Month: December 2006

Sexy Flex!

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I went to a presentation this morning for Adobe Flex this morning that reaffirmed my desire to learn about it and use it. It's a very good application of a RAD platform, but what you can do with it is only limited by what you can imagine. It looks slick and really, really good. In less than 10 minutes, the presenter had a demo of a working picture viewer that allowed you to upload webcam shots to a carousel-like viewer. Impressive.

I already have plans to revamp my own website picture viewer with Flex, as well as recommend it for the online ontology editor we're thinking about at the office.

That's one think about this conference that I'm most impressed with – the amount of new tech that I want to go home and geek on :) Of all the conferences I've been to this year, javapolis is the one I'm going to lobby the most to go back to next year.

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How much to I love my sweetie?

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TTTTTTTTTTTTTHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHH!

And more, really.

She buys me muffins and nice hot chocolate drinks, she thinks of ways to arrange my too-small duvets so that I can get all of my body covered and comfy, and she scares the crap out of me with Tiny Tim impressions from the Christmas Carol.

Life is good right now :)

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I love the UK :)

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Children are taught pole dancing

A Northumberland fitness instructor has defended plans to teach children as young as 12 how to pole dance. Laraine Riddell will start classes in the New Year at a gym in Choppington, in which boys and girls will be taught to spin up and down on a pole.

Ms Riddell insists the classes are nothing but good exercise for children who are at risk of obesity. But the children's charity Kidscape, said pole dancing was traditionally linked to erotic acts in clubs.

Ms Liddell said she wanted to distance her classes from images of naked women dancing for money in nightclubs.

'Fantastic feeling'

She said she had the support of parents who welcomed the classes.

Ms Riddell said: “This is a good way of tackling obesity. It is dancing and it is fun and gives you a fantastic feeling. “I have seen the joy in the faces of children who are holding their body strength up, doing the splits, spinning round and upside down. “The children don't come in with thoughts of strip clubs in their minds.”

But Michele Elliott, director of Kidscape, said the classes were “out of order”.

She said: “Pole dancing is traditionally an activity where women on stage are given money which is stuck in their underwear.

“To teach 12-year-old girls pole dancing is out of order. I am sure pole dancing is good exercise – but so is stripping. After all, strippers have great bodies.

“By all means give the kids exercise, but just skip the poles.”

As a related bit of news, Tesco recently removed a home pole-dancing kit for kids from their xmas toy shelves because of public pressure. Spoilsports :)

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I did it myyyyyyyyyyy waaaaaaaaaayyyyyy

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It's just past midnight and I have finally made it back to the hotel. The good news is that I finally found a cashpoint that gave me euro. The bad news is that I have been properly chastised for being late by getting pissed on. It's raining again and my coat is now hanging up to dry. So much for nice weather for the rest of the week. More good news is that I have successfully made it to the center of Antwerp and have scoped out a few shops to investigate for chocolate products.

We had dinner at a restaurant near the square close to the old cathedral. The meal was good, but we were in this outdoorsy terrace place with heating lamps and disco balls. Two of them, even. Belgians are weird people. I had an interesting evening talking with two guys from Warrick who are here for the conference. They kinda sorta just latched onto our group. They were weird as well, especially one of the two. The sort of person I'd not normally hang out with: bit brash, bit full of himself. Still, the other one was really nice and I spent part of the evening talking about the fun problems of bioinformatics and biology in general. It was fun, really, cause his last foray into biology was a-level stuff (and he's in his late 30s right now) so delving into the complexities of combinatorial interactions, protein families, sequence variations, mixed in with a good dose of IT problems made for lively conversation. The look of abject horror on his face at the state of the problems and the lack of solutions was fun :) It reminded me just how much I love science and talking about it and vulgarizing it to people who are interested but never had a clue of the beautiful, elegant complexities of the system.

I would have been ready to head home after dinner, but being without money, map and not relishing having to ask for directions in pseudo-flemish meant that I had to stay with them while they went for a drink. That part was less fun. They went to an outdoor bar that served mulled wine (yetch) and was full of drunken Belgians (who I think i have mentioned are weird) meant that I got really bored really fast (especially when the other dude started talking about his hobby as a pop psychologist and how that helped him pull birds for random shags – a topic he went into with great gusto). That's when I went exploring the square for cash points and chocolate shops. We're going to go there after breakfast tomorrow and then head directly to the conference.

Now that i have a vague idea where I'm going and have funds to get there by myself, I think I'll have a night on my own tomorrow and come back for an early night at the hotel tomorrow night. As much as I like the guys I'm traveling with, I want some quiet time with to call Katy and then I'll read my book and chill at the hotel for a while.

(PS the title of the post was one of the songs that was playing at the outside mulled wine bar. even more yetch…)

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Javapolis, day 2

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For some reason, I keep waking up really early in the morning. I sleep ok, but I just wake up early. Meh, no biggie. Today was good.

I wasn't able to smuggle out pastries for Katy yet cause we didn't find any shops that were open and sold tupperware on our ramblings last night. We might play hookie tomorrow morning, so I might be able to do a spot of shopping and get her some frorm thursday or friday :) I have however, liberated some waffles for her cause they're individually packaged and won't cream the inside of my bag.

The day's sessions were really good. The morning one was all about tips and tricks on how to optimize java for performance and how to investigate bottlenecks. The afternoon session was about Adobe Flex, which is a codebase that lets you write flash applications that are uber sexay. I'm thinking of adding that to my arsenal. I think it might have marketing potential for my CV for future use.

The amount of stuff they give away in the exhibitor hall is truly shocking. Without trying really hard, I walked away with 6 tshirts, a mug, a tuque, a deck of cards and a pair of boxers. I'll see what sort of goodies I can plunder tomorrow :)

The plan for tonight is pretty much like last night, except with better weather. We're all meeting in the hotel lobby at 7 to go for dinner. I'm still euro-less because of the crap banking of last night, but hopefully a guy here will lend me some and I'll pay him back in pounds when we're back in the UK. It's just more annoying than anything else – I have money, I just can't get at it… Note to self for future travel plans, I guess.

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The weekend, and then Belgium!

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Saturday was a good day, and it wasn't. The rover was booked for its yearly MOT so we drove in to Saffron Walden and, after a few turn arounds, found the garage. The mechanic had been recommended by someone at work and he was going to have a look at the brakes, which had been mentioned at the last MOT, and then test the car. While that was going on, we went window shopping in town and had breakfast at a decent little greasy spoon called Mocha.

The MOT didn't go according to plan at all. when we called the dude to see if he was done, he told us that the car needed work done. a lot of it. It needs a complete new exhaust, two back tires, break pads in the front and possibly shoes in the back. Parts and labour in upwards of 500 quid. That's the bad news. The good news is that he's going to try and give us a good price for all the work that needs to be done, as well as a full service and have it all done by next monday. [In retrospect, that was optimistic as hell as it turned out to cost upwards of 850 quid, which is probably more than the car is worth at this point in its life. Still, according to Katy, it's like driving a new car right now, so at least some good came out of it]

We had plans to have dinner with Phil and Caroline, but it was now rather difficult to get to their place. Being cheeky, I asked Phil for a lift so we were still on for dinner. It was a nice evening, with lots of food and lots (and lots!) of wine.

Another bit of bad news was that we found that it's physically impossible to get a taxi at midnight on a saturday night in the middle of nowhere, unless you've pre-booked it. We hadn't, so after a dozen futile calls, we resigned ourselves to sleep on an inflatable mattress in the middle of the sitting room and Phil would drive us home tomorrow morning in time for me to get my cab to Heathrow and for Katy to go to work.

The morning was rough. I did something incredibly stupid which was to go to bed drunk without rehydrating myself and my head let me know just how silly that was at 5am. Lots of water later and a few advil, my headache cleared and the trip to Heathrow and subsequent flight to Brussels was routine. Once we'd landed, we got our kit and took the train to Antwerp. Hotel check in went surprisingly smoothly and we went to get some food. We found an italian restaurant close by that had good food but a truly weird italian landlord that was just… well weird.

The food was good and plentiful and reasonably priced, so I'm willing to put up with eccentricities. We chilled at the hotel for a bit then went to the conference center to pick up our conference packs and get dinner. We actually skipped dinner cause we were too full from our late lunch, so we only had hot chocolates at a little cafe near the venue.

I'm looking forward to the conference as it promises to be really, really interesting. at the same time though, I wish I was back home giving comfort to the katylady. She's feeling rough physically and low mentally. Her job is stressing her our and putting her in a bad place. A hangover and a dodgy stomach really aren't helping today either. as much as I'm looking forward to the conference, I'm looking back to being back in cambs to be with her :(

The first day of the conference went well. I had a decent night's sleep, given the fact that the bed is smallish, and the duvet doesn't cover me completely. Still, it was ok. Had breakfast at the hotel and we decided to walk to the conference center. We thought it would only take about 10 minutes, but that turned out to be closer to 25. It was a miserable, grey day too. Fun fun fun. The good news though is that the pastries they serve for breakfast at the conf center are simply sinful. I mean… I had 3. I'm a bad bad man, but I couldn't help myself.

In my defence though, it was a good thing because I had to skip lunch because they only served pre-packaged sandwiches with no ingredient labels on them. With all the sugar I had in the morning, I have to say that I really wasn't very hungry by lunchtime.

I managed to snag a Duke stress ball and a raffle ticket from Sun (it's a classic gimmick, they throw the stress balls in the crowd and the people who catch them can enter a prize draw – except that the speakers forgot to throw the thingies during their talks, so I just walked to one of the speakers at the end of the session and simply asked for one :D)

We got back to the hotel and chilled again before going to dinner. With my lack of lunch, I was feeling ravenous. The evening was a bit disappointing. Our guide was a typical man, who was convinced he was leading us to the promised land of good restaurants. After 20 minutes of walking in the rain, we settled for the first one we could find where we could all eat. It was ok. Decent food, but pricey and it took a solid hour for us to get the food after we ordered. When it was time to go back to the hotel, we decided to go for the cab option. It took another 20 minutes for the cabs to arrive. Sometimes, I really, really miss Taxi Co-Op…

Then there's the bank saga… I didn't have time to get any euro before I left the UK so I've been bumming off people here as I only have pounds on me. The night manager told me that there's an ING cash machine “nearby”. It took 15 minutes to walk there in the pouring rain for me to realize that it won't accept either of my cards. I was not a happy camper walking back to the hotel. My coat and jeans are currently hanging up to dry. They should be fine by tomorrow and I'll try again at other banks if I can find any.

I also found out that the hotel wireless network is extremely wonky. For some asinine reason, I can log on correctly the first time I get a new daily access code from the lobby, but if I hibernate my computer, I need to stop the DHCP and DNS client services on my laptop, flush my DNS cache and then turn everything back on before I can connect properly *. Still, it works – which is more than I can say for the wireless at the conference center, which was abysmal. It's almost pitiful, given the fact that this is an IT conference…

Ah well, off to bed now.

* Having said that, it might honestly be my laptop. It seriously need a complete reinstall. It's starting to act truly bizarrely at times…

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[Recipe] Steak & Veg pie (hmmmm, pie!)

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This is one of those spur-of-the-moment recipes.

I had an extra block of defrosted ready-made puff pastry, so I just made a pie lining and cover.

To make the filling, brown 1 pound of lean ground beef in olive oil. Season with thyme, parsley, tabasco, salt & pepper. When the beef is browned, add two diced onions, 3 small diced carrots, half a punnet of quartered mushrooms, one head of broccoli florets and add a bit of water. Cover and let the veg steam until tender (about 8-10 minutes).

Add the ingredients to the lined pie dish. I reused the frying pan to make some thick instant gravy (Bisto granules) and covered the veg/meat with it. Cover with the second half of the pastry and seal well. Brush with beaten egg and cook for 10 minutes in a pre-heated oven at 200C, then lower the heat to 190C for another 25 minutes.

Serve with mashed potatoes and a bit of salad and you have a quick, simple and very tasty meal!

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Parcelfarce…

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We shipped a box to Canada containing xmas prezzies for the folks and the sproglet. It makes me giggle that even though I sent it using Parcelforce, I can't track it from their website because they don't offer tracking for the service we used. However, if I go to the Canada Post website, the tracking information comes up just fine, thank you very much.

Go Canada!

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