I'm continually impressed by brother Joseph's side projects, and never more so than by this Ballmer-themed t-shirt he has made. With the job and the kids, where does he find the time?

I'm unemployed. I worked my last day at Tesco.com on Friday. It has been a great four years.

This gives me about nine weeks of notionally free time before I start in Redmond, although I'll be up to my ears in thesis work for most of that. Nonetheless, I'd like to take the opportunity to declare this The Summer of Patrick.

Just stumbled across this interview with Kieran Mockford, MSBuild PM, ex-Msft UK and all-around good guy. And if you've exhausted IT Conversations, there's more here, including a great intro to Software Factories by Steve Cook.

This is the world's funniest post containing the words "L2 cache replacement disciplines". A sample:

"I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for your feature, and you curse the performance team. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That your feature's death, while tragic, probably saved bytes. And that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves bytes. "

Kind of reminds me of QUOTES FROM THE MOVIE "JAWS" IN WHICH "SHARK" IS REPLACED BY "JIMMY PAGE".

I'm currently working on some demonstration code for my thesis, contrasting my ConcernMaps project with other approaches to separation of concerns. I had planned to use the Feature Exploration and Analysis Tool (FEAT) as one of my comparisons, only to find that a new and improved version was released on Wednesday. It's called ConcernMapper. Argh.

It has been very quiet on the blog front recently, for several reasons. Firstly, we are moving to Seattle in October so I can start work at Microsoft. I'm not absolutely certain what I will be doing yet, but the general idea is that it will i. involve developer tools and ii. be fun. It is great to have it all finally decided so I can concentrate on finishing my Concern Maps project over the next couple of months.

More recently I spent four days in deepest Poland, in a placed called Torun attending my cousin's wedding. As far as I can tell Polish weddings are endurance tests to see just how much vodka, coffee, meat and dancing the human body can take (the answer is about 12 hours). I won't go into too much detail, but the take home points are:

1. The countryside, buildings and people were absolutely beautiful and I'd recommend a visit to Poland to anyone. Unless they didn't like vodka and/or meat.
2. There is an Wild West themed restaurant in the town square where it is possible to order a meal "with clapping" for an extra 5 zloty - the waiter told us this was a 'suprise'. It turned out to be the entire restaurant staff yelling and clapping as they served the food. We were all suprised.
3. Sample menu items at this restaurant: 'Tortured frenchman captured by Sioux' (some sort of drink), 'Jack London's mood with a glint of white fang in his eye' (meat?), 'Killed bison playing dice for his soul, so that his flesh remains in one piece' (not bison), 'Juicy manitou cult chopped with a tomahawk by Alan Pinkerton at high noon', 'Scumbags in Fort Knox uniforms'... I could go on, but you get the idea. Wacky.

We got back from Poland in time to show my family around London for a few days before the terrorist attack on Thursday. I was impressed at how Londoners remained calm in the face of such terrible events, particularly Ken Livingstone's speech.

On the uni front, I finally got my Whidbey beta 2 build finished at 1am last night. Tonight I'm playing around with the Class Diagram Power Toys with a view to using an API to create class diagrams (rather than just building the CD XML myself). This has presented some interesting challenges which I'll post on once I have them beaten.

Lastly, my latest Amazon shipment is the new Spolsky book and Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, both look good.