It looks like Tom Smith is going all new-age on me. Scary ;)

Every cloud has a silver lining apparently.

Certainly, the demise of (or failure to materialise in the first place) of my Dublin job was a blow at the time, but I can take a couple of positives out of it.

Most immediately, it meant I ended up at SCEE, where I am having a great time.

Secondly, it allows me to approach my authoring tools project in a completely different way.

I haven’t given up - far from it - but it’s a spare time only project now (given the amount of spare time I usually have, that means it could easily take ten years). Without time pressures, or anyone else’s agenda, I can do it the way I really want to. Primarily, this means doing it in Dylan.

In fact, I’ve come to the decision that all code that I write in my spare time will now be in Dylan (or Dylan related). That’s quite a bold statement at this stage, and I may live to regret it! Dylan can do anything that any other language can do, but the tools are limited, and a lot of the spare-time coding I do tends to be writing hacks and plugins for other systems, such as Drupal.

Switching to Dylan for everything means I’m going to have to move back ten steps for every one step forward. Instead of writing a new plugin for Drupal, I will first have to write a new Drupal in Dylan :)

At this point you’re probably thinking that I’ve totally lost my marbles. That may be true, but from my point of view there are lots of compelling reasons to go down that route:

• I get to write in my favourite language
• Everything I do (hopefully) moves the Dylan project forward a little bit
• Dylan needs tools… funnily enough, that’s what I want to create anyway
• Every programmer wants to re-invent the wheel. Dylan already has a lot of wheels, but quite a few of them aren’t very round yet! There are many many gaps to be filled - web applications and content management being a big one that springs to mind straight away. It’s going to take me a long time - but what’s the hurry?
• I love learning about new stuff, and I’m sure I won’t stop any time soon, but it is getting damn confusing trying to figure out what to code in… Obj-C? Ruby? Python? C#? D? etc etc etc. Now I don’t have to worry anymore!

Blimey. When I looked at the Norwich team sheet, I thought that we were going to be ripped to shreds. As it turned out, the most surprising thing was how absolutely, utterly spineless Norwich turned out to be.

Maybe they had a massive row on the coach (or with the coach?), or all got out of their respective beds on the wrong side that morning, but with the honourable exception of Dean Ashton, nobody in yellow and green looked remotely interested in winning this game. Ashton was combative, and within twenty minutes or so sported a Terry Butcher style bandage to prove it, but on his own he couldn’t do enough.

QPR played well, but not, to be honest, that well. We didn’t look as fluid as we had against Plymouth, but somehow by half time we found ourselves three goals to the good. Nygaard grabbed the opener with a header, then Furlong nicked the second from a Lee Cook free kick.

At that point, Bircham went off with a knock, on came George Santos, and my heart sank (along with a substantial number of Rangers fans who booed in response to his arrival). Here we go, I thought, time to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory - but no! Play continued for a minute or two, a cross came in, the ball popped out of the box to be met by an on-rushing Santos. Normally George’s idea of a gentle weighted pass ends up in row Z, so I didn’t have much hope - but miracle of miracles he hit it well, kept it low, and it thundered through a group of players and defected into the goal.

Forty two minutes gone… 3-0 up, am I dreaming?

The second half was bound to be tough. Norwich were bound to come out with all guns blazing. Nope. They made a couple of changes, but put in the same tepid performance. We didn’t really look like conceding, or scoring again, and the game played itself out.

All in all, a good performance. I have a few quibbles, but it would be churlish to complain. My only concern? That Santos’ goal might somehow get him back in the team!

Bit late this report…

All the details can be found here.

This was one of those funny games where we played some really nice football, created countless chances, and scored only once. Meanwhile Plymouth had one shot, scored one goal. Arse :)

From a Rangers point of view there were some promising signs. The team looked more balanced at the back, with Evatt and Shittu paired in the middle, and no sign of Mr Santos. Gallen played on the right, which was a little weird with both Ainsworth and Langley warming the bench, but overall it seemed to work. It looked like we’d been working on some specific things in training, with Royce passing the ball short quite a bit. We were keeping the ball on the ground well, playing it around patiently in midfield, and then putting some telling diagonal crosses in for the towering Nygaard to knock down. Unfortunately we just couldn’t convert enough opportunities into goals.

Truly, Lotus Notes is the worst email program I have ever had the misfortune to use in my entire life.

I can’t believe it’s so big, and yet so bad.

The only explanation that I can see is that it exists purely to make life easier for MIS departments, and the fact that it’s a heap of festering turds to use is entirely irrelevant!