This person is very angry about many things. He’s very clever, too. But mainly angry.

Two things. First: last night, I had a dream. This dream, at some point, involved a bunch of my friends going off to a rehearsal of Nayf, The Musical. I remember there being at least five songs, one of which was a re-imagining of Debussy’s “Girl with the Flaxen Hair” entitled “Boy with the Golden Hair”, and another one (I sadly don’t recall the tune) was called “Mad as a biscuit”. I even stole a glimpse at the sheet music, but sadly didn’t recall any of it well enough by morning to write it down.

Second: In a weird piece of synchronicity, there was a feature on Today about a new Radio 4 programme concerning the worst musicals ever made. They reckoned it was probably “Sister Bernadette”, which ran for only two weeks in the West End, and featured a vision of the Virgin Mary represented by a large polystyrene ring wheeled – by hand – onto stage on trucks, and had songs that sounded like they’d been written by a bunch of schoolchildren chanting in the playground. I reckon even Nayf would have a hard time outdoing that, to be honest.

Sunshine – yay. No wind – boo. English weather really needs to get its act sorted out – what’s the point in it being lovely and hot and sunny if there isn’t also a decent breeze as well? Bah.

It’s apparently perfectly okay for them to show pictures of members of another country’s Royal family dying on TV, but showing pictures of their own war dead arriving home isn’t allowed.

(courtesy of lyle) From the Media Guardian (requires registration):

Richard Desmond, the proprietor of the Daily Express, launched an extraordinary tirade against the Germans yesterday when he accused them all of being Nazis as he goosestepped around a boardroom to the astonishment of fellow newspaper executives.

People present at the meeting said Mr Desmond – who dropped out of the race to buy the Telegraph after balking at the asking price – had at one point strutted up and down the room holding his fingers to his lips and giving stiff-armed salutes in emulation of the scene enacted by John Cleese in the TV sitcom Fawlty Towers.

Also at BBC News.

Browsing round the Visual Studio.NET site after that last post led me here, which is a surprisingly fascinating (for a geek) set of blogs written by people involved in development stuff at Microsoft. There’s a lot of stuff there, but it’s interesting just to dip in and out, and see if there’s anything that catches your attention.

With Windows applications, whilst big bugs can be a serious hassle and put a hell of a crimp in your day, I don’t come across them all that often (touch wood). The things that do cause me to shout and scream and grind my teeth in frustration are the little tiny niggles which occur often, and aren’t a serious problem, but are enough to throw me off my train of thought or put a sudden stop to those nice, productive flows of work that happen every now and again – the kind of bug equivalent of a charity woman turning up at your table in the pub asking for money for horses, or something – kills the mood immediately and it takes a couple of minutes for things to get back to normal again afterwards.

My favourite bug of this variety is the one in Visual Studio.NET (and – don’t get me wrong – I really like Visual Studio; things like tab-complete on method names, tooltip parameter lists, lack of having to write makefiles, a very powerful debugger, good, integrated help, etc, all make the life of a developer so much more pleasant and productive) which means that, every so often, it will freeze up and do nothing for a couple of minutes. It always recovers, but it takes sufficiently long that it’s not just a case of take a deep breath, wait a couple of seconds and continue, but it’s equally not quite long enough to justify getting up to make a cup of tea or something.

So, what little niggling “undocumented features” make your life a misery?

There was supposed to be a review of Norah Jones’ gig at the Manchester Apollo this morning. Unfortunately, someone failed to deliver on their offer of free tickets, and so the missus and I ended up at home drinking tea and watching University Challenge instead (I knew the answer to three whole questions this week, including at least one which wasn’t about science. I’m so proud.)

Anyway, I vaguely recall being told that I’d have loads of things to write about today, and the law of sod therefore dictates that I can’t remember a single one of them. Never mind.

Excerpt from today’s big list of people who’ve annoyed me:

• Every single person on the M56
• Especially those who change lanes without indicating
• And lorries who pull out to overtake the lorry in front of them because their speed limiter is set a whole 0.2mph higher than the one in front, blocking two lanes of the motorway and ensuring that the 70 year old doing 50 miles an hour in the middle lane is shoved to the outside an holds the entire carriageway up
• The inventor of the alarm clock. Thank you very much. Now I have no excuse for oversleeping

It looks like she’s managed to blag the two of us (plus a friend) free tickets to see Norah Jones tomorrow night at the Apollo, so maybe she’s not all that bad after all.

“Why do I never get chatted up by pop stars?”

Edit: Or not. The gig is in less than two hours, and there is a distinct lack of ticketage around here. Useless unreliable pop stars.

Her: “So, we’ll see you in Trof shortly, yeah?”
Me: “Okay.”
[me trundles off to Trof and waits about outside]
[she doesn’t turn up]
[me phones her]
Me: “So, um. Where are you?”
Her: “We’re not in Trof, we’re on Solomon Grundy’s.”
Me: “I’ve been waiting at Trof for ages.”
Her: “Yeah, we left there and came here instead.”
[words failing me, I go home, which I at least know doesn’t move around randomly without telling me]

Yes, I do love you really. But you know how I hate people changing my plans without telling me.