I feel like posting the picture below.

It's from a very rainy Friday in September 2000. I had a meeting around noon that day. Directly afterwards, I went for a weekend in the mountains with two friends, and I felt just like that.

About an hour after the picture was taken, over dinner, I explained my mood. Unless things change, I expect I'll leave in a few months. A good forecast: I gave notice four months later, ten minutes after another depressing meeting.

I didn't forecast Nokia's recent rampage, though.

I am reminded of the Inmos Transputer.

That, as my older readers may still vaguely remember, was a freak processor in the eighties. It was designed for parallelism: Its fundamental design was for a computer with many transputers, not one with a single humongous blob. Each CPU was small, simple (the wikipedia page includes the complete instruction set) and linked to four other CPUs using bidirectional message-passing connections, and the design allowed vast CPU meshes with message routing and forwarding.

The thing that reminds me of the transputer is the way those links worked. When a Transputer received a message that had to be forwarded, it would prioritise communication over its own computation.

I am reminded of this because my mail is down. A great big failure happened during Christmas vacation. Then a routing mishap left me unable to take part in a video conference this morning. I am forced to prioritise my own programming over message passing, and it feels so good. Yesterday was great.

Tomorrow I shall apologise to borud about my unresponsiveness. But today, I plan to wallow in solitary hacking.

Actually I'll wait a few hours with publishing this. There's a chance someone might see it.

The Amazon Prime game is an odd kind of game: The players are Amazon and myself, but the winner is usually either DHL or UPS.

The rules are as follows: (more…)

Leaving the offices of customer.com today, I pressed the button half a dozen times. (For some reason, customer.com's planners thought it best to litter the offices with giant TVs, most turned on, all muted. There's a corporate espresso bar with seventeen corporate television sets. Really makes one wonder.) Walking to the hotel, I pressed the button a few more times.

Just as I was entering, I saw one last TV, reached for my tv-b-gone and... nothing. An employee had turned the TV off as part of closing for the day.

I'm not sure how I feel. Puzzled to have seen someone turn a television set off. Happy to have seen it happen. And somehow cheated.

Update: What a pity the TV-b-gone is too slow for drive-by actionism.

Tidying my office, chapter 17, in which beloved hardware is less beloved than a usable shelf.

I'm throwing away the keyboard Cherry made for me sometime around the middle nineties.

It has an AT keyboard plug, so I haven't been able to use it in a while, and it's worn out (more…)

One of my not very frequently used possessions is a large laptop bag. Big enough for two laptops and some random other items, or for one laptop, a change of clothes, random chargers and whatnot, and a book. (more…)

Now that we have two children, the daily routine has grown even worse. So we've adopted cross-paradigm best practice to manage and control complex projects, on-budget and on-time, improving parent/child satisfaction matrices.

We've adopted scrum. (more…)

A public service announcement: Upon learning that Dave Cridland describes identi.ca as a snark broadcast facility and claims to use it that way, too, I have decided that when I cannot repress my snarkiness, letting it out at identi.ca/arnt is acceptable.

Maybe even good. rant.g/rant has helped me regain calmness more than once.