Books, cakes and... is anything else required?

So yes, the weird cheesecake was very yummy though it's definitely getting a base next time. Baseless things are just poor imitations of real, and important, things - like accusations. Sorry, that's not actually my joke, my colleague sort of said it and it seemed too lame to pass up! Anyway yes, it was pretty good though I don't think it was my best thus far. I shall make my unbaked version and compare ;)

Books! I am participating in the book exchange as suggested by Robin, a person I only heard of through Kristi - because she blogged about his book exchanged... Circles within circles - or something. Anyways, I am now an exchange partner with Marilyn and because I'm terrifically efficient (for once) I have decided on, paid for and shipped the book she's getting. I love you Amazon! It was tough deciding though, which is why I suddenly noticed it was five past eleven, I was distracted by comparing books. I seized upon the idea of Tom Holt - who I have slandered recently I know but he will always be a love of my life so... whatever! And then I wasn't sure which one I should send, then I wasn't sure if I should send any of them but I was so trapped in the genre (of wacked-out fantasy comedy fiction) that I couldn't think of anything else. But then I did so it's all good :D

Still on the book topic; I am currently reading "Gargoyle". Yes I bought it 'cos it looked pretty. Actually I also read the back - just other authors' comments - but not the inside which is where the actual outline was... D'oh! Anyways I started reading it and it was, uhm, dragging a bit. Kinda all over the place (intentionally) and there was *far* too graphic a description of burns. I read a few reviews online, some raving the others... not so much. So I was not particularly looking forward to the next installment (I read before I go to bed) and it was really great actually. I don't know if my hopes had been trodden down or I'd gotten past the point of no return and realised that I didn't want to but I really enjoyed it. So it's going well. Very very weird though. But I think I understand why the word "redemptive" was used so often in the reviews! Actually I should have saved for my looooooong ferry trip back home! Ah well, I'll just have to buy another book ;)

Work was... weird. Ewout and I decided to do some coding and finished a whole bunch in one go. Shockingly fast. But we can't test it 'cos for some reason the server that's running it is trying to run a method that hasn't existed for a month and never existed in the class that's being run. If you understood that I'm sure you can feel my pain, if not consider yourself lucky :D Anyway so that was stressful and weird, then the test server went down and then the production server flushed our current live database, not great! But we had cake which made it better! Still, if we test our code and it works then Ewout is going to have a very short internship. We haven't much else to do except reproducing the same stuff again and again and if we can do it in about three hours (including panicking about the weirdness) then we're going to power through the rest of the carriers like nobody's business. Of course we still need better test data and stuff but certainly with FedEx we shouldn't have many issues because they just use a table - incredibly simple to parse!

I also sorted my music collection today. I had loads of music I'd pilfered off a friend a couple of years ago and it's been sat on my hard drive in badly named albums with useless titles since then. So I sorted that out; the songs mostly had artists and albums so it wasn't too hard really, just lengthy. But yeah now I can listen to all the music in windows media player which somehow knows the names of all the tracks and I'll change all the names appropriately and then I'll put them in iTunes and it'll be sorted!

Anyway, enough of the geeking out. Possibly dinner time, I forgot to make myself some *again* and then bed. Night night.

13 sleeps till Christmas!