Okay, note to library developers. When you’re providing documentation for your class library, a bunch of pages like:

SomeObject::GetID method

Gets the ID for the object

Does not mean that you have thorough documentation. Seriously. That is all.

This one came up during the drive home from a long weekend up north, while listening to one of those ‘Greatest Movie Songs Ever’ type of albums. They all seem to have Love Is All Around on them; great for singing along to, as long as you haven’t heard it recently. I mentioned to my travelling companions just how quickly it brought up memories of Four Weddings and a Funeral – within a few bars of the opening you could close your eyes and  imagine Hugh Grant’s face in front of you, itching to be slapped.

My fiancée took this to the next level though, as we’d been playing Rayman over the weekend, and one of it’s mini-games involves slapping choir-boysrabbits singing out of tune. The Wii-mote’s got such a nice motion for slapping, including a little noise/rumble when you connect. And so “Celebrity Slap – Wii” was born. All of the most annoying celebrities in popular culture today, moving around the screen. You wouldn’t need ultra-realistic models, just inflated mug-shots on wobbly-headed avatars – it’s the face you want to slap really.

You could have all different sorts of scoring modes: “Slap the Talent/Popularity Stars” – where you have to only slap celebrities who’ve been on X-Factor or Strictly Come Superstar; “Slap the Slappers” – where you have to only slap celebrities famous for their ridiculous love-lives. The possibilities are endless. You’d have to localise it of course, every country has it’s own set slappable figures; you could have a nostalgia version where you get to slap Timmy Mallet and Noel Edmonds and the like, or a music version with Britney Spears, et al.

Sadly though, the copyright and libel issues on this one put me off actually making it, so I’m giving this idea away free to the world. All I ask is that I get a free copy, so that if it does appear, I can have an enjoyable half hour slapping the Gallagher brothers.

Well, a bit of patience appears to have paid off with respect to finding a new office for us. Or at least, a bit of religious checking of Gumtree’s office space section every morning. I shouldn’t really count our chickens before they’ve hatched (as we’ve not signed the lease yet), but the new place is looking good. It’s just round the corner, so still nice and central for all four of us; it’s about half again as big as our current place (although the rent has gone up commensurately); and it’s generally just a nice space for us. As it’s still being renovated, when I went to see it was still somewhat rough around the edges, but that’s just the sort of place I like anyway.

We’ll probably not be moving until mid to late January though, as I’ve yet to get a final move date confirmed. BT and Eclipse assure me that if we give them enough warning then we will be able to switch our phone and broadband over without any hassle, which is nice. Even better though is the ability to keep the same phone number. Not that we use the office line for much except giving us a route to put broadband through, but I like minimal changes. It’s going to be annoying enough handling all the change of addresses as it is.

Still, I’ll be sad to leave the current office, it’s been a good home for the last 15 months. It’s a little hard to remember that right now though, given how cold it is. It will be nice to move to a place with working central heating and some well sealed windows! And of course we will miss the grumpy cat from the courtyard outside, who spends all day meowling loudly because it’s been left outside in the cold.

Grumpy Cat

Mind you, once it’s been let back inside (as I assume it must be occasionally), it probably takes about 5 minutes for it to start meowing and griping until it’s kicked back outside again. Such is the life of an outdoors cat. 🙂