Steampunk R2D2 - I want one!

I saw this Steampunk R2D2 a couple of years back in Boing Boing and wanted it ever since. I wish I knew how to make it or convince the person who made it to sell it to me. I love steampunk everything!

Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

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This is one of my favourite poems. It's probably Shakespeare's most well known and loved sonnets. I will never get sick of reading it and I still recall the first time I read it which may have been in English class in high school thinking how beautiful it was and dreamily hoping I would meet someone who would woe me with poetry... ahhhhhhh!
Anyway, here is a nice reading of it.

Enroute to Kandy

Another beautiful photo.

Beautiful Picture

This gorgeous picture taken from Sirigiya is from a photo blog I saw when I was looking for Lankan landscapes to paint.

Game of Thrones - Can hardly wait..

I finished reading the books months ago and loved them (except maybe all the Cersei viewpoints in 'A Feast For Crows'). I was surprised how many of the characters I managed to keep in my head, but I still missed a few connections here and there. Its only after you read all the blogs about the books that you discover some of these obscure things.

The HBO series was very well done I thought. Amazingly close to the books in many regards, now when I think of the characters I am imagining the TV series actors rather than my own little creations in my head. I remember thinking when I first saw Daenerys that the version I imagined was way better than that. Unfortunately I don't recall what she was like in my head at all now.

I don't know how I can wait for possibly years for the next book and even series 2 isn't due until April next year. I will probably have to re-read some of the older books. For now I'm resolved to re-watching series 1 and reading the production blogs for series 2. Yes, I know I am sad!

What it means to be a professional developer

I read this article "Keep Your Workbench Clean! Code Quality & The Professional Developer" today. It has some interesting concepts about what a professional developer should do. While there is nothing new or revolutionary about what it says - I mean we should be already doing this - but I liked the whole carpenter analogy.