It’s been traumatic, it’s been difficult, horrible… A NIGHTMARE. Countless days lost to my computer. No sleep. Too much sleep. Anger. Joy. Delirium. Short-lived self-confidence. But I have finally submitted my PhD thesis. Done. Dusted. Gone. No more. Can’t do anything now. All I can do now is await the dreaded date - the bit where I have to pretend I actually know what I’m talking about. The bit where 4 people, 4 insanely intelligent people, the type of people someone might write a “how many people does it take to change a lightbulb” type joke about, for that day have only one mission in life - to rip me to shreds.

RIP Simon Wilson, 10/06/1981 - 02/10/2006. I hope you find the peace you were looking for.

WE DID IT. A totally ridiculous challenge to ride from Southampton (Hampshire, UK) to Santander (Cantabria, Spain) in 26 hours. It was about 1800km, which on the face of it seemed easily doable. The trip started badly - I’d invested lots of time and money into a bike cam - a video camera with a bullet camera mounted to my bike to try and take some stylish video of the whole affair. Before we even got going, it was broken with no sign of life.

List of things that Matt majorly missed the boat on, part 287: Flickr I only just got into flickr-ing. And it’s such a good site. Very sophisticated.

Next month on the 4th at two minutes and three seconds after 1:00 in the morning, the time and date will be 01:02:03 04/05/06. That won’t ever happen again in our life time.

D-Link, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of networking and Internet equipment, has had a bit of a shocker. NTP (Network Time Protocol) is a simple protocol designed to allow computer equipment to keep an up-to-date time clock - it’s done by a handful of hierarchical “time servers” around the world which individual computers are supposed to indirectly connect to to update their time. I say “indirectly” and “hierarchical” because the availability ot so-called “Stratum 1” servers, or those time servers at the very top of the food-chain is quite limited, and normally are only connected to by time servers further down the list.

On Saturday night, I was in London in the audience for the filming of an episode of new(ish) comedy quiz show, Petrolheads. Neil Morrisey is host, with Chris Barrie and Richard Hammond as team captains. It’s aimed at being a “Have I Got News For You” style quiz show in a car perspective, but it’s really more “A Question of Sport” in a car perspective. Moderately funny, and entertaining to see filmed. The usual routine is that whilst the crew and celebs are getting ready, we get the pleasure of a warm-up chimp, the type of idiot you’d expect on the Friday night at Butlin’s.

I was going through some old emails and came across this. It’s pure quality and deserved posting. In memory of Ronnie Barker. RIP. This was originally shown on BBC TV back in the seventies. Ronnie Barker could say all this without a snigger (though god knows how many takes). Irony is that they received not one complaint. The speed of delivery must have been too much for the whining herds. Try getting through it without converting the spoonerisms [and not wetting your pants] as you read …

Amongst the multitude of annoyances that I’m putting up with in Visual Studio 2005, one small thing is they’ve removed the ability to assign an imagelist to the new toolstrip, via the designer. So you can do it; but only in the code (i.e., in the form designer generated code that you’re not supposed to touch). What made me chuckle though was a discussion about it on the MSDN forums, and why you should use the image property and not the imagelist anymore…

Guernsey is just about to have a debate about sewage treatment (Guernsey currently discharges raw sewage into the water). SAS (Surfers Against Sewage) are trying to persuade the States to take their responsibility seriously and to implement full sewage treatment in the island. It’s a bit embarrassing, isn’t it, that Guernsey has been pumping out millions of gallons of sewage each year (about 1.5 billion gallons will be discharged into the water over the next 12 months according to SAS) while Jersey has had full UV treatment for years?