I’ve talked about open document formats before. I don’t think I articulated my argument quite as well as Steven Garrity does in this article. It’s an interesting article, as are its predecessors on open formats for music and instant messaging.

I particularly liked this sentence, which I think sums up much of the argument in a couple of sentences:

If your mom buys a computer, writes you a letter, and emails it to you in the Microsoft Word format, you have to pay Microsoft to read the letter.

I’m working at HP again over the summer, which should be good. From October, I’ve accepted an offer from Nameless UK, a webby-type company (never quite sure how to describe web companies!). From the impression I got during my interviews, the people seem like they will be good to work with and the work itself should be interesting too. Looking forward to starting both jobs, a promising start to the summer!

I’m moving into a new house on July 1st, which is also exciting. I’ve been in my current house for going on two years now, so moving to a new one will be quite strange. On the other hand, I’ve been in student accomodation for four years now: it will be nice to have a non-student house. From what I recall, the place is pretty nice; big kitchen and a small garden with barbeque. It should be fun over the summer and beyond.

I finally handed in my thesis on Wednesday (25th May), which was a great relief. It’s quite strange sitting here typing this and not feeling like I should really be working on the thesis. In the end, I was pretty happy with it — the time spent paid off and the final monstrosity was quite readable for a fifty-page document on machine learning and RSS feeds. A big thanks to all the people who helped me during the thesis.

I was bored by work so I took some photos of my guitar instead:

For those who are interested, I’m trying out using Backpack, 37Signals’ new toy, to manage Bluefunk and Feedfunk’s progress in a fairly ad hoc way. You can follow goings on at Bluefunk’s and Feedfunk’s pages respectively.