...so I read your blog.  If I didn't know better, I'd say you were having a mid life crisis.  But the subject is so limited in scope that I know that's not the case.  It seems like you're just fucked off with the culture you inhabit, and need a change.  I won't pretend to be able to offer you any advice, as the situation is completely specific to you, and your life / desires / beliefs etc.  Its an interesting situation to be in though, to go back and question the things you did when you were younger, and question the environment you inhabited.  Me, I'm not perceptive enough to be in a situation like that, I always take people at face value.  That has been my undoing in the past, and gotten me into more trouble than it was worth.  It took a bad split with an ex for me to get seriously introspective and start to question things.  That capability has gotten better, and worse over time, but I guess I'm just not the kind of guy to dwell on things.  That may be why I usually do so well in work, relationships and friendships - I don't question things that much.  Its not that I can't, just that I don't.
::sigh::  I hate Fridays, they drag on forever.

Is it just me or is has slashdot recently been doing stories that are out of date?  There was something this morning about personalised google, which was released last week.  The review of Star Wars ep III was two days after it was released - given the audience I would have expected a review at 3am after a midnight showing.  And they're also linking to some really crappy content lately too.  I can't find anything specific on there today, but I've come across a couple of links that were at best slightly relevant to the story they were supposed to be backing up.

Star Wars in 84 minutes.  Must get out of here...

I picked up a new Hauppauge PVI TV card last week, and Windows Media Centre.  I have used a TV card in my PC for years now, as we don't watch enough TV to actually require a seperate screen for television.  I have to say, I was blown away by Windows MCE.  It simply rocks, which surprised the hell out of me.  To skip back a week, we went to see the Microsoft Digital Home, of which there is a  partial review here, and the technologies were based around Media Centre and everything you could do with it.  It was pretty gripping stuff, even if they were showing off microsoft technologies in a microsoft environment demonstrated by microsoft trained personnel.  
Anyway, I picked up the new TV card to run this, and it rocks.  As well as being able to record straight to disk, I can time-shift (pause live TV), and record a program or the entire series at the click of a button on the remote. Awesome.

So, I have this blog... in work.  Its a typical community blog, with many users and many departments.  I've just rolled it out, and so far it works really well.  The problem is that my boss asked me to do something today that I can't do really easily.  He wanted me to see if we could segregate certain departments from being seen by other departments.  Now, on the face of it, this shoulsn't be too much of an issue.  The problem lies in that up to now I had been developing this blog from the perspective of using a "select * from blog where {filter} order by {order} {sort}". Depending on whether you are logged in or not, and the criteria you specify, {filter}, {sort} and {order} are changed.  Now, there doesn't seem to be a very easy way to select entries from one table based on criteria specified elsewhere and display them in the kind of page I have built.  It CAN be done, but I'd have to re-engineer the page to use a datagrid or a repeater, and I just don't have the time for that.  ::sigh::  I guess it'll get relegated to version 2.0.  I hate not getting things done quickly.

So today I started looking at the Flickr APIs.  There's some interesting stuff there actually, and it might be worth while looking into ways to use it.  I'm going to have a little play with it for a while before I decide what I'm going to do.