Grey Stripe

Just one more day of work to go, and then six days off over the Easter weekend, followed by a three day week and another long weekend. To say I'm looking forward to it would be an understatement on a scale hitherto unimagined in the span of human history. Or something like that.

My nerves were jangled somewhat last night by having to hunt and trap a rather large house spider in the bathroom at two in the morning. It's unusual to see them so big at this time of the year - I'm starting to worry that come the autumn we will seeing Shelob style monstrosities clomping through the house in search of prey at odd hours of the night.

Talking of clomping monstrosities, the boy seems to be consuming bandwidth at a prodigious rate by the simple expedient of playing Warcraft whilst simultaneously watching (or rather listening to) YouTube videos in the background. I'm still not entirely convinced that his Vista pc hasn't got some sort of malware running in the background as well. In other clomping monstrosity news, the girl is back from Uni tomorrow for the Easter break, so her usage will need to be monitored as well, also. Where are the modern parenting manuals that advise on network management policies, eh?

Yesterday's OU work included reading an article about the development of Linux as an example of collaborative development. It seems that volunteers (and Torvalds himself) were motivated partly by the desire to get recognition as being clueful hackers from their peers and also by the need to produce a useful operating system that they wanted to use themselves. Fascinating stuff, and interesting to compare and contrast with companies like Microsoft who have draconian management policies and still churn out bloated and fundamentally broken code.