My Life

I managed to get a couple of tickets to the Live Earth concert in London yesterday. Wow it was a good show with some incredible performers. I’m not going to list them all but it was the first time I had seen the Foo Fighters live and they were just superb, loud massive energy and great tunes, they really got the crowd going. In all there were about 20 acts during the 10 hours show, of course there was some pap, Metallica and Genesis spring to mind but then you needed time to go and get a beer or burger anyway. Of the other good or great performances were Snow Patrol, Madonna (surprisingly as I’m not normally a fan), the Red Hot Chili Peppers (of course), the Beastie Boys and the Black Eyed Peas.

It was also the first time I’d seen the new Wembley, even though it was massively over budget and late it is a great stadium. Apparently there were 85,000 there yesterday but the queue for beers and food was never more than 3 minutes. Even when the entire stadium piled out after the show towards the tube, it only took us 90 minutes to get back to my flat.

Overall a superb day, photos are already up on Flickr

Nothing to see here, work has been crazily busy this week (as with every other week at the moment), but we did manage to get to the pub after work today. It’s important for a development team to just decompress, catch up on what we’ve all been doing all week and what we’re going to do next week. Well that’s the excuse anyway and I’m sticking to it.

One of the nice perks of my current contract is that I have access to the Gherkin, one of the most distinctive buildings in London. There’s a bar and restaurant right at the top but you can’t get in unless you work in the building. So tonight I’m heading up for dinner in the (apparently very posh) restaurant with my parents. All the reports I’ve heard of the food are excellent and I know the views of London are second to none so hopefully it will be a good evening. We’ve just got to hope that the weather holds as it’s so high the top sometimes disappears into the clouds!

Things are incredibly busy at the moment with a major project in my day job taking up well over 100% of my time for that client. But in the background Defectr is ticking along nicely. We recently went over 500 registered users, of which about 20% are active on a daily basis which I think is not a bad conversion ratio. Hopefully the upcoming release of Dojo 0.9 will continue to improve things. My understanding is that it’s basically a rip and replace of the 0.4 version but once 0.9 is out the API will be basically locked.

In other news I’ve been playing around with Ruby on Rails for a little application idea I’ve had. I know I’m a bit behind the times but I think it’s still worth picking up those technologies which move beyond the fad stage if only to be able to talk to other techies in terms they can understand when I have to explain Domino to them (a problem I was having last week in Germany with some hardcore J2EE developers who were sneering at Domino).

The thing I’m enjoying most about the Ruby on Rails playing is that I don’t need to fire up Windows to do anything, it’s pure Mac and boy does that make a difference. As usual the refrain rings out, “Roll on Domino Designer on the Mac”.

It was a good trip to Munich, work wise at least. We knocked off a lot of the problems with the web services and it was good to meet the team over there. Unfortunately, as normal with these short trips, there wasn’t time to actually see any of the city. It was airport-office-hotel-office-airport. Still from the taxi ride the place looked nice and the people were very helpful. As ever in Europe it was massively embarassing how every German I met knew at least some English, most spoke it pretty much fluently, there is no way the same would happen in England for a visiting German.

So Munich gets added to the list of places that I have to go back and visit properly.

I’m sat in London City Airport waiting for a plane to Munich at the moment. It’s a short notice trip for a couple of days to work on integrating the Domino app I’ve been working on with two other applications using the web services I’ve been playing with for the last few days. Hopefully in the next couple of days we should be able to deal with the various issues which always arise when two significantly different applications and platforms try to talk to each other, even if they do share the common language of web services. A lot of the problems come from simply understanding how the other apps organise and key their data.

Should be interesting anyway, embarrassingly I have never been to Munich before so hopefully I’ll get a chance to have a look around the city a little tonight as well. Who needs sleep?

Update: The automatic guidance system at City airport failed this morning which reduced the inbound flow of aircraft to two per hour (!) so my flight was delayed a couple of hours. Still I am here now and the weather and city are beautiful so no complaining.

So I’ve been back at work for three days now and it’s back with a bang. Unfortunately I have to finish off a whole month’s work in two weeks so I am and will be playing catch up for a while to come. But luckily the work I’ve come back to is pretty interesting. We have to try and get Hibernate working from Domino to an Oracle database. Not something I’ve done before and it doesn’t seem to be a trivial so it should keep me busy for a while. If anyone’s got any tips then I’d be appreciative.

And, of course, the weather here in London is especially good at the moment so we have to go to the pub to make the most of it while it lasts 😉 Talking of which, I’m off to a leaving party now. Life is tough.

The journey home was pretty uneventful, took ages to get out of the airport though, they had trouble opening the plane door, then there was a huge queue at customs, then the bags didn’t turn up for a while. But that seems to be the norm these days.

Anyway, the challenge now is to stay awake until a reasonable time this evening. Time to catch up on e-mail and blog reading I guess.

Maybe I’ve been lucky in the past but I’ve never really had any trouble when flying. But for this trip I’ve done eight individual flights and every single one of them has been delayed by more than an hour. In the end yesterday I arrived at the hotel at about 1am instead of 9pm. Has something happened to make air travel worse over the last year or have I just been unlucky?

I just got back from my trip to the Grand Canyon and the Skywalk. A great day all round with temperatures at around 106 degrees the flight was just great fun, more like a roller coaster than a normal plane trip. I’d forgotten how much fun light aircraft can be. Photos are up already.

It’s only about 25 minutes from the Boulder City airport to the Grand Canyon and then after that the group split off with half going to do helicopter trips to the canyon floor and the other half, including me, heading off to the Skywalk. Now, as Carl warned in the comments of a previous blog entry it does cost more, $27.50 to be precise. The thing which annoyed me more than that is that you are not allowed to take your camera onto the platform, instead they try and scalp you with “official” photos. Well I didn’t get any of those but the view is absolutely stunning. The place is still a bit of a building site at the moment, just the walkway itself exists at the moment, in the future they are going to add a whole visitors centre onto it. There was also talk of the tiny airport being expanded to take 737-type jets, I think that would ruin the rather ramshackle feel of the place so I hope it doesn’t happen.

All that being said about the Skywalk I think I got more of a thrill just walking up to the edge of the canyon proper. I came here with my family when I was a kid and I was afraid that it would have become sanitised by our risk averse culture but gratifyingly they still don’t have any safety rails, you’re just told to use your common sense. A vertigo sufferer’s nightmare but really quite exciting if you’re OK with heights.

Bizarrely for the first time while I was at the edge of the canyon I got just the slightest urge to jump, I obviously didn’t but it was a very strange feeling. No idea where that came from!

Anyway, back to Boston tomorrow and then off home on Thursday. Boo.