Matthew Knott

The fact that there have been no British winners of Wimbledon sine 1938 is perhaps a sign of the pressure that is heaped on the home players. Andy Murray today bowed out of Wimbledon in a match he missed too many chances in. Several times he threatened to break the server of American, Andy Roddick, but could not seal the deal.

Roddick was very, very good, but beatable, and it needn't have gone to tie breaker either time, but as we see time and time again at Wimbledon, the pressure hyped up before these semi final games must be excruciating for the players to deal with. Knowing that every interested person in the country will consider you a failure if you do not beat this man that you've beaten so many times before.

Andy Murray has shown himself to be a resilient talent, and will be back next year, and no doubt at least a quarter finalist. He is after all, only 22. Hopefully, unlike Henman before him, he will not deliver years of disappointment at tennis's biggest tournament.

The now surgically-enhanced Llanelli Super-Hyper-Mega star (By Llanelli standards) has contracted swine flu and is in quarantine.

Hopefully she can make it to Parc Y Scarlets in time for pre-season though.

Well, despite a tough two weeks, things seem to be getting better.

To start with I've had a gas / electricity bill in excess of £1000! On top of that, as many of you already know my car died and looked like it may need a new engine. Well, I had a call today, saying that the car is ready to pickup, no mention of cost so I'm assuming it was done under warranty, and wasn't major.

I'll confirm this tomorrow, but it's such a load off my mind now that it's been done and I'll have my car back soon.

Some other things that have been happening in my life then. Well, the biggest thing over the last few weeks is I've been trying to get back into iPhone developing / objective-c by using the Stanford material available through iTunes U. It's a brilliant course, and I've found it really useful. For anyone watching the videos, the course assignments are available here. I have a couple of ideas in mind and I'm really excited to see what I can come up with.

Also, I've started back on the Digita Solutions site, trying to rejig it as a platform for a couple of SharePoint solutions I'm working on casually. It's a nice design and it's fun which is the important thing.

Today, I discovered logmein.com, a web based remote access solution, which works great on mac. This is really useful as I don't have a fixed IP with O2. At least I don't think I have, I've been meaning to checkout the leasing and see how long I've had this IP.

Finally, I created a really simple application for tracking thoughts, and adding to them. Be interesting to see if it helps to resolve problems.

I've written a simple app that gives you 3 sliders to generate an RGB colour.

The code can be downloaded here [600k].

I've now added some simple code to enhance my auto-posting to twitter from the blog. It now tries adding the tags as #links on the end of the post title. This will help with trending plus it's something for me to fiddle with.