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I'm just sayin'.

It seems the battle between pirates and ninjas rages on. But after careful reflection, I'm going to have to side with the pirates on this one. While I'm sure ninjas are extremely well trained and very good at what they do, a pirate's life is much richer and freer, and just plain more fun! Ninjas must spend so much of their lives training to perfect their ultimate fighting skills, they don't have time to really enjoy life.

Pirates understand romance. They know how a faded and torn map leading to buried treasure really inspires the imagination. I think this sense of romance comes from living in such harmony with the sea. They know the joy of an invigorating breeze of salty air. What do Ninjas know of joy? Nothing - joy would just be a distraction to them.

The piratical life is very sociable. You live in close quarters with a bunch of friends. You drink a lot (fresh water spoils fast on the open ocean so beer and rum is what there is). Ninjas don't have any sort of social lives - they trust no-one.

You know what else is great about pirates? Prosthetics! Eye patches, peg legs, hooks for hands - you name any body part and some pirate somewhere has an artifical one. Completely awesome!

And for all their talent and training, Ninjas aren't so undefeatable. They can really only win by sneaking up on people or poisoning them in their sleep. A ninja with a sword is no match for a pirate with a flintlock pistol - the pirate would just shoot the ninja dead before he got within a sword's length. And Ninjas' hovering powers? They work great in trees and on ceilings, but fail utterly over water, the natural habital of pirates.

Our cable modem seems to be out. I have Jerry-rigged some rudimentary internet access using some ancient technology called a "modem". It's very slow.

Anyway,

I'm just sayin'.

I've spent the last couple of days reading through the archives of Questionable Content after my friend Christopher linked to one of the strips. I do enjoy a good webcomic, and that is one of my new favourites.

This panel did make me wonder, though, if the author has been spying on Gennie and me:

Now I'm off to read the new Harry Potter book.

I had a meeting with my manager's manager today. Managers' managers at Microsoft like to have a chat with their direct reports' direct reports occasionally to make sure they're happy there, that everything is going to plan and to give them a chance to tell them anything they might not want to tell their managers directly.

(By the way, those of you who don't know where to put your apostrophies, or who get the words "their", "they're" and "there" mixed up might want to study the previous paragraph in detail and bookmark this post for future reference. You know who you are.)

Anyway, most of said meeting went very well - I talked about some of the features that I thought it was important that we implement, and justified these with my theories on how the uses of Pocket PCs and Smartphones will change in the future. However, at one point in the conversation I did a terrible thing - a thing of which I am greatly ashamed. I used the word "paradigm". I couldn't help it. Words were coming out of my mouth, and as the thought formed and turned into a sentence I could see that word coming but could do nothing to stop it. The good, decent part of my brain was screaming "find a synomym, quick, you moron" but I couldn't think of one before it was too late and the word was out there in the air like a particularly malodorous flatulation.

Please comment with your suggestions on how I should atone for this atrocity.