All around good bastard Ocker and MS Enterprise Server guru Angus Logan has decided to drink the kool-aid.

He's off to be a Tech Specialist with MSFT.

Well done bud!

Rod Drury wants a new Knob.

One of my mates @ e-Media had a knob like that.
It was certainly big... and it flashed when you turned it.

I have a different Knob. Mine's got buttons and all sorts. Quite nice really.

I'm am ^&%&*%ing sick of the Latte Revolution.

These days when I go to a restaurant or cafe it seems that rather than being served I must hang around twidling my thumbs while the swarms of staff, you know the type that such places tend to employ, swoon around the La Cimbali or Astoria doing everything BUT being useful and of service to me. Is it too much to ask for some god damn service! I know that coffee is cool and trendy. I know that there are a good group of slutty little souls who will shag a Barista, self styled or otherwise, on sight. Hell I even know that people regard coffee making as a 'profession' now. But if you ask me, professionals see that their customers are served and happy and frankly this ain't happening.

Craig Ebert of the BNZ takes the Govt. to task over the real root causes of inflation. Well worth a read.

http://www.bnzmarkets.co.nz/downloads/public/22059_0.pdf

“

OK... so some of the Korean Dev community have put together a VS2005 rap...

Check It Out!

I laughed my ass off!

http://www.microsoft.com/korea/events/ready2005/vs_song.asp

OK.

So a wee while back I posted about moving into an Intensity phase.

Here is an update to that.

1. I've not managed to nail the 2 a day exercise. But, I have significantly increased my total exercise time. Mainly by getting to the gym early in the morning for an hour. I've been pushing my legs quite hard on Monday mornings which means by Wed morning I need to aquajog for some active recovery.

2. So that carries on to the more weights. I'm lifting much bigger weights and slightly lower reps. Have dropped back from hitting 20 reps in the 1st set to more like a 15,12,8 set pattern.

3. Supplementing is going well. The Thermogenics took a bit of getting used to again and the creatine has wacked on some serious water weight (like 4 kilos). But, I'm pleased with the supplementing regime. I fell like a million bucks most days and I'm nialing some hard morning gym sessions.

4. My eating has not changed a great deal. Slightly better at making my own lunches (generally Chicken breast and salad sammies). Have been MUCH better at eating fruit. Doing at least 2 pieces a day which is a major change for me- loving apples at the moment. Mmmmm... big juicy apples.

Weight this morning 104.2. Now this is up on pre creatine levels but given that when I started the loading phase I bounced up to almost 106kgs I think I'm still well on target for sub 100kg by Xmas. I really have been stripping it off over the past few weeks.

So, all in all good progress.

My recent training calendar.

My intensity grah showing much more time being spent in the yellow and red zones and less 'junk miles' in the grey zone.

O)K... so Phil came back and commented on my post from yesterday....

One suggestion was to support mapping between tags. I still have issues with ontological mapping like this as I think that it remains both error prone and a time consuming PITA. But, I did some thinking while abluting this morning (the little boys room is a great cognative stimulant) and I reckon that we must be getting close to being able to draw inference mappings from real world data.

What do I mean from this. Well. Google has a whole schwag of information on various sites around the world that would, IMHO, cover pretty much every conceivable topic. One would think that they should be able to use their Googlebase to build some sort of inference engine that would give a ranked inference between potential tag terms. So, from my example yesterday, Canoeing and Kayaking would sit very close together on the inference list. Thus tag ontologies and the mappings between them could become a fuzzy concept and we could use fuzzy algebra to help us build systems around them.

I played around with this sort of autmatic inferencing in music files in my final year AI paper @ varsity. Used Self Organising Maps to cluster similar music. Google could use some sort of Neural Net to cluster key words out of their database. Then this cluster map could be used to help map between concepts in a fuzzy fashion.

The advantage of this approach is that these maps could then be represented to the user in 2D or 3D space and coupled with some funky zooming could be used to help solve the UI problem that Phil talks about.

Phil Cockfield has been writing quite a bit on tagging recently.

He's currently talking about tagging emails at source rather than destination.

This is all well and good except that to work really well we need to either

a) Share the same set of tags

b) Alow the sender to 'pollute' the receivers tag list

And of course the whole semantics issue comes up....

For example if someone from the UK tags an email with 'Canoeing' I might miss it because I'm only interested in Kayaking.

I heard about the death of Rod Donald as I drove down the Clyde hill on the way back from Queenstown.

Very sad.

As a libertarian I have a great deal of respect for many green policies and, of course, a great deal of disdain for others. The thing about Rod Donald though was that he wasn't a typical politician- he had principles and he genuinely stood up for them. I think of all the politicians in the house left or right, up or down, his Green collegues included, Rod Donald had to be about the most uncompromising of these principles.

Anyway. Linz has written a bit on his passing and it sums up my fealings fairly well. http://solohq.com/Articles/Perigo/Daily_Linz_18_-_Rod_Donald,_Green_Convertible.shtml

OK.... so wiffle has ben living in Wellywood for the past six months. Of course I am lonely... and of course we text each other a lot.

I hope her new phone supports Blouetooth becase I might buy here 'The Toy'...

“The Toy is a hi-tech vibrating bullet. Connected to a mobile phone with Bluetooth it becomes an intimate, silent connection between two lovers, regardless of distance. Custom designed for your pleasure, it is intelligent, sophisticated and invented for bliss.

The Toy is worn internally, linked to a mobile phone and controlled by sms text messages sent to the phone. Once read, the message is transported automatically to The Toy, which turns it into vibrations - with a huge range of movements, depending on what you have written. Just say what you feel, The Toy will do the rest.”

Via DPF

Had a morning surf session @ Do Little Do Nothing (Kauwarau River, Dog Leg Run) on Sunday morning. Herewith the photos.

Some rock towers @ the takeout. Wish I had my SLR and 50mm f1.8 for a better depth of field.

Me looking bright and 'butt' bouncy......

Me doing something in the foam pile. I have no idea what... but it must have been something cool.... honest.....

Nikki having a romp.

Nikki spends some time in the white room......

Robin throwing down a Helix.

Nikki putting the pedal down.

”Back Up!”

Robin Blunting.

Liz out on the green

So you have an ordered list of things you want to put into two columns via XSLT.

I've always done this a very hard way in the past using recursive stack popping logic.

Here's a super easy way to do it.

<tr>

<td width="50%" valign="top">

<xsl:apply-templates select="item[(position() mod 2) = 1] " mode="child-categories"/>

</td>

<td width="50%" valign="top">

<xsl:apply-templates select=“item[(position() mod 2) = 0] " mode="child-categories"/>

</td>

</tr>

Now this will be about the first and only time I post a friendly link to a Christian Web SIte.

But, one of my team mates here @ Kognition is a keen member of the Christadelphian church here in Dunedin and has put together a pretty kick ass wee site for his church in ASP.NET 2.0. He reckons it's childs play to use.

It even picks up the bible readings off a web service!

Anyway... take a look. Feel free to ask in the comments how any of it was done.

Be sure to check out the Joseph Movie:

“just for a little fun, one weekend we decided to travel down to Gore and film our rendition of the famous Bible story of Joseph.”