the corner office

I got back to Wallingford tonight, and walked home through the Medieval Christmas festival. By the time I got there, it was a bit of a desultory affair, with few people out braving the rain. The knights in rusting armour were there, looking a little drenched, and the Hog Roast was top notch as always. It was a reminder that we've been living in Wallingford for over a year (hard to believe), and it was also a reminder that we won't be living in this character-filled town for much longer.

A lot of shops were open though, including the local Oxfam. This was a blessing, because I'd run out of books to read - the only things unread in our flat, apart from boring textbooks (that's another story), are a Wilbur Smith and something by Umberto Eco - neither of which fill me with any excitement at present.

I've given some thought to reviewing the books I read - it'd give me something to write about - but I've never found writing reviews easy - I have difficulty finding the right balance between just jabbering about what the book is about (which isn't generally interesting) and offering meaningful opinion about the book other than 'yeah alright' or 'damn good' or 'fukken boring' or the like. We shall see.

Right, so, a techie ramble is long overdue. As I mentioned, I'm playing with some new stuff at work. My main new thrill is Spring. All I ever knew about Spring before was that it (a) relied heavily on Dependency Injection, (b) was decried for being XML intensive, and (c) featured in a very large percentage of job adverts.

I like it. I like the DI approach to things - not necessarily because it's the only virtuous way of putting together large systems, but because it makes life easier in all sorts of ways. If you've ever battled with rigging up mock objects for a test environment, you know that it's a helluva lot cleaner than the alternatives.

Spring has had a few other nice surprises for me. It's a gentle introduction to pain-free AOP. I've always considered AOP to be intellectually interesting but not very practical for a lazy lay developer - in terms of esoteric tooling, and limited adoption. Spring is powerful and entrenched enough that it solves both those problems. Spring's JDBC support is also great. I've tried my best to like Hibernate, and I know it's incredibly powerful if you're willing to submit to the Hibernate way, but I'm still happiest cranking out SQL statements and knowing exactly when I'm hitting the database and why. Spring takes out a lot of the drudgery and housekeeping, which is a real time-saver.

On the home front, I'm still plodding on with Eclipse RCP development, mainly adding bits and pieces to our home budgeting app. I spent a bit of time moving parts of it over to Swing using Matisse4MyEclipse, but in the end I gave up. I liked Matisse4MyEclipse and I'd gladly recommend it for working with Swing - but I reached the point where I had to admit to myself that no matter how convenient and powerful the tooling, I just don't like Swing. It's mainly an aesthetic thing, I'll admit, and I wouldn't call myself an SWT/JFace fan, but the only Java app I spend a significant amount of time using is Eclipse, so go figure.

I remember my first impressions of London commuters at Paddington and on the tube. Sour, in a rush, unforgiving and impatient with anyone walking too slowly or getting in the way or not doing the right thing. It's only been two weeks, but already I find myself becoming like them. More to the point, I understand, now. Places to go, trains and tubes to catch, and eager to get out of the mass of people as quickly as you can. So many people, everywhere, all the time. You switch everybody off. Very different to the bus commute into Oxford, where most people were regulars, I saw them every day, and everything was altogether more relaxed.

It's not just a city slicker thing, either. I lived in Joburg for years. It's a big city, but apart from shopping malls and the like, middle class peopled were never really bunched up. You always had space. Even in long, drawn-out traffic jams, you'd be in a car, with nobody close to you. London transport is completely the opposite.

I'm adjusting to the commuting, though. It takes a big chunk out of my day, but on the upside I'm reading even more - I'm averaging about two novels a week. And the exercise is good, too. In addition to more walking, there's all the standing on the tube, and on the train, because First Not-so-great Western can't be arsed to increase their capacity while fleecing their customers. Bastards. The directors of FGW ought to be lined up against a wall and shot. Or better yet, get them to draw straws and march the losing half off to the wall, and then tell the remaining half that they've got a month to sort themselves out or they're next. I'll bet you that would get results.

I turned 35 this week. I never thought about it much until the day arrived, but 35 is a bit of a milestone age. You're no longer an 'early' thirty-something, you're now officially mid-30s, and more accurately, you're on a one-way trip to the arse-end of your thirties, and there's no getting around it.

Perhaps most ominous, is the knowledge that the next milestone is 40, and that carries enough baggage. You're supposed to start thinking about mid-life crises when you hit 40. I always joke that I had my mid-life crisis in my 20s, and I'm only barely getting out of that. So I'm not quite sure where that leaves me. One of these days I'm going to have to start acting my age. Ronwen say I'm a grumpy old man, but I'm still not fully reconciled with the idea of being a grown-up.

Oxfordshire is a beautiful part of world, and working in Oxford has been really cool. I learned a lot of new things, got to work with some great people, and got to spend some time smack bang in the middle of one of the oldest and most beautiful cities in the world. London's call was just too strong though; as lowly immigrants we couldn't afford to ignore what London offers in terms of salary and career development.

So what it boils down to, is that I started a new job in London on Thursday. I'll continue the tradition and say bugger-all about it here, other than that I'll be getting my teeth into and may blog about a few new (to me) technologies. We'll start looking for a place in London, and plan to move early in the new year, but for now, I'm commuting and doing the train & tube thing for the first time. That should be fodder for a few choice grumbles, I suspect.

All in all though, it's an exciting step. Daunting, but exciting. London is something else, and it's always felt a million miles away from where we live out in the country. Now, this insanely huge and bustling city is part of my daily routine. Hard to believe.

I went for a haircut this week. Well, not a haircut-haircut, more like a hairtrim, but that's not the point really. During the haircut/trim I had to endure the one bit of haircut/trims I really wish hairdressers would do without: the head massage.

Having my hair washed - that's OK. It's functional, it feels nice, I'm happy. Stop there, towel me up and send me to my seat. Please don't subject me to the 5 minutes of head rubbing. It's not that I'm against having my head massaged, I just find the whole human dynamics part of it too hectic to navigate.

First, I'm just not quite sure how to react to having some lady I don't know massaging my head. What's the right thing to do? I'm pretty sure that 'oh yeah, harder harder little to the left aaaaaah yes, ooooooh I like it like that' isn't appropriate. But after that, I'm lost. So? Sit back and look content? I'm not sure if my 'content' look will give her nightmares. Do you have to make her feel better by looking like you enjoy it? Is she thinking I'm a heartless machine serial killer if I'm not responding? I know that if I try to muster the half-amused and detached 'yeah it's cool I'm cool and I do this every day' look, I'll just come across like a perv with a daft grin.

I'd rather just not go through that.

Also, what if the aunty's just not very good at it? I don't think I've ever had a particularly good head massage at a hairdresser. Sure, in principle, a head massage is nice, and I'm not saying it always sucks, but generally speaking it's either too hard or too soft or pulls your hair or just feels like someone's looking for ticks.

I'm guessing that most hair-wash-head-massaging ladies are doing their apprenticeships and being thoroughly exploited, or really in need of the money and being thoroughly exploited or just not well in the head, and being thoroughly exploited. So if your job entails massaging people's noggins, you've got enough problems, without people giving you grief about it or bitching 'cause you're crap at it. I just couldn't do it. I'd rather just live with the bruising and bald spots.

That brings me to my final point, which is that generally speaking, the head massage just feels a little bit porno. I've never had anyone who's been entirely erm, enthusiastic about it. It always just feels like it's a kinda down-to-business, everyone else is doing it so we gotta do it to keep the customers happy vibe. I know this woman doesn't really want to be massaging me. I know I'm like the 50th head she's massaged today, and there's nothing special about my head to make it in the least bit exciting or interesting for her. She's not getting any kick out of it - sensual or professional (except for the crazies, but I'm sure they're statistically insignificant).

She's just doing it 'cause she's gotta, and it goes without saying that there are a great many things in life where if the party of the second part is doing unto the party of the first part just 'cause they gotta, then the party of the first part is probably better off not being done unto at all.

Which is precisely my point. I just think this whole head massage business is a monster which has grown out of control. I, for one, am happy to leave haircutting/trimming to the professionals, and stick to enjoying head massages in the privacy of my own home.

Grumble grumble... I'm sitting here, quietly tinkering away, and I look up at my CPU monitor on my Gnome toolbar and notice that my machine's a little busier than it should be. I take a peek at the system monitor, and notice a process called trackerd is the chief CPU hog. A quick search and it turns out that this is a file system indexer. I recall reading something about this on the new feature list. Not very nice of Ubuntu to not even ask me if I want it running, but it wasn't hard to switch it off via the Indexing control panel dialog.

Whilst searching, I saw a good few forum and blog entries griping about the whole trackerd thing, since a great many people are seeing sluggish systems once this daemon gets going. A fairly common theme is 'Ubuntu is getting bloated'. If tracker-bloody-d is anything to go by, I'd have to agree. I guess it's just symptomatic of other things. It's not going to change, but it's disappointing that inevitable creaping featuritis, mixed with a healthy dose of 'let's dazzle Windows users with crap and hope they convert' is the order of the day with many of these ambitious, heavily marketed open-source projects.

For me, I should really just put some time aside, bump myself over to Xubuntu, or roll a leaner fluxbox desktop or the like, and be done with it. I like many of the Linuxey things you just can't get on a Windows box, but I must admit, I find myself getting increasingly more frustrated with Gnome. It's never been my favourite, but it's starting to really get to me.

I don't want all my posts to be grumbles and whinges though, so on a brighter note, tomorrow night is Friday night, which means pizza night! Mmm pizza.

Today saw the release of Ubuntu 7.10, aka 'Gutsy Gibbon'. I thought I'd go ahead and upgrade. How wonderful 8MB ADSL is... I had the 800 megs in update files in no time. The upgrade went off without a hitch, which is usually the best thing you can say about an upgrade.

This version has Gnome 2.20, which is as unexciting as any previous version. There's also Compiz Fusion support which is really cool but beyond my laptop's graphics capabilities, so I wobbled a few windows and then switched it off. But it's nice to know it's there. Oh, and Nautilus is as rubbish as ever. That's about it.

Rather a nice weekend. Aunt-visiting-from-South-Africa, cousin, cousin-in-law-to-be, sister and brother-in-law came to visit yesterday. Lunch at the Crown in South Moreton (well recommended), followed by a drive along a few country lanes and a lazy afternoon with everyone making a fuss of Leo.

Leo, for his part, was on fine form, charming everyone by being adorable and sociable. Of course, the minute the last guest was out the door, the toothless grin dropped, he hauled out a pack of cigarettes and a six pack and plopped down on the couch hurling abuse at the TV and his parents and ripping the heads off his teddy bears and making foul bodily-function sounds and scratching himself in unmentionable places.

OK, not really, I made that last bit up (mostly). The little man knows how to turn on the charm for an audience, though. That's not a bad thing, and way preferable to the alternatives, but I hope he doesn't start thinking it's going to turn his parents into pushovers. No way, no chance of that happening. Nuh-uh, never.

Ronwen mentioned something about a post on a blog we both follow, and I said 'hey, I haven't read any posts from that person in ages'. So I went digging around in my Bloglines folders and realised that somehow I'd lost the blog's feed. Goes to show - these fancy no-effort tools are great, but a little bit of finger trouble and you're none the wiser.

Trawling through my Bloglines subs was a bit of an eye-opener, though. I'm still subbed to blogs which haven't been updated in years... quite literally. Take Southern Cross, an early South African blog, for example. They haven't posted anything since August 2004. I guess it's safe to say the dudes have given up. I made my peace with the idea, and hit the 'unsub' button. I could do the same for quite a few more, but there are others where I'm hesitant. I'm subbed to some blogs where the authors have done the Farewell thing... and in other cases, they've just gone quiet... but if any of them ever decided to start blogging again, I'd like to know about it. Going through some of these dormant blogs, there are quite a few I'm remembering fondly. I rather miss their blogging.

How long before you decide to flip the switch on a dead blog? A month, a year? More?

I also just realised that as of the beginning of October, I've been blogging publically for over 4 years. That's a loooong friggin' time.