the corner office

We have an allotment. When I say 'we', I mean my darling wife. When I say 'allotment', I mean a small patch of land neglected by the former holder for what must have been decades and so weed and grass and pebble infested that our veteran allotment-neighbour suggested it'd likely be years before the entire thing is sorted out.

That's not my story. I occasionally go along to the allotment to help with the heavy lifting. We all went this morning and I did my bit (and picked up two mean blisters, but that's not my story either). After doing my bit, I was sitting in the car changing out of my muddy trainers into my sandals.

What the hell, I thought, and did something crazy. I didn't take my socks off.

Now, for swathes of European men, socks and sandals is a perfectly natural thing to do. For swathes of South African men, this is only the kind of lunatic thing strange foreign Europeans would ever do. A bit like getting conjugal with a goat - some might swear blind by it, but it's just not done. Consequently, this is probably the first time I've ever worn socks with sandals.

And I must admit, it felt remarkably comfortable.

Naturally, we got home, and our neighbours were all outside, and I had to walk past them looking as nonchalant as I could. I briefly pondered taking the socks off before getting out the car, but I decided that worrying what people thought of my pedal attire was even sillier than how I myself thought I looked. Nothing like a bit of social conditioning.

Not forever though. I give myself about another 10 years, and I'll be old-man confident and comfortable enough with the idea. Until then, sandals will remain a purely foot and leather affair, and no cloth between.

There was a fairly respectably sized spider in our flat the other day, and after unsettling some weird-assed thing with wings from next to the computer a few minutes ago, it occured to me that there is another reason why these hot UK summers (and climate change, in general) are not a good thing.

Not only is this extreme heat detrimental to my enjoyment of the summer months, but it also makes the UK a far more appealing place to the kinds of critters that I was quite happy to leave behind in Africa. All it would take is for one egg-heavy parktown prawn to get adventurous and hop into a container in Rosebank, and then scuttle out into a back garden in Putney a few months later. That's all it would take, and London would be doomed.

London is too damned hot right now, and it's expected to get worse. One small consolation is that they're predicting thunderstorms. I quite like the idea of that - if there's one thing about Johannesburg weather I miss, it's summer afternoon thunderstorms. Not that I've ever experienced a UK thunderstorm of Highveld-esque intensity, but anything involving precipitation and a break from this infernal heat works for me.

Eclipse Galileo has been released. I commented on Ben Poole's site but thought I'd save most of my moaning for here.

Since about 2007, each release has seen me fall further out of love with Eclipse. Sure, each release adds useful new functionality, but the core Java IDE lacks focus and often as not adds 'features' which can only have been implemented in response to corporate sponsor diktat.

Ironically, I've very recently started using Intellij IDEA at work. I've tried it in the past, but always gave up after a few hours and went back to the comfort of Eclipse. After months of Visual Studio development, a new machine that didn't have a Java IDE, and me getting that little bit hazier with all the Eclipse Java shortcuts and tricks, I thought I may as well give it a real go. The jury's still out but it's slowly winning me over. Not as pretty as Eclipse (all praise SWT), but refreshing to use an IDE that has what you need, when you need it, and which just works, consistently and cleanly.

Anyway, I still use Eclipse at home, so I'll be trying out Galileo and I'll see whether there's anything new and exciting about it. In the meantime, I noticed, if my memory serves me correctly, that this is the first new Eclipse release where they didn't get around to updating the splash screen. Assuming I'm not wrong about my observation, I wonder if that's somehow significant.

Long weekend. Oxfordshire. Awesome.

There's-uh, nothing as uh, irritating as uh, people uh, especially politicans who uh, keep uh saying uh all the uh fu-uhkn time during press conferences and uh interviews.

On the upside, the tube strike means I've been working from home for the past 2 days. What a lovely thing, the Internet.

First round of assignments handed in. I feel thoroughly drained, and not a little bit stupid. I've had to dust off more than a few mental cobwebs, and still have a long way to go before I'm thoroughly on top of what I'm doing.

But still, a brief respite, and during a couple of nights away from the books I decided to get back to some hobby coding. I've been giving Python and wxPython a go to whip up a very simple GUI app, and am rather impressed. My Python knowledge is minimal, but between Google and having paged through a Python book a few months ago, Python's not that hard to start being productive with.

I'm still rather blown away by the fact that I can vote for members of the European parliament. I guess South Africa rejoining the Commonwealth wasn't entirely a waste of time, then. There I was, half past nine tonight, an overdue assignment, and me feeling guilty about not voting. So I hopped in the car, zipped along to the local polling station and made my little cross.

In related news, Labour appears to be in meltdown. There are times when I feel sorry for poor ole Gordon Brown and the sorry mess he's now in. Then I remember he's a politician, and come back to my senses.

I saw an interesting headline on an Evening Standard billboard this evening, so when I got home I thought I'd hop onto the newspaper's website and read it. Except that after opening the article's web page, my CPU monitor started showing that one of the CPU cores was maxed out, and the CPU fan started going into overdrive. I've got Flashblock installed so it wasn't even the usual Flash sludge causing the problem. Some JavaScript madness, presumably?

Whatever it was, it's crazy that I can't open a web page without it killing my PC. My laptop is getting old, but not that old. I won't go to the Evening Standard's site again, but the problem is, many other news sites aren't much different. Stop the madness, web developers.