Sunday 18 January 2009

Deadly Serious This Time

At 32 Great Queen Street in London, there is a restaurant called -- imaginatively enough -- 32 Great Queen Street. We just ate Sunday lunch there; the confit duck was probably the single best dish I have ever eaten (and I have eaten at 1-Michelin-star places before, if not 2- or 3-). You know the bit in Ratatouille where the critic gets hit between the eyes with 50 years of poignant remembrance, all at once? It was like that.

My starter, a brawn and ham hock terrine, was less inspired -- and, in my unlettered opinion, should have had the mustardy stuff on one side (not drizzled over the top) -- but the puddings more than made up for it: both the chocolate tart and the Muscat caramel cream were delightful.

Guest ale was pretty nice too, I thought, but I don't actually know a good ale from a hole in the ground, so YMMV.

You can book and you probably should, although it didn't quite fill up while we were there.

Thursday 15 January 2009

More foolishness; now with added drunkenness

Well, it seems my last post was a year ago, and it therefore seems likely that I may actually be dead before I get around to making another. I wish this was a joke.

However, with that sobering realisation comes a silver lining: that, equally, I'll probably be dead before I notice anyone's response to my rantings, so I may as well assert away, as foolishly and offensively as I please. So:

1) Explicit static typing may be all very well if you're coding tedious predictable crap that's been done a million times before, but -- if you're trying to do anything even slightly interesting or worthwhile -- it's an ugly and stupid waste of your short and precious life.

2) Don't bother to disagree: my AcceptFeedback method only takes FawningAdulation instances.

3) No, seriously, don't bother. All the FawningAdulation class can do -- and, indeed, all it needs to do -- is tell me how awesome I am. Also, it's 'final' (that's in Java; 'sealed' and 'totally fucking useless' are the synonyms in C# and English), so you can't even subclass it and make it do something useful.

4) No! Shut up; I don't care; I designed this system perfectly in the first place, and the only reason you're complaining about the feedback API is because you're too stupid to use it properly. Go away.

If you take my point: good. If not, read this post again and again, and again, until it seeps in.