Mike's musings

No laptop

On a better note, the cooling fan arrived for my graphics card. I was right: it _was_ overheating. Now, however, I can run it at 1600x1200 and it works like a dream. No problems at all. Quake3 Arena and Civilisation:Call to Power both play very nicely, thank you.

I also spent some time today playing with Eclipse. The last time I used an IDE (not counting the marvellous emacs, of course), it was Visual Studio, about 6 years ago, and I hated it. And it was by Micro$oft. So, when I heard about Eclipse, which is a graphical IDE aimed at Java development, and also open source, I thought I'd give it a go. I've been rather impressed so far, but the best feature (which was hardly a surprise, given the people using and developing it) is that you can use emacs keybindings for the editor. I may have to do the odd bit of Java coding here and there for PoCs, example integrations and the like, so I thought it was worth a shot. New tools usually slow productivity down for a while, but this has already increased mine, so I'm pleased.

A few weeks ago, I got my parents set up with Skype video, and today, we tried it for the first time. Jo thought it was excellent - the most interesting thing is how little she's fazed by it. I think that if you're presented with things when you're young enough, they don't seem wondrous: just part of everyday life. We hope to use it quite often from now on, to keep in touch with them.

Ordered some books for ERMC last night, which should arrive in the next few days, so it's going to be back to the grindstone pretty soon. I've started to miss it, actually, so it's no bad thing. On a relevant note, I've volunteered to do our group worship on the Friday of the summer school, so I need to put some things together. I'm planning on a cut-down BCP evensong, with some good music to go with it.

# posted by MikeCamel @ 7:50 pm