Matthew Knott

With the birth of my second child imminent I'm starting to take a little more charge of my life, but still keep getting knocked back as I go.

With the baby due Wednesday, 2 weeks paternity leave is just around the cor ner. After getting really down about a few things this week I've decided to try and take control.

For starters, I've finally listed my car on eBay, or rather I did, because it sold within an hour of going. Unfortunately, this was to a 0 feedback account who has not yet acknowledged the sale, so if I have to re-list the car, I will be posting that gobshites details online. If he lived closer I'd go visit him along with a copy of what he agrees to by clicking buy now. The bastard.

Also as of Thursday, I finally decided to stop worrying about what's happening with some solutions I've developed but not been paid for, and start making enquiries with the middleman, and also looking at what I can do legally if things don't work out. Either way, I'm going to be developing my own SharePoint webparts now and selling them directly. It just feels good to be doing something about it!

Anyway, all these are to try and stop me worrying so much about how I'm going to cope with 2 children and 1 income! People say you need to break these problems up into smaller ones and deal with them one bit at a time, but sometimes, a problem can seem so insurmountably huge that sometimes there is no conceivable way to break it up, in programming terms it would be a divide by zero error, in quantum mechanics terms its a Dirac wave equation for a Eigenstate, in baking terms it's a donut with just a hole.

Other stuff

In lighter news, I've been trying the beta of Star Trek Online. It's actually rather good. There's a few issues, mainly lag and mission bug related, but generally it's been good fun. It took a while to get familiar with the experience and skills model, but I'm on my way now. I really can't wait to get a bigger ship though. It would also be great if you could explore your ship, certain key areas anyway. The ship to ship combat is very easy to pick up, you concentrate more on piloting the craft and managing energy levels than having to place each shot. 

Ground combat is okay as well, the controls and abilities are greatly simplified, all interaction is handled with either a double click or the F key, you have 3 attack methods, that's about as easy as it gets.

Back in the real world, I've actually picked up a book for the first time in a long time. I actually had reading anxiety before getting back into it, fearing I would repel the words somehow and couldn't take it in, but things are going well. The book in question is "Unseen Academicals" by the wonderful Terry Pratchett. I was a huge discworld fan once upon a time, but the stories suddenly didn't seem to have the same feeling anymore, starting with the wee free men, which I really couldn't get into.