacking in the rest of her brain. I speculate that Auto Update got turned off in this one area.

The most recent example was when we were discussing a diagram of the solar system with our daughter. “So did the Greeks and Romans know what the planets are called when they named their gods?”, my wife asked me – then immediately put her hand over her mouth in embarrassment.

But the funniest was a few years ago as we were driving through our neighbourhood at night, after there had been a power cut. The houses on either side of the road were eerily dark, and we were suddenly dazzled as another vehicle went past us in the opposite direction. My wife piped up,

“So how come that car’s headlights are still working?”

My first FreeCycle

This evening I completed my first FreeCycle. Unfortunately, this did nothing to improve my fitness levels, but it did bring us three black bags closer to our target of emptying our Junk room by the end of February. 

FreeCycle is a an organisation that is all about “reuse and keeping good stuff out of landfills”. It currently claims 6.5 million members in almost 5 thousand local groups worldwide. If my non-descript medium size home town has a FreeCycle group, then there’s a good chance yours does to.

Once you’ve signed up, you can list items that you want to get rid of – things that you might otherwise dump at the household waste site. Fellow Freecyclers express an interest, you choose who you want to donate to, then make mutually agreeable arrangements to transfer ownership.

I had an assortment of Lever Arch files (formerly housing my University Lecture notes – sniff, sniff!), and two aged Colour Inkjet printers to dispose of. Previously, I probably would have taken these to landfill – albeit rather guiltily. But within a couple of hours of listing these on my local FreeCycle group more than five people had expressed an interest in taking one or both items off my hands. Following a brief email exchange this morning, a gentleman called in a few moments ago and took the lot: said he was setting up a new office!

I first heard about Freecycle more than a year ago. What put me off back then is the technology (or lack thereof) powering the scheme. Things still haven’t moved on, so, in the interests of decluttering my life, I had to put my technological prejudices on one side, wind the clock back several years and immerse myself in the world of Mailing lists. You send mails to an alias with “OFFERED:” in the subject line, together with a description of the white elephant which needs rehousing; once the item has been collected you mail again, this time flagging your mail with “TAKEN”. There’s even a convention using “WANTED:” and “RECIEVED:” for optimists, though etiquette forbids subject lines requesting brand new Mercedes Benz and such like.

But as I proved today, it works. All in all, a simple, foolproof, scheme for making the world a better place one black bag at a time.

Disposing of memories

Today I did a very difficult thing: I threw away my University Lecture notes.

It was all part of the Great Junk Room Clear-out. I had folders in there which I hadn’t looked at since the jubilant day of my final exam, five and a half years ago.

After I’d had stern words with myself, I conceded that I was unlikely to need them again: my career has led me down a path in which the finer points of Representation Theory are no longer of practical use. Besides this, my handwriting could justly be described as write-only; scrawling the notes helped the content stick in my memory during the exams, but it certainly doesn’t serve for archive purposes.

I must confess to flicking through the pages nostalgically before consigning them to the recycling bag. I have fond memories of the days when I understood those Theorems, Lemmas and Corollaries.

My brother the blogger

I’ve just discovered that my brother has started a blog; he began writing it back in January (my family communicates well, as you see!). He’s writing about life from the point of view of a Herbal Medicine Student.

My favourite post so far: The Time Monster.

Answered Prayer and Handbags

As a Christian, I believe that God hears and answers prayer. In fact, I don't just believe it, I know it from my own experience. Now I might wish to have some miraculous episode to recount to convince you too; but perhaps it says more about the character of God that my most vivid memories of answered prayer concern Handbags.

The Handbags in question both belonged to my wife, though at the time our concern was that they'd transferred their allegiance elsewhere. The one incident, that prompted this post, is still making itself at home in my memory - it happened just after Christmas.

Noted and forgotten

We'd just finished the shopping at our local supermarket and I was charged with unloading the trolley while my wife visited the Ladies'. As I put the last carrier bag into the boot of the car, I noted the handbag in the front of the trolley. "Musn't forget that", I thought, as I pushed the trolley to join its companions in the trolley shelter.

My wife rejoined me in the car.

"Got my handbag?", she asked.

"Mmm", I replied [I'm grateful to my wife for filling in this part of the story, because I have no memory of it].

It wasn't until several hours later that my usefully ambiguous reply turned out, in this case, to mean "No!", rather than the "Yes" my wife had assumed at the time. We were on the way out of the house laden with platefuls of pizza, our contribution to the Sunday School Christmas party.

"You better just leave your handbag, Mummy", our three-year old daughter insisted, anxious to get to the party, as Mummy hunted in all the places that handbags sometimes get dumped. "It will be alright", she added, innocently. My wife wasn't so naive.

"If we can't find it, someone will have to stay behind to cancel the credit cards."

Since there were only two someones eligible for the task, and the female was being dragged by the non-eligible someone in the direction of the party, I remained behind. Prayer was my first resort, and a heartfelt "Help, Father!" ascended heavenwards. A second search of house and car yielded nothing. "Nothing", was also the answer I got when I phoned customer services at the supermarket to ask if anything resembling a handbag had been handed in.

So I set to work calling up the credit card companies (optimistically asking for only a temporary block to be placed on the cards) and googling to find out the procedure for replacing lost National Insurance cards and Photocard Driver's licenses.

But I felt I couldn't leave it at that. I looked in on my wife and daughter, daughter enjoying the food at the party, wife forcing the appearance of enjoyment, then I set off on the 15 minute drive back to the supermarket.

I didn't have much hope of finding anything, but I wandered round the car park, mobile in hand, repeatedly dialling my wife's number in the hope of hearing an answer from the phone that, opportunists aside, would still be tucked in her bag. I would have paid to hear the cheery Nokia jingle on this occasion: but no such joy.

Hope pretty much gone at this point, I headed into the store to try Customer Services one last time. Then, what to my wondering eyes should appear but my wife’s handbag, open on the Customer Services desk with the Assistant staring bemusedly at the mobile phone she had just fished from it.

“I couldn’t work out how to answer it”, she explained, as I introduced myself as the rightful co-owner of the lost property she held in her hand. She remembered me from my phone call to the store earlier in the evening. Then she confessed that the bag had in fact been behind the desk all along, but she had just that minute found it after disposing of a bag of rubbish that had been stuffed in front of it.

Happy coincidence? I know what I think. But before you reach your final conclusion, let me tell you about Handbag number 2.

A Handbag takes a holiday

This one had accompanied us on holiday to Torquay, in the English Riviera. It stuck with us faithfully throughout the week until the day we visited Cockington, a picturesque, Olde Worlde village a few miles out of town. To preserve the charm of the place they direct all drivers to a car park on the outskirts, from whence they’re instructed to savour the peace as nature intended: on foot. The parking charges paid by the choiceless motorist no doubt go towards preserving the structure of the village.

As I manoeuvred the car into an empty space, my wife bent down in her seat to fish her purse out of her bag. She fished in vain. It was pointless asking her to look again: not even the rubbish that accumulates in the front of our car during a holiday could conceal a handbag as over-stuffed as my wife’s. So I went to the back of the car, and started turning out the boot – also in vain.

Since our daughter – about 18 months at the time – would not appreciate leaving when having barely arrived, my wife remained with her to look around the village whilst I retraced our tracks. Back to the car park down by the harbour; back to the cafe overlooking the sea where we had so lately enjoyed a carefree coffee; back to the car park again. No customer service desk this time; but a Harbour Master just as capable of delivering the lines: “Sorry sir – nothing’s been handed in”.

I was just about to begin a second round when my phone rang. Expecting it to be my wife ringing for the third time to check on my progress, I was instead greeted by my Aunt, calling from back home.

“Afternoon Sam! Has Rachel lost a handbag?”

I wasn’t quite speechless.

“Yes! But how do you know?”

So she explained the convoluted story. Whilst answering phones on the reception desk at our GP surgery where she works, she’d received a call from my wife’s Health Visitor. The Health Visitor needed to get in touch with Rachel Jack, she told my Aunt; she didn’t have a contact number, but she’d remembered that my Aunt was a relation, so could she pass on a message? The message was from a hotel receptionist in Torquay. Apparently, a passing pedestrian had handed in a handbag containing, amongst other things, a purse within which was a Drivers license belonging to a “Mrs Rachel Jack” – but only the telephone number of the Health Visitor on a torn off page of a notebook.

I could hardly believe my ears. To think that all the time I had been making my fruitless enquiries the handbag had been safe and news of it had been on its way to me by this circuitous route!

Having received details of the hotel I set off post-haste to see if this could really be true. When I arrived at the reception desk, I could only stutter my thanks to the diligent girl who had gone right through the bag to find that single scrap that could connected her, by such an unlikely chain, with the owner. And she solved for me the one remaining mystery: how did the bag come to be outside the hotel, half a mile down the road from the habourside carpark?

The anonymous pedestrian, the receptionist said, had seen the bag fall from the roof of the car just outside the hotel. Relating this a few minutes later to my marvelling wife, she remembered that she had placed the bag there as she leant inside the car to strap our daughter into her seat, just before we left the car park. And somehow it had stayed put, until it fell, to be picked up, contents still intact, by the model citizen.

I don’t need to tell you how thankful we were, not only to her (regretfully we never had chance to express it), to the receptionist in the hotel, to my wife’s Health Visitor, and to my Aunt, but to the One who oversaw the whole episode, and “worked all things together for good”.

Now I don't want to give the impression of a God who operates a divine lost property service. The Son of God came into the world to look for and save people who are spiritually lost, rather than things that are carelessly lost by absentminded geeks and their wives. But if God can take care of ours, surely we should take him seriously when he offers to take care of us?

Nothing new under the sun

With a new member of the household arriving mid-year, we’re in the process of re-purposing the room in our house that, outside of the family we call The Study, but between ourselves we refer to as The Junk Room. Our daughter is looking forward to a pink-themed makeover, with Fifi stickers on the walls; she won’t appreciate sharing with the quantity of books that we have in there.

As we were discussing where we could re-house our mini library my wife had sudden inspiration.

“Why doesn’t someone start a book rental service, like Love Film do with DVDs?”

A pause.

“Ah – that would be a library!”

Windows Vista Ultimate for Sale

Remember that I won a copy of Windows Vista Ultimate at the PDC? Well now I’m auctioning it (in the UK of course).

If any reader wins the auction, let me know, and I’ll include a Functional Fun business card as a bonus :-)

All part of my cunning plan that I hinted at earlier.

Too close for comfort

There was a robbery at the Post Office in the village neighbouring ours this morning. The Post Master was shot in the leg; his son was shot dead. One media account described this as “an armed robbery gone wrong” - as if armed robbery ever goes well! The Daily Mail has the full story.

This is tragically far from unique in the UK, even less in other parts of the world. There are many innocents caught up in ongoing or recurring conflicts around the globe. Murder is perpetrated on a larger scale all too frequently. And when I read of these events I do feel a genuine mental sympathy for the victims. But for some reason this has touched me emotionally in ways that other events have not.

It’s not I feel any more afraid. True, the police did seal off the area, and there were helicopters hovering over the village for the best part of the morning. But Fairfield, where the event took place, is about five minutes drive from the intersection of two Motorways; the robbers could have been a county away within half-an-hour of the crime.

I think its the psychological power of our proximity to the place and those involved that is at work. The Post Office is less than a mile from my house, as the crow flies. I’ve used it myself on several occasions, and was probably served by those involved. And our daughter was at pre-school just around the corner from the place, my wife having dropped her off 40 minutes after the episode, though unaware of it at the time.

So I find myself recalling that I was just arriving at work at the same time the poor man was shot; wondering what thoughts the hapless pair had to themselves as they opened up shop this morning. And trying to imagine the feelings of the Fiancée of the dead man: what must be going through her mind at this very moment?

I guess there’s good reason why the phrase “it brings it all home” has settled itself as a cliché in our language.

My prayers are with the victims, and with the authorities that the perpetrators will be brought swiftly to justice.