In no particular order;

The aftermath of the Hollywood writers strike

It's not that I was opposed to the strike in any way, I fully backed it. But being somewhat addicted to TV it is now very frustrating that so many shows have either been a) dumped, b) curtailed or c) confused through a large season break. The next autumn season cannot come round quick enough.

A frustration that was good to write but on reflection removed

Writing things down, or typing them up (why is writing "down" and typing "up"?), is a very cathartic thing to do. But looking back on the one that was here (work related) I felt it best that I remove it. Will write about it at a later date.

My bowling scores

Since I started my current project I have missed many weeks of bowling and it shows. Recent nights have shown and improvement and my 4 Week Moving Average is now almost back to pre-project levels, although that's still not great. I really do feel like I am improving but that I just can't get past a certain point. It's also a downward spiral in that my frustration has an adverse effect on my game. As with life in general I find it hard to push work out of my head and focus on what I am doing. It's hard to bowl with code compiling in your mind.

Conclusion

All in all there's not much there really. Life is pretty good at the moment, although there's a couple of frustrations that I don't want to write up here (inevitably the bigger ones). If I can get my current project complete, my personal project moving and one or two other things finalised then life will be sweet. Not much to ask for is it :)

Here is an automated post of the latest bowling scores. 3 Game Weekly Average 4 Week Moving Average

Update: You'll notice that I have fixed the calculations behind the 4 week moving average chart. They were way off and not showing the latest results. All fixed now, as you can see by the way I am rapidly catching up to STS (Seven Ten Split) Onepin! ;)

Here is an automated post of the latest bowling scores.

3 Game Weekly Average

4 Week Moving Average

It's been a very long time since I wrote anything substantive on this blog. Even the rolling scores updates have been far too few, gaining me a not insignificant amount of complaints from my fellow rollers, well deserved of course.

The reasons for my absence have been many, and all totally uninteresting to you dear readers. Well all that is except one. My current project at work which has been most consuming for me. It has been on a crunch timescale since day one, and client extensions have not helped. However, the interesting point is that it has finally got me back to, officially, coding at work.

Like a long lost friend with whom I have been reunited, coding and I have had much to catch up on. But, also like seeing a close friend after a long break, most has stayed the same and the familiar rhythm of friendship is soon resumed.

This has all been helped by some great personal projects that I am also undertaking in my, somewhat limited, spare time. One of them I cannot speak about just yet, expect more some time in the summer. The other though, might have come to your attention tonight if you read this blog via a feed reader like Google Reader.

If so you may well have notice an auto generated post for the latest rolling scores. It was a test, and a nicely successful one at that. I have finally admitted that I am never going to be organised enough to keep up to date with adding the rolling scores to the nasty spreadsheet I have and generating/posting the graphs to my blog. So instead, like any good developer, the desire to be lazy is the mother of invention.

I have written a little web app which will allow me to post the scores from my mobile phone, on the lane! It then saves these in MySQL, generates and posts the blog entry which includes 2 links to on-demand generated graphs of the 3Game Weekly Averages and the 4 Week Moving Averages.

The latter will be a little different from how they were before as they are now a true moving average of the raw data, rather than a moving average of the 3 game averages.

It's taken about 5 hours work to put together so far, most of which was learning the API's for JFreeChart and ROME. Obviously this is not the end. Time allowing it will eventually allow for some analysis of the scores, e.g. lowest deviation etc. Plus access to the all important, and embarrassing to me, raw data.

All going well the first live post should come after tonight's games, which are doubly important as we have decided to reset the no-show average to our personal 3 game averages from tonight. Not looking good for me, the current no-show is 120 and I've been scoring under that for some weeks (mostly the reason we are resetting them). Ah well, enough of these warm up games, on with the real deal ...

Big update, depressing for me though. Really need to improve as I only have a month before the company bowling night.

Here are the 3 Game Average and here is the 4 Week Moving Average charts from the last couple of weeks.

Here are the 3 Game Average and here is the 4 Week Moving Average charts from the last couple of weeks.

In the spirit of giving educational gifts that kids don't want, here is fun little quiz for all you Sci-Fi geeks like me.

	I received 72 credits on The Sci Fi Sounds Quiz How much of a Sci-Fi geek are you?
Take the Sci-Fi Movie Quiz canon s5 is

Here are the 3 Game Average and here is the 4 Week Moving Average charts from the last couple of weeks.

Onepin is gaining on Rogue's, once thought unassailable, lead. As for myself, I take some pride in the consistency that can be seen in my 4 week moving average chart. Just need to take the next step.

Loving the new iPod Touch. Does not take too long to get used to the on screen keyboard either. I have spent most of the last few days letting people in the office have a play. I think there will be a few more around there soon ;)

Thanks all who turned out last Saturday, it was a lot of fun. Here's the 3 Game Average and here is the 4 Week Moving Average charts from last week, including our extra Saturday game which went well for me, shame I couldn't follow that through to last Tuesday. Maybe this Tuesday will work out better :)