Note to self…

Wow, it’s been a while since I wrote anything and my head is brimming with ideas on things to blog about. Now, I could come up with an army of excuses why I did not blog… such as, “I have moved house” or “I spent time today cleaning next doors cat’s vomit from my path”. But all in all they are just good excuses not to post rather than actual reasons. All of these things have also even stopped me opening Twitter each day. Today I found all sorts of information in there, including the fact that the company I work for, SDL, has taken over Language Weaver. Moments later I found this news in my email inbox; maybe I should work bottom to top on my emails?

Anyway, I wanted to share two things that I wanted to write about but did not get the chance so far (blah, blah). First up is Clone Detective. My current project is undergoing some re-factoring both in approach and content. A natural progression of a project running this long, things change and thus we must change also. One of the things being addressed is the code that has been written and how good it is. In my part of the work on this I came across Clone Detective for Visual Studio; this neat tool discovers how much of your code is duplicated allowing you to see what methods you can merge and how you can restructure the code. In this particular case, 25% of the code was duplicated which is way more than you would have ever spotted with the naked eye. Even if you write great code, I think this is well worth downloading.

Next, for the new house (did I mention that?) I had to install a new wifi network. I opted for a N class wifi network hoping that even poor connectivity would give me a decent connection. The curse of any wifi network is that, unless you are sitting next to the access point, your connection is bound to be suspect. Whilst annoying, a long Ethernet cable is usually allot faster. To make this all happen, I needed to purchase a new wifi adapter and grabbed a Sweex wifi adapter from MediaMarkt. I chose it mainly because the price was right (read: cheap) and I figured it would work just as well as any of the others. Well good news it did! But this tale is not of the adapter itself but what was in the box.

In the box was a note from the founder of Sweex, Leon. It reads:

“I had a dream

Some time ago I had a dream in my sleep.

I dreamt that I was shipping millions of boxes around the world

(which is exactly what my company Sweex is doing).

And inspite of useful products in them,

I experienced an empty feeling in myself.

I sat with the dream for a while and pondered over it.

Then I realized – I needed to fill the boxes with my wish for you.

Here is the content:

“Dear receiver of the box, from the bottom of my heart I wish you a life full of happiness, peace and wellbeing”

Now the boxes are full.

Leon

founder and owner of Sweex”

WOW. As a result, I will buy more Sweex products because, unlike all the other companies out there, it seems this guy cares about me. OK, maybe not really, but at least I was made to feel this way and he also made this more personal than any website could ever do, because after all I had a piece of paper, in my hand, in front of me now, even when the website was closed.

As a result I have made a mental promise to write more notes to people to say something to them, but first I will write a note to myself to write more blog posts!