Don’t know how I’d missed this one… Today is apparently “Programmer’s Day” according to Engadget!

Programmer’s Day is celebrated annually on the 256th day of the year, which happens to be today — so reach over and give that special computer scientist in your life a big bear hug, flowers, chocolates, or a simple “thanks” for making Engadget (and pretty much everything else we care about) possible. If you’re a programmer, grab another Red Bull and get back to work, playboy; we’ve got a list of bugs about a mile long and they’re not fixing themselves.

So, happy programmer’s day! Enjoy it

Ok since Marc pinged me on this and I’m currently not exactly busy I thought I’d share 8 random things about me with you all:

1. I’m currently sitting in a Coffee Republic in Reading (UK) town centre. What am I doing here apart from drinking latte? Well I’ve just downloaded one of the VS2008 express edition betas and I’m messing around with that. 

2. During my formative years I was a fairly successful choir singer! I’ve performed at the Royal Festival Hall and even got through to a last round audition for a part in Joseph and the Technicolour Dreamcoat. Oh how my life would be different if I got that part

3. A few years ago I was fairly heavily into fishing and wrote a monthly article for a well known (if you move in those circles) carp fishing magazine. Does the weirdness ever end.. I also had several endorsements with major bait and tackle companies.

4. My middle name is Joseph. It was going to be my first name but in the end mops an pops decided to name me after a dog. Nice.

5. Um not really about me but my brother Mike just got a job at Apple. Cheap Apple stuff here I come!

6. I’m waiting for my girlfriend to finish work and we’re going to see the Simpsons movie. I absolutely love the Simpsons, almost as much as South Park. I regularly ponder who is the greatest character of all time: Homer or Cartman?

7. During secondary school, I was assigned some homework for English class to write a poem. Unfortunately due to prolonged bouts of Mario Kart I didn’t get it finished in time and instead plagiarized the lyrics to a Smiths song How Soon is Now? and claimed it as my own. A year later our school published a book of the best poetry from select students and yes, you can guess what happened. ”My” poem was published and pretty soon the school was flooded with reports that the book had ripped off copyright material. My defense was that I was never asked if I wanted my works published. Ho hum!

8. Last but certainly not least. My fab girlfriend Becky is pregnant with our first child! Woohoo! Accepting suggestions for names

Sweet, use Sopcast to stream live premier & champions league football games (among other things) for free. Handy if you don’t have satellite or cable TV!

The VS.NET webform designer,
Was engineered by a bunch of part-timers,
I clicked ‘design-mode’ and it ate all my code,
I can’t wait til the day I retire

I was having an interesting conversation with a few well-weathered ASP.NET developers and it wasn’t long til the discussion came around to the VS.NET webforms designer… Between the four of us, we’d never used the web forms designer for any length of time and summarily dismissed it as fairly lame for several reasons. I know that the 2005 designer is much better but our experiences were centred around the 2003 designer, this being what we’re all still stuck in unfortunately (but representative of a good percentage of ASP.NET devs’ I’d assume).

Is the designer any good for anything other than management demonstrations I wonder? Not in our collective experience Can anyone admit to using it on a regular basis?

nintendo superfan

Now don’t get me wrong, I want a Wii (hmm, sounds a bit dodgy)… But perhaps not as much as this guy.

Yes, I’ll be at Microsoft UK for the foreseeable future (OK, until 15th September) working on a snazzy WPF proof-of-concept application for my fabulous, bleeding edge technologist employers BBC Worldwide

At times I might be running Ubuntu Linux on my MacBook from within the Microsoft campus, so if you don’t hear from me within a few days, contact the authorities (or the Linus Torvaldes Liberation Front).

Yes it really is a iPod toilet roll holder, stereo dock hybrid. Shame they didn’t call it the “Toilet Dock”… Get it? Nevermind