the corner office

Today saw me return the gym after far too long a break. Didn't do anything intense... just "get the blood flowing" stuff. It's a bit depressing how far I've regressed since last year's diligence. I suspect I'm going to have some seriously tender abdominal muscles tomorrow. But as always, it's great to feel revved up after a stretch of exertion.

Ronwen rented Kaena on DVD this afternoon. Lousy story, but absolutely stunning graphics. I haven't seen too many animated movies, so maybe this kind of stuff is par for the course these days... but it's a long way from The Secret of NIMH, that's for sure.

Wasted nearly an hour this evening trying to figure out why a sample app from one of my textbooks wouldn't compile. Couldn't for the life of me figure out why a simple rand() was causing a linker error in this app, and only this app. After spending a lot of time with Java and Eclipse recently the whole makefile palaver is a bit of a jolt again. I wasn't really paying attention when I typed in the source code, and I was looking at rand() in one place but not noticing the rand() a few lines up, which was a typo. Aaargh! The usual lesson learned - when you know things don't make sense, they probably don't, so give up and try something else for a while. That could be summarised into this maxim:

If Googling for your error message returns a page or less, you should probably work on the assumption that you're doing something stupid.

The CD ripping continues - I'm past the A's and onto the B's. I'm having fun doing some genre-bouncing, especially with some of these CDs not having been listened to in half a decade or more. So after revisiting my entire Bauhaus collection and then ending up with Chet Atkins' and Mark Knopfler's "Neck and Neck," things can't get much weirder. (Well, they can, 'cause Syd Barrett's next, but that's tomorrow's story).