Here comes the rain again
Falling on my head like a memory

It’s a dark and dismal day. Walking into work this morning I attempted to use an umbrella to keep me dry. I battled with it for twenty minutes not even giving up when one half of the material was no longer attached to the spokes. I’ve always hated umbrellas. My mum bought me my first umbrella when I was about four years old. It was blue with a frilly edge and she thought it was really beautiful. I, on the other hand, thought it was horrible because I abhorred all things girly. I don’t know where I was when it started to rain but I remember liking the blue rain. Of course the rain wasn’t really blue, just coloured from the dye that was running down the handle and dripping off my fingers. It seems that my mum had bought me a parasol and not an umbrella.

The Pareter Principle explains how successful results come from 20 percent of your actions. When you calm down your mind you develop 20/20 vision to see which actions are your 20 percent priority actions. Then you can redirect the saved 80 percent of your time and energy into accomplishing this 20 percent in a faster, smarter way.

– How To Change Your Entire Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing, Karen Salmansohn

Last night Mark Jason Dominus spoke to Belfast.pm. If you ever get the chance I would recommend that you go hear the “Twelve Views of Mark Jason Dominus”. This is a series of twelve lightning talks given back to back. As each talk is only five minutes it’s easy to stay interested and if you happen not to like one, which isn’t that likely, you know that he will soon be moving on to the next topic. My favourite one was “How To Progress” where Dominus gave tips on how to improve. I won’t put any of them in this post as I don’t want to spoil the talk.

But eventually I came to accept the truth: I am overweight. This is not my fault. My body, without consulting me, has been converting the food I eat into fat, as opposed to something I can actually use, such as toothpaste.

The problem with human bodies is that they’re based on a design that is eons old. Our bodies believe that any day now, we’ll have another Ice Age, and there won’t be any more food, so they need to store up lots of fat. So while our brains are in the 21st century, wanting desperately to lose weight, forcing us to eat salads and engage in bizarre cult activities such as ”Pilates,” our bodies are back in 12,000 B.C., thinking: “I made six more ounces of fat today! Bring on the glaciers!”

– Dave Barry, He ain’t heavy — he’s fat

Why are video players so badly designed? I think it’s some sort of male conspiracy. What could be more fun than mocking a woman when she can’t work out how to use the video? I’ve never had a problem with the video before but tonight I needed to re-set the time. There was nothing on the control panel or the remote that seemed to do this. After 15 minutes I gave up. Beaten by a machine.

I’m responsible for organising speakers for Belfast.pm. This didn’t go particularly well in October but things are looking up for the rest of the year. On November 17th Dave Cross will be speaking on Tieing with Perl and in December Mark Jason Dominus will be the speaker. Belfast.pm, like most Perl Mongers groups, doesn’t have any money. We are only able to get speakers like Mark because the company I work for puts on training events in Belfast featuring some of these speakers – which really helps with covering the expenses. This year we are hoping to run a three day version of Mark’s CGI Programming with Perl. Once I have that sorted out I’ll pick a topic for Mark to speak on at Belfast.pm.

Tony and Marc were chatting last week about earworms – songs that keep repeating over and over inside your head that you just can’t get rid of. I’ve been plagued recently by Daniel Beddingfield’s “If You’re Not the One”. This song makes me glad that I’m not twenty and single. When I was single I used to get tapes sent in the post from boyfriends, ex-boyfriends and boyfriend wannabes. Watching High Fidelity made me realise that some people take making compilations really seriously. Sometimes some of these were quite good. But the song that made the most appearances was Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting”. Why did anyone think that I would actually like that song?

Today I imagine they would be sending me “If You’re Not The One”.

The art of time management is usually a matter of ranking your items by importance and urgency, and prioritising according to how high things appear on each axis. But most books, articles and seminars on the topic stop there. Spending a few minutes each day doing something that is neither particularly important, nor particularly urgent, but that has a beneficial outcome, has value.

– Tony Bowden, The Value of Tiny Tasks

I’m really sleepy today. Finding it very hard to concentrate in work. I’ve spent most of the week out of the office preparing for an exam. It’s been years since I’ve had to sit an exam and I found the whole experience rather strange. My first problem was trying to write for three hours! I don’t really spend a lot of time writing anymore. I do make handwritten notes of meetings but these don’t compare to writing essays under pressure in an exam. I wanted to have a word processor. I also have more problems with the concept of exams than I’ve ever had in the past. I’m studying law and it seems that to pass the exam I need to learn lots of different Acts of Parliament, EC laws and cases. The exam was weighted much more strongly towards memory than application. What is the point of this? If I want to know the details of “the rights of migrant workers’ families” I will look it up. It’s so easy to find this information once you have some idea of the sort of thing to look for. Do lawyers really have to know the “Sale of Goods Act” off by heart to be able to give people advice on consumer problems?