Whitehead reached its ADSL trigger level yesterday, with 250 registrations. We now have to wait for BT to do have a look and enable the exchange. BT can take a long time to do this, so I was pleased when I read that BT in Northen Ireland are faster, so I should be wired before Christmas.

So, I’ve started selecting my broadband ISP by playing with the service provider comparison service at http://www.adslguide.org.uk/.

Karen took me to John Carmichael’s falconry school for a half-day introductory course. It was wonderful!

The day started with John (jr) setting about 15 birds out on little perches, and complaining about the owls. They keep lots of owls because they are very popular (thanks to Harry Potter), but they don’t really like them. Owls, it seems, don’t have great eyesight and aren’t at all wise, so they don’t make great birds of prey. Maybe in an effort to justify his complaints, John (jr) started the flying with owls. The first owl was beautiful, but didn’t seem to want to get off the ground. When it did, it wasn’t interested in food. The next owl was much better, although it wasn’t able to land accurately on my glove. The third owl was the best (of the owls): it flew easily, landed well, and was careful when taking the food.

The Harris Hawk was the best part of the day. We had to carry it away from the other birds before we started. Then John let it go, but it didn’t go very far: Harris Hawks follow their owner. We continued to walk down the road, and the hawk kept us in sight. When I held up some food, it would land on my arm, grab the food, and then fly off to a nearby tree or post. It was amazing.

Karen found a picture of me on O’Reilly, so I’m returning the favour.

It’s not often I want to thank Microsoft, so wanting to do it twice within a month feels a bit strange. But, I’ll do it anyway.

Today and yesterday Microsoft provided lunch for OSCon. Fortunately /I spent the last few years building up immunity to iocaine powder/.

I was never really a frequent MUD player, but I always enjoyed developing: it’s an enjoyable doubly-creative process when you can write code and storylines at the same time. That’s one reason why our extreme programming tutorial uses a simple MUD-like game as the sample project.

I haven’t thought much about MUDs in a long time, but this evening I was chatting with two of the FaerieMUD developers and noticed some /morphic resonance/ when I remembered some of my old ideas. As I listened to the plans for FaerieMUD, they started to sound very familiar. Some of the ideas could well have been copied verbatim from my notes, if I had ever kept any notes. I mentioned this to the guys, and they were amused. I then went on to tell them some of my other MUD thoughts, and it became their turn to feel the resonance.

It was all quite strange, but it’s not uncommon; that’s probably why there are weird theories to explain it.