I forward a possibly useful link to a colleague and what response do I get? A thank you? A simple nod of gratitude? No siree.

His reponse, delivered in caustic tones:

'Thats so, like, four days ago, man!'

The cruelty! The wicked brutish perniciousness!

As thumper said to bambi:
'if you can't think of anything nice to say, then shut the f*ck up, you stupid skinny-ass little deer!'

It won't surprise you to learn that this same person now refers to Version 1.0 of the .Net Framework as 'Seriously Old Skool'.

• Mike 'racoon hater' Gunderloy (RSS)- he da man.
• Julia 'call me Julie' Lerman (RSS)- she really knows how to think in ink.
• the ever persistable Roy Oshergrove (RSS)
• axr - my beloved audient. (not a blogger)
• loki, my cat. (blog currently offline)
• Bob, the little protein chain from which all life evolved. (no blog.)
• a big shout out to the 'system.xml.serializable' name space - you're still my favourite - all those other namespaces didn't mean nothing! me and you is like together forever!
• Bill Gates - thanks for a great christmas party on your yacht bill. the lobster was excellent and sorry i chucked up on the skipper!
• and a big shout out to the skipper. 'sorry' doesn't really cut the mustard does it?

cheers kids. And by the way Roy - next time you're critical of Rory try to be a little harsher. He wasn't even offended! Sheesh!

Microsoft is currently handing out its 'MVP' awards for the year.

Here's mine:

Thanks to Mike Gunderloy, who delivered this rather natty little parody of the MVP program in his 'daily grind' column this morning.

A shill, by the way is 'One who poses as a satisfied customer or an enthusiastic gambler to dupe bystanders into participating in a swindle.' (according to www.dictionary.com)

After seeing a great documentary on woody allen earlier in the week, i decided to revise the animated woody allen. Here it is, re-launched.

My written output is generally of low quality and miniscule popularity. But rather than blame my own poor writing skills, I'd love to blame the blogging medium itself and claim that blogs are inherently bad and lead directly to shitty content.

So here's a quick break down of the pluses and minuses of blogs.

The only dangerous thing about blogging is that once an idea is blogged, it cannot be recalled. The same however is true of email, as numerous debacles have shown.

Hopefully, by harnessing the goodness and filtering out the badness, my stuff will eventually become:

• Blogalicious
• Blogtacular
• Blogtagious
• Blogdacious
• Blogadaisical
• Blogomatic
• Blogadelic
• Blogtastic
• Blogasexual
• Blogatantric
• Blogosophical
• Blogamental
• Blogaphoric

In the meanwhile, I have to work on my blogatude.

One of my new-year resolutions was that I would endeavour to allow certain portions of my brain to dry up, rot away and never be used again.

Brain segments marked for deletion are those containing skills for:

• MS Access
• Crystal Reports
• Word VBA
• Excel VBA
• VBA in general

Although these are all excellent tools in themselves (I frequently use them for my own purposes) I loathe working in them professionally. They quickly lead to messy, ill fitting, amateur solutions that are not scaleable, not tamper proof, hard to re-use, and suffer from terrible lock-in.

But when a salesman walked into the technical area yesterday and asked:

"Who here knows excel?"

Like a fool I put up my hand and said things like, "Sure! Yep! Pick me! I'll do it!"

And in no time i'm trapped in one of these fiddly micro-projects that you just know is going to get real messy real quick.

Currently working on a 'traditional ASP' application. And the technical term 'Cluster F*ck' certainly springs to mind. The sheer architectural madness of this stuff is staggering. I pity the fool who'll have to maintain it.

Languages and sub-languages need to program this sucker:

1. html
2. Css
3. client-side javascript (for multiple browsers)
4. server-side VBscript
5. server-side Javascript (don't ask)
6. client-side regular expressions (for validation)
7. embedded SQL

Other Technologies employed:

1. ASP
2. ADO
3. SSI
4. COM

Better jangle the spurs and get back to work. Yee-ha!

• A woman considers it very romantic if you simply sit together and watch a romantic comedy
• The effect is somewhat diminished if, every time a main character speaks, you roll on the floor goraning in agony, attempting to beat yourself unconscious by ramming your head against a coffee table.

I have also learnt to understand the subtleties of a woman's body language.

When you play her a new album, you can be certain that she does not number it amongst her most valuable possessions if:

If you haven't seen Return Of The King yet, (and you haven't read the book) then let me be the first to tell you:

• Gollum is Frodo's great-grandfather.
• Sam dies at the end

I meant to warn you to look away if you don't want to know how it ends.

Well, I consider that a suitable revenge for all those people who ruined: The Sixth Sense, The Crying Game and The Empire Strikes Back for me.

Now here is the obligatory glowing review:

Return of the King is so damn good that it begs the question: Why didn't Peter Jackson release this one first??

ROTK didn't have any of the extended slow patches of the first two - just purely gripping, full of rising tension. So good in fact that even my wife is talking about reading the books now (she was dead bored with the first movie, and quite bored with the second one).

It definitely made us want to buy all three DVD's, and a DVD burner, pirate them, return the DVD's to the shop and then watch all three in one go.

That sounds like too much effort, so i'll just have to wait until someone invents a computer:brain interface device with which you can download the sensation of having just watched all three films. And then i'll go 'aaaaah, that was great!'

(update: watched 'Ghostbusters' last night and I must say that LOTR:ROTK, as good as it is, has nothing on Ghostbusters)

Are you as smart as Einstein? Only 2% of people are clever enough to answer this quiz question. (Allegedly.) Can you handle it?

There are five visitors from the red planet in five adjacent space ships hovering above the earth.

Each alien has a different Rank, Skin Colour, Number of ears, preferred earthling love slave and a unique alien pet.

Which one owns the Plutonian Whistling-Cat?

There are no tricks. The following hints will help you...

Which one owns the Plutonian Whistling-Cat?

Got the answer? Mail me (address below) or leave a comment.