h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It's about time I added to this journal. It's sad to see that h2g2 doesn't seem to be very active since it went offline for a while... but perhaps it's just that I haven't been visiting so often. Alabaster is not appealing at all, but perhaps if I can get the cookie going again I'll always be greeted by the whimsical Classic Goo which will encourage me to stay. I wonder what happened to the mauve gam room.

Last night I was walking past a bookstore, and glanced inside... immediately I saw something halfway to the back of the store which looked very familiar. A book I'd never seen before, but even from that distance I immediately recognised it as The Salmon Of Doubt. Since I was so surprised at having spotted it in a brief glimpse from afar (considering I often poke around in bookshops looking for it) I strode in and bought it, just like that. It was quite expensive for an impulse buy, but worth it. Already people are lining up to borrow it once I've finished. I'm not sure what to do though, because it happens that I was halfway through reading Mostly Harmless on my second Newton (which I got a few months ago) so I can't decide whether to finish that first. It's too late now though, I've already started on The Salmon of Doubt. It'd been ages since I last read Mostly Harmless though, and I'd only read it once, so it's quite unfamiliar to me. It's like I suddenly have two new DNA books to read. What a choice!

I've also been reading A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram. I'm a bit bored with it at the moment but I'll get back into it once I've read the DNA books and caught up with New Scientist. I 'discovered' New Scientist magazine a few months ago, it's addictive! The only problem is almost all of the articles are worth reading so I just barely have time to read one a week. I even registered [Broken link removed by Moderator]as a spoof, and I know I don't have time to do much with that. Hopefully other people will submit articles.

I also bought [Broken link removed by Moderator]and [Broken link removed by Moderator]. It's been over a year since my last post here so you won't know that I've really got into Cocoa development now. It's awesome that I'm able to do this stuff now, thanks Woz! I also got a job. A job as a windoze developer, unfortunately, but nevertheless a job which gives me enough money to buy books and domain names and more Newtons on impulse. A job which would allow me to buy PowerBooks and overseas trips on impulse would be better, but this isn't too bad. Windows and Visual C++ still frustrate me often though. It's astounding how bad Windows is at actually drawing windows... I'd expect from the name that it'd be good at it. Instead, we can watch the almighty 1.6GHz P4 draw windows rectangle by rectangle, line by line, and leave window trails behind when the window is dragged around the screen. I can see now that mouse trails are not a feature, but an optimisation. How people put up with that I don't know... and then there's the issue of three to seven different styles of each widget - even within the same app you can see several different styles of scrollbars, menubars, buttons etc which are functionally the same. And don't get me started on progress bars. I don't care how ugly the Windows GUI is or isn't, I just want it to be consistent! And that's just the GUI... I won't mention functionality because I have books to read. And you have better things to do I'm sure... like learning Objective-C perhaps. Go on.

(I did not just call you a goon, whatever it looked like.)