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.

I watch people using computers, and I have to say that I agree with what Blake Ross has to say. In my mind, what many developers need to think about is making things work. As opposed to making MSN Messenger look a bit crazy.

I think that we need to stop sticking in shining bright new things just because we can and work out whether they are pretty useless, really, and concentrate instead on making what’s there already work flawlessly. Office suites come to mind here. Why not make them not crash, rather than making pretty Document Recovery dialogs? (Or in OpenOffice’s case, rather confusing ones). Thesis writing has concentrated my mind on this one. I should’ve just used Lyx, I know…