Minimal

Damien Hirst, eh? What’s he good for? Popped into a small art gallery in Harrogate yesterday, intrigued by the notice proclaiming an exhibition of said artist’s work. And what did I see? Lots and lots of ‘paintings’ of concentric circles. Give me a pen and a set of compasses and I could knock one up in a few minutes. And I wouldn’t charge thousands for it.

On the other hand, the rest of the gallery was rather good, offering complimentary coffee and introducing me to the work of James Naughton. The dramatic lighting he captures in his landscapes is really quite something. The paintings are also quite deceptive. Stood at a distance of, say, 10ft away, they appear to be quite highly detailed. Close-up, however, all brush strokes are fairly sweeping and there’s really not as much detail as you’d expect. They’re definitely better appreciated at a distance. Sadly for me, they’ll be staying distant — £800+ is way beyond my budget.

At work recently, I’ve been evangelising the humble dialog box approach to the design and testing of UI elements. After a bit of teaching via osmosis (pair-programming), we’ve pretty much adopted it as a standard practice. Tonight, however, I discovered I’d been doing it wrong all along. Not massively wrong, but enough to turn the design paradigm on its head and leave it feeling like a compromise. And my team-mates had accepted it — eek!

I have to say, I feel like shit.

Not only did I design my handicapped humbleness into various dialog boxes, I based an entire application architecture around it. And promoted it as the architecture for many of our future apps. Despite it requiring significant effort, I think I even got people to believe in it. To now find that I’ve led valued friends astray feels awful. For people to trust you and for you to admit you’ve failed them is not nice.

To make matters worse, I leave the team for a different project next week. I just hope I get a chance to put things right first.

You’ve got to feel sorry for Jonathan Woodgate. He’s yet to play a single game for Real Madrid and now it looks like he’s out of action for the rest of the season. They’re even speculating that his injuries (yes, plural) “could jeopardise the defender’s career”.

Poor bugger. He’s a quality footballer and both Real and England will be much the poorer in his absence. We Newcastle fans, however, while sympathising with him, can count ourselves lucky we got the £13.4m we did. I still hope he can get back playing sometime, but it’s looking more and more like England’s got another Garth Crooks to lament. I just hope he can do better interviews. ;)