Juggling, AQ Test, GMail and Llamasoft

OK you try and come up with one snappy title that encompasses all those topics ! It's been a rather good day so far..it's "Bring Your Kids To Work Day" here. Apparently it was on TV last night and in the papers, but we only watch what the Tivo records and we get our news from the net, so I only found out about it when I got to work and saw large numbers of tiny people looking bored :) Can't really blame them though, can you ? An office is a pretty quiet, sterile environment filled only with the joys of the mind (for those who enjoy their work !) and clockwatchers.

So being of a juggling bent I thought I'd liven things up a bit and impress some eight year olds with some juggling skills. They enjoyed it and asked some pretty good questions too. The bottom line is that the lad Matt is outside my office door throwing balls around like there's no tomorrow and shaking the floor as he leaps for each off-target throw. It's good to pass my obsessions on to the younger generation :) Actually he's picked the basics very quickly, but his sister Amber is a little younger and hasn't got the accuracy needed to do the throws - she's having fun though, which is the important thing. If you want to give it shot, it's pretty easy to learn to juggle.

I got one of those google email accounts where you get 1GB of email and they get to show you ads based on the content of your messages. Google owns Blogger, the company that provides the storage and tools which build this blog, so they offered me an account. I'm not planning to use it yet though, because it's taken a while to get my current account working the way I want it, what with the necessity of training a spam filter, building folders, getting into people's address books etc. I might start using it for something or other though.

The AQTest is a measure of of where you lie on the Autism Spectrum. I scored 31, which apparently is borderline autistic...well, actually it means if I *did* display any sort of behaviour ("Get out !" "Gotta watch Babylon 5 !" "74 toothpicks !") that looked too Rainman, this test result would reinforce that. Luckily I seem to be pretty functional anyway, my weird behaviours being confined to watching the same tv shows over and over and over (Red Dwarf, Blackadder) and listening to the same albums for weeks at a time (XTC ! The Church ! Madness !) :) Leave your score in the comments so we can all point and laugh.

Lastly, a link to celebrate the work of Jeff Minter, who surely scores higher than I do on that test. He's the last of the one-man games programmers who gave us spotty anoraks something to do with our time and computers back in the eighties. His games usually features sheep, camels, llamas and other random ungulates and seizure inducing lighting. He's working on a game called Unity, which is the primary reason I bought a Nintendo Gamecube last November. This link goes to his potted history of Llamasoft, the company he founded. I think it's very interesting and should appeal to all of us who know what its like to get *really* into games.