This evening, we were walking along the drive. It was dark, so I had a headtorch on, and I made a spooky discovery.
You see, the drive is bordered on both sides by farm fields, with a row of bushes and small trees marking the boundary. And the field on one side is full of all-black cows.
The spooky thing is that the cow's eyes light up in a torch beam in the same way cats' do. As in, at the distance away they were, the torch beam didn't light the cows themselves up any more than a faint black sillhouette, but there were several pairs of bright glowing eyes - a disturbing distance apart, leaving no doubt that they belong to something quite larger them myself - peering at us through the hedge.
I'm going to see if I can find a way to get a photo of this rather alarming effect!
I've noticed that some of the best applications I've used (or designed) have been ones with a decent plugin architecture.
In designing applications, I've often noticed that as soon as we add a plugin system, we start to notice that large parts of the app could just be turned into plugins; and if we get time to do this, before long, we have a very simple and generic 'core' with lots of plugins.
This is good, since it tends to reinforce the internal boundaries in the application. It ensures that there aren't any unexpected dependencies between modules.
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There's a Pick Your Own place near us, just by the Shurdington A46/A417 roundabout, which I sometimes drive past on the way to or from Cheltenham. And for ages, I've been intrigued by their "Maize Maze Open" sign.
I'm rather fond of mazes, so this morning, after dropping Jean off at her nursery, we stopped off at the maze on the way back.
Life being rather busy at the moment, I rarely have time to do something fun except from making empassioned blog postings about technology when I should be going to bed (or when I should be working, so I end up working when I should be going to bed), so I was rather excited about this outing.
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Once I lamented that I don't like carpets because I'm always trying to clean liquids out of them, while knowing that I'll never truly succeed.
Well, with a lingering smell of kitten urine in the lounge becoming a bit too much to bear, and Jean tired of being stuck in her playpen rather than being allowed to crawl free, we went out Thursday morning and splashed out on:
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Integrated Publishing, as far as I can tell, are an outfit who get the US military to release their training manuals under Freedom of Information Act requests, then (due to US laws that government works are in the public domain) sell them as books.
They have a load of cool information about all sorts of topics, from the nuclear interlock system in the missile handling systems of a naval ship to electronics, maths, and the disturbing M18A1 claymore mine.
It's worth a browse.
Alaric | alaric | 
Mon 18th Sep 2006 10:22 pm | 
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