Christmas Party

We had our Christmas party today at work. Good food, good company and no photographs, because I was having such a good time I forgot to take any.

Optimus Quest Winner

Well, I’ve had a fun weekend going through all the Optimus Quest entries. By the end I’d had loads and it has taken a while to take a look at each one. Quite a few people had submitted multiple ideas, which was great but meant even more stuff to go through. For each of the entries the questions I considered, in order, were:

• Can this application actually be made to work on the phone?
• Can I see anyone using/playing the application?
• Has it been done before on Windows Phone?

That narrowed things down a bit, and then I moved on to picking a winner from the ones that are left.  Which was very, very, tricky. At the end I settled on “Magic Finger” from Marcin Limanski. A very nice idea that I hesitate to describe in too much detail in case someone else takes it on and gets there first. If you want to contact me Marcin we’ll see about getting the phone sent to you.

The Bad Taste award goes to “Poo Shoot” from Marc Cutsforth which was pretty much as disgusting as the name implies. The Most Amusingly Useless award goes to “Spinning Bow Tie” from ‘Ignorant Pom’.

Honourable mentions go to Emma-Jane Alexander,  Beverley Usher, David Parker, Simon Johnson and Jason Wakefield for workable ideas that really should be taken further.

Thanks to everyone who took part, and thanks again to Sheryl at LG for supplying me with such a nice prize to give away.

Animal Husbandry

I got to feed the pigs today. We keep chucking hay in for them to use as bedding and they keep eating it, which reflects something of a lack of forward planning on their part. Good thing they are hardy.

The water in their bottle freezes solid every night. Pig management tip: Keep duplicate water bottles in the kitchen so that you can just swap them for the solid ones each day, rather than spending 10 minutes holding the frozen ones under the hot tap and making yourself late for work.

Hammering and Sawing

Why is it that the thing you buy to replace the thing that broke is a quarter of an inch bigger all the way round? When the thing in question is a door lock this results in a bunch of hammering, chiselling and swearing.

Not necessarily in that order.

Anyhoo, the front door now both closes and opens (as opposed to only doing one of those things easily). We actually convinced one unfortunate guest that we had automatically locked him out. Kind of like a “Reverse Hotel California”.

The Optimus Quest Nears its End

You have have just over an hour to get your ideas for Windows Phone applications to optmiusquest@robmiles.com. Best idea gets a shiny LG Optimus 7. Find out more at http://www.robmiles.com/optimusquest