Had a luverley lunch in Florent with Tricia today, in some of the spare moments she had between the rigours of an extreme programming project. Extreme programming, for those of you who don’t know, is where you write code with two people – one person doing the actual typing, and the other just watching and thinking about whether it’s the right way to do it. One of the side effects of this, apart from being extremely tiring, is that you have to all work at the same time – so Tricia ends up with a very short, pre-defined lunch hour.
During this lunch I had a realization – next year is palindromic. Yes, 2002 is the same backwards as well as forwards. For some reason this got me very excited but for why I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s because this is the second palindromic year I will have seen, the last being 1991, and the next isn’t until 2112 with the one before that being 1881. Strange how your mind can fixate on these things.
Today was also the first day of the Internet World show in New York. This was highly unimpressive, with absolutely nothing managing to catch my eye. Even the quality of the free crap they were giving out was mediocre at best. Ah, for those halcyon days of mundo VC cash making for piles of cool branded toys. My old friends AccuWeather were there so I had a quick chat with some of them, as well as hanging out around egg solution – Jon’s company that makes a panoramic lens for digital cameras. Their stall was regularly the busiest which was very impressive given how quiet the show was.
The subject of bank balance addiction also arose. A friend of mine now absolutely must check her bank balance online every morning without fail. I used to be much the same with ATMs, constantly checking my balance before I took any money out. Luckily I’m not more blase about it all, but checking your transactions online is a great way to feel more in control of your finances. When another friend told me of a scam happening on the west coast with HSBC members I was able to immediately check that my account was OK, which it was. Very comforting. Also extremely useful when you have a bank account in a foreign country…
ps, I now have some new pastry recipes to try out. This will be aided by the purchase of some proper butter rather than the usual, plastic American crap that most delis sell. Add ‘butter’ (and other unhealthy snacks) to the list of things I like about Britain!