The [correct] rules of Calling Shotgun

Sionide has listed the rules of shotgun, in his recent blog entry. I'm afraid that whilst I mostly agree, there are a few "mistakes". As such, I hereby post the correct rules of calling shotgun, in order of priority.

1. You must be able to see the car in question.
2. Shotgun cannot be called whilst inside a building (unless you are in a multi-storey or underground car park.)
3. Shotgun cannot be called in advance, only whilst on the way to the car for the journey.
4. Automatic SWMBO shotgun is a given if the female in question is a recognised significant other of the driver, but she must not abuse the privilege and only call it on roughly one third of all journeys.
5. You cannot declare shotgun if someone has previously declared shotgun for that journey, providing;
6. On the call of shotgun, the driver can call reload, this means that all calls of shotgun before that are void and the first person to call shotgun again gets the seat.
This can be used when there is a simultaneous call and the driver is unsure of the outcome, also a shotgun has two barrels so a reload can only be called once.
7. When simultaneous shotgun is called, and reload is not considered, there is then a foot race to the passenger side door from the all the people who called.
8. Once shotgun has been called and decided for the front seat then back left and back right can be called, thus leaving the fifth person to travel in the middle.
9. In the instance that the normal driver or owner of a vehicle is drunk or otherwise unable to perform their duties as driver, then he/she is automatically given shotgun.
10. In the instance of both the normal driver and the owner of the vehicle being unable to perform, the owner is automatically given shotgun.
11. Once the journey is under way, the person occupying shotgun must not fiddle with the radio.
12. Shotgun overrules dibs, bagsy’s and all other calls!

New Year Resolutions

Something most people will agree on, is that when you're faced by a great unknown, is that it's scary or exciting. Personally, I'm absolutely petrified. I do enjoy my job a lot, but despite working with some really great people, it can be rather mundane from time to time, and it isn't always challenging. As such I've decided that I'm going to start Open University next year, as well as do a few vendor specific exams (including my LPIC-1). The reason I've not been able to do it until now is that there's just something in the back of my mind, that tells me that I'll fail.

My current level of fitness is also something that scares me. Don't get me wrong, I'm not fat, infact I'm still underweight for my height (probably about right for my build), but my fitness is questionable - to say the least. Late summer this year, I started going swimming with my girlfriend but we slowly stopped going together, and going by myself was rather boring. Actually, that's a complete and utter lie. I was intimidated by my fear of getting into that pool alone. So there's something I want to work on. Perhaps jogging early each morning?

I'm also going to try to stop pushing my friends away. Over the last few months I've recognised that I'm increasingly alone, and that without my girlfriend I wouldn't have any one else, outside of work, that I regularly see. Sometimes I enjoy it, and even crave it. But other times, I just cannot bear it. Working from home has put this into perspective. Granted the guys and gals I work with really go out of their way to stop these sort of problems, and we've got meetings / outings booked up well in advance for the coming year; but sometimes it's just not enough.

As sad as it may seem, I'm going to try and spend a little less time with some members of my family over the next few months. I've realised I'm trying to fill in for my Dad, but it's only making me unhappy as I just can't do it without thinking that he'd be disappointed in me. His perspective radically changed when my Mum passed away and I truly didn't understand, until this evening, just how much he was right. You need to live life as you want to, and make sure you enjoy it. He spent his life looking after people to the point of not living for himself, which he just couldn't sustain over the years; which only caused disappointment to others in the end. I can only hope that I can be half as kind, but not take it to extremes.

So there are my resolutions. I was hoping to pop a [lame] screen resolution gag in there as well, but considering the max my 2 screens can get to is 2560x1024, and that I'm currently running at that, it would be rather tricky.

Ungrateful?

Apparently you can kick a gift-giver in the face these days. I have the feeling that the union and workers are missing the fact that Christmas bonuses are not obligatory.

MVC for the web

For ubiquitous reasons, I've been considering doing a fairly substantial project in PHP for general release. As an effort to produce some "nice" code, I've been investigating pre-existing MVC frameworks in order to "save time" and "effort".

When it comes down to PHP5, there's basically 2 reasonable ones available:

Now I have issues with both, and the long and short of it is that I'd love to cherry pick the best bits from both, but I don't really have that sort of timescale.

Therefore, it's a question of who do I trust more? Zend, the people behind PHP (urgh: I won't go down that route in this entry) with a framework that does a lot of what I want, but isn't mature (and as such is constantly changing), has a number of features I'd like to use in Incubation, and has questionable documentation? Or pMachines (Code Igniter); the library with the pMachines license, but with a mature API which would need more effort to bring upto the level I want it?

Having played briefly, I actually prefer the Zend Framework so far, but I'm starting to wonder if I've mentally talked myself into that rather dark hole with the time limit in mind.

OpenID

Simon Willison has been pimping openID a few times in the last week and does a pretty good job at describing what it is, and how it works.

What concerns me is that it's coming across as a bit of a wasted effort, to this cynic. The .NET passport generated by Microsoft was supposed to be the big effort at making everything work with consolidated login credentials, and I fear that its failure has tainted the one-stop-login shop, especially now there are things like autocomplete, credential vaults, and so forth.

Time will tell.