« January 2005 | Main | March 2005 »
February 23, 2005
Shut the door, paint the windows black
This from an MTV.com article on HST's suicide:
The way he actually cranked out the copy, as he said in a 1974 Playboy interview, was quite basic. "One day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore: You shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were — the writer."
It parallels my experiences of writing software pretty well. Programmers block, perhaps. Hours, days, weeks of pointless staring at a screen, pecking listlessly at the keyboard, randomly clicking in the IDE with the mouse, drinking too much coffee, engaging in displacement behaviours (like blogging) followed by a deep visceral anger at yourself, the computer, the world for being so useless. Sometimes, pulling an all-nighter recovers (or partially redeems) all that ... sometimes. Never tried painting the windows black, though ... hmmm ...
Posted by daen at 02:16 PM
February 21, 2005
Delphi 8 update 3 fixes .NET Framework 1.1 SP1 problems
Out-of-the-box, Delphi 8 VCL.NET projects do not compile under .NET framework 1.1 SP1. Period. It's taken me half a day to track down the official Borland fix for this, which is in Delphi 8 update 3. Bad bad bad.
Posted by daen at 01:42 PM
Hunter S Thompson is dead
"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro" -- Dr Gonzo
Posted by daen at 01:18 PM
February 08, 2005
Ellen MacArthur breaks round-the-world solo sailing record
Ellen MacArthur, the diminuitive English yachtswoman, has completed her single-handed round-the-world voyage in record-breaking time ... 71 days and 12 and-a-bit hours. Over 27,000 miles, that's an average speed of 15 miles per hour (13 knots). Unbelievable.
Posted by daen at 12:26 AM
February 06, 2005
Ernst Mayr is dead
Ernst Mayr has died, aged 100. He is well known for his 1942 book on Systematics and the Origin of Species, in which he argues for a model of speciation based on geographic (allopatric) isolation. Initially badly received, Mayr argued the case for allopatry until the critics shut up.
Darwin once wrote: "It's dogged as does it... I have often and often thought that this is the motto for every scientific worker." An appropriate thought for a man who has been described as the Darwin of the 20th Century.
His Harvard obituary is here and his WikiPedia entry is here.
Posted by daen at 03:12 AM
February 01, 2005
Ivan Noble dies aged 37
Ivan Noble, BBC News science and technology writer, has died aged 37 in a London hospice.
For over two years, Ivan kept an online diary describing his battle with cancer for BBC News Interactive's readers.
Thousands of people e-mailed the website to share their experiences and thoughts with him.
He is survived by his wife, son and daughter.
Posted by daen at 01:17 PM