Newstocks

Bertha

Satellite image of Tropical Storm Bertha at 2.45pm today, about thirty miles off Bermuda's eastern tip. Thank God this thing had weakened from a hurricane, or we'd be having a rough time of it. As it is, it's just a very rainy, blustery day.

Suggestions wanted

After spending the last few weeks building an application to manage the bookings and admin for Mandy's swim program, this weekend it finally reached beta quality. Mandy is now using it for the bookings she's taking for August, so I'm hoping that there are no nasty bugs in any of my code that might cause any data loss.

I'm still struggling to come up with a good name for it though. When I wrote a similar application for managing the stock at Godet & Young I came up with the name GYPSUM, which a) sounded cool, b) was the name of something associated with a hardware store and c) actually stood for something (Godet and Young Product and SUpplier Management).

The best I've managed so far for Mandy's program in SIMS (Swimming Instinct Management System), but I don't really like it. It's not the name of anything associated with swimming, doesn't really sound that cool (needs more syllables, I think) and it reminds me too much of a crappy video game.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Centipede!

Had a nasty fright while we were washing up in the kitchen this evening, when I turned around and saw a centipede scuttling across the floor.

I'd heard about centipedes in Bermuda before, but this was the first time I'd seen one alive. Based on the ones I'd previously seen dead outside, and pictures like this and this, I thought that they were pretty small. But it turns out that all these were millipedes. This sucker was completely different - red and fat and about 6 inches long. It looked very similar to this.

While I was freaking out and wondering how to stop it getting anywhere near Aidan's room, Mandy grabbed a knife from the counter and chopped it into little bits. I really hope there's no more where it came from.

Lapped

GRID is still frustrating as hell. Spent yesterday evening racing again and again on one track, in attempt to complete the objective of finishing at least third in my class. It was the same as one of the tracks in the demo, which I had finally managed to win a race on, so I was hoping it wouldn't take me long to complete the objective.

Wrong. It took me a couple of hours, in which time I suffered a humiliation even worse than coming last: I was lapped by all of the other drivers.

For completing the objective I scored 145 reputation points in Europe, bringing my totals to 200 in the US, 145 in Europe and 180 in Japan. Doesn't sound too bad, until you realise I need 80,000 points in each region to progress to the next level of the game in that region.

I'm going to stick at it, but if I don't improve soon, I fear I'll be abandoning GRID for another game that's a bit more fun.

Another broken promise

I've just sent this letter to the editor regarding the Government's free child care bill, which was introduced in the House of Assembly yesterday:

"Dear Sir,

I was intrigued to read in today's newspaper that the PLP's free child care will only be available to Bermudian parents with a gross income not exceeding a "maximum prescribed amount".

While restricting free child care to needy families may be an entirely sensible thing to do, it is nevertheless not what the PLP promised before last year's General Election. On 13 December 2007, the PLP published a statement on its website which said, "The PLP will provide free DayCare for all Bermudians. That's a big difference between us and the UBP. The UBP will only provide day care for so-called 'needy' families."

It seems that the PLP is not so different from the UBP, after all.

Phillip Wells
St. George's"

I pointed out the contradiction with statements coming from other members of the PLP at the time, but the party stood by its statement.

Just another example of the mendacity of our current Government.