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A couple of days ago I got confirmation through that I'm on the creative writing course I applied for a few weeks back. This may seem like a bit of a strange choice, seeing as I'm a programmer by occupation, but English is something I've always enjoyed immensely. I studied English Literature for my degree, along with American Studies, but only afterwards did I realise that pursuing my computing hobby would likely be a more successful career path. The fact that I had a disastrous work experience stint at my local paper as a journalist made the decision easier ;)

I have absolutely no idea what to expect from the course. In my mind's eye I can see a room full of either unsuccessful guys writing war stories or old ladies in their blue rinses and twin-sets who get a kick out of bodice-rippers. I am likely to be wrong on both counts, but it's just indicative of the trepidation I'm feeling. I haven't been in a formal academic setting since I completed my HND Computer Studies in 1998 and I also haven't had a hobby for years that has actually involved meeting people.

Of course, this has only made me realise how poor some aspects of my writing are. This blog is my only real outlet - I haven't actually done any creative writing in years. I've got a few books on grammar and writing style that I should read through again, and I've also just got Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots and Leaves: The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, to tackle my heinous comma and semi-colon usage!

The attraction of the course over some other possibilities at the University is that it will require me to actually produce work and be self-confident enough to expose it to an audience. Also, it's going to get me out of the house once a week and pretty much force me to meet new people, which I really need practice in. Maybe it will improve my technical writing too, which would be useful in my job, but that's a non-essential bonus if it does happen.

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The gadget blog Engadget reveals a likely name for the next Xbox console. See the link below for the full entry.

Currently code-named Xenon, there were rumours that the console would likely be called Xbox Next, which I must admit to quite liking the alliteration of. However, if the Engadget entry proves to be accurate, I think the final name is actually quite clever and apropriate.

Still, it's very likely that we'll have to wait until E3 in May before we find out for sure. If it's true that we'll be seeing the PS2, Xbox and Gamecube successors at the same show this year, I can't wait!

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Although I'm really not a fan of the PS2's looks (the PSTwo is a big improvement however), Sony's PlayStation Portable is a seriously attractive piece of kit. The value pack (PSP, soft cover, crap headphones, remote, 32MB MemoryStick Duo and SpiderMan 2 on UMD for the first million sales) is going to be $250 when it comes out in the US. I haven't read any announcements about the European pricing yet, but it's likely that they'll put it at a point above the Nintendo DS, so as to distinguish it as an upmarket, older-demographic product. Still, us in the UK will most likely be ripped off again!

Check out the link for a blow-by-blow disassembly of this desirable piece of kit. I'm thinking their warranty is pretty much null and void by now.
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The past few days at work have actually been, dare I say it, bearable. The cause of this surprising upturn in morale is that I've been writing .NET code as if it was old-skool Visual Basic 6. To cut a long story short, we needed several hundred classes generating for our performance tests, differing only by a few key characteristics, like class name, file name and a few internal bits and bobs. Doing the generation by hand would have taken an age and been very error-prone, so I spent a couple of days writing tools that did the work for us.

These tools will probably not be used again and they needed to be written quickly, so quality and stability weren't exactly high up on the list of requirements. In the end I churned them out and really enjoyed the experience. When you're working on a large-scale project with dozens of developers and support staff, there isn't a lot of chance for this sort of thing, and it really reminded me of developing VB programs a few years back - design patterns were out of the window, with pretty much all of the UI logic was behind the forms. It was a really fun, iterative process. My perfectionist streak meant that I actually wrote comments and laid the forms out neatly, though - I really need to stop with that whole "good enough just isn't good enough" mentality.

Anyway, it's not often that you get to produce two programs in two days, even if they aren't exactly bleeding edge technology showcases ;)

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In no particular order, my favourites of the moment:

• Skype. Gives you free calls to anyone else with the software, and there are versions of the client for systems ranging from Mac to PocketPC. Even with a cheap-ass headset it's better quality than POTS, and you certainly can't argue with the price. The technology is very interesting too - apparently it uses peer-to-peer for everything from name lookup services to file transfer, as well as routing the call itself. I haven't tried the paid-for service, where you can call pretty much any landline on the planet from your PC for pennies, but if I ever find a great-uncle in the US (preferably old and monied), I'll be sure to put it to good use).
• Gmail. Slick free mail from the search engine gurus Google. This redefines many aspects of the web mail experience, and it just seems to get better the more you use it. I haven't been a member for long, but the no-postback way of working (through XMLHttpRequest calls in JavaScript) is so much more responsive that after a very short time you can't imagine going back to the old days of waiting for Hotmail to redraw its bloated UI each time you page through your spam. Free POP3 access (so you can read your mail through a normal email program on your home PC), keyboard shortcuts (although they're not switched on by default), threaded conversations, and, oh yes, 1000 Megabytes of storage complete the deal. Once it gets out of Beta and shakes off the PR damage that some recent security breaches caused, it will likely become the de facto standard.
• Firefox. OK, a product, not a site, but who would have thought that from the ashes of Netscape's doomed browser would come something as svelte and well-featured as this? It's a revelation. Many features, including the tabbed browsing interface, the cookie management functionality, plug-ins and so on are inspired by other products, like Opera and IE, but the integration here is faultless. I'm pro-Microsoft most of the time, but with all IE's security problems and lack of updates, there's really no good reason to stick with Explorer any longer.
• Wikipedia. 461,000 articles sounds like a lot...and it is. Covering everything you'd expect in a normal encyclopedia and a lot more, it's current, mostly accurate, and - uniquely - if you think you can do better than the existing contributors you can just edit the page you've just viewed. You would think that this would result in a chaotic mess, but it's self-repairing and constantly improving instead.
• The Inquirer. A great source of oft-updated technology news, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. From Mike Magee, previous editor of another great British tabloid technology site, The Register.
• Penny Arcade. Sometimes Tycho's news posts can be a touch pretentious, but you've got to love the comics - Mr. Period and his punctuation friends are my favourites.

OK, chances are I could go on and on about pleasant places to visit in the online world, but I'll pick it up another time.

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