After a morning at Zurich Zoo we set off for the airport and flew back into London City – landing precariously on a thin area of land in the London docklands. Then via the DLR, Tube, Midland Mainline and my Folks house in Leicester, we are now back at home in Ambergate.
Twiglet (the cat) is please to be home and we are tired, but more relaxed than we were a few days ago – thanks to Duncan, Rowan, Frances and Alexander for a nice few days!
It’s been something of an emotional roller-coaster since my last post. The responses to my news about my brother Andrew’s death has been touching – two comments n the blog here, phone calls from friends, cards and general sympathy have been much appreciated.
Also in the middle of all of this, we welcomed my sister Isobel’s first baby Lara Niamh into the family – arriving just over a day after Andrew’s departure! This lifted everyone of course. Welcome little Lara!
After a slightly fraught Christmas, we traveled down to Potters Bar (Kathy’s family area) and spent a couple of days catching up with the Ainsworths and seeing one or two other friends. This lowered the stress levels before heading back up to Leicester for Andrew’s funeral.
This was a strange mixture of sadness at saying goodbye to Andrew and joy at meeting Lara for the first time. The funeral was as nice an occasion as one could be – there were lots of people in attendance – including old teachers, Scout leaders, cousins, uncles, family friends and some of Andrew’s friends from the rllmuk forum (thanks Paula, Nick and Steve). I managed to stand up with Duncan and make a speech between us without bursting ito tears – not an easy thing. When the curtain drew and the committal music played (the Finale to Saint-Saens’ organ symphony) I just lost it for a while. Afterwards we went back home for the wake, which was much more fun – lots of food, chance to catch up with the old teachers/scout leaders and have a few games on Andrew’s Wii (in his honour of course!).
Then the next day we got up up at the un-godly time of 5.30 to get the train down to London, then fly to Zürich to see the New Year in with Duncan, Rowan and the kids. After a trip to the Tier Park at Goldau to see various animals, climb a big rope-walk climbing frame and have Schweinschnitzel and fries or lunch, we went a very agreeable evening with some of their friends up on the hill. Then back home to watch the fireworks and listen to the clanging bells of the Zug/Barr valley – very atmospheric!
So here I am on the first day on 2007, and I suppose it customary to make resolutions – well here are a couple of mine:
- Make a blog post every day – even if it’s very brief (even just a picture).
- Get a new bike and start cycling to work every day, so I get fit again!
Lets see how I get on….
This morning news that I had feared came about my youngest brother Andrew.
After nearly 10 months of “recovering” from a major heart operation, he died peacefully this morning at 9.30am in Glenfield Hospital.
He had been struggling since the late spring with major fluid build-up problems. This was frustrating to him, as was starting to make a recovery after such a serious operation. It’s difficult to understand the discomfort and pain he has suffered for most of this life – let alone the condition he has had to carry for most of his life. Throughout this period my Mum and Dad have practically put there life on hold to care for and support him. I feel slightly innadequate in that respect, and only hope I can support them in some way at this time.
Andrew was a gaming demon, and I hope he had a chance to enjoy his Wii before he passed away – he’d talked so enthusiastically about it when we saw him a few weekends ago in hospital.
Andrew/Andy/Michael – We love you and will miss you so much.
So here I am in Manchester at MDDA for a (free) training day on Ruby and Rails – organised by those nice Geekup.org people. A few of them are familiar from my recent trip to d.Construct, so it’ll be good to renew some acquantances. An early start, but the journey up up the train along the hope valley line was stunning – mist clearing, sun rising etc.
I’ve had a quick play with Rails, but haven’t really dived into Ruby yet – the syntax looks a tad weird, but I think Prototype has some Ruby-like stuff in it. So here goes…
Tags : geekup manchester rubonrails rubyandrails06
After grumbling to a few people at dConstruct that there didn’t seem to be much web community activity in the Midlands, I’ve actually found a group called Multipack from a story on Simon Jobling’s rather neat site. They’re meeting up in Wolverhampton on 14th October for a 1st birthday social – so I guess it would be a bit rude not too…
Yesterday, at lunchtime we actually had a mini-tornado in Derby! Wow, freak weather hits the East Midlands! It made in onto the BBC and ThisIsDerbyshire (our own site) and Baz (aka Bazzamatazz) took and post this pic onto Flickr just as fast as he could…
As you can see the Jags got it – or as Lactose put it “…God hates Derby and Jag drivers. Who can blame him…”. I tend to think it’s mother nature making her point about greedy flashy gas-guzzling idiot-mobiles. Sounds like he also had a narrow escape while in the Eagle Centre market in town – as a portion of the roof got ripped off!
I was a tad worried about the very tall trees at the back our house, but when I got home, there was little sign of any storm at all. Localised our what?!
I’ve been d.construct-ed (My trip to d.construct06) part 2 – APIs, Microformats (in the park) and Flex(ible) Mashups
So, I’m back in the theatre after bumping into Craig Morey and co from Mindworks, slightly squashed in with my excessive luggage (damn – should’ve left everything in the cloakroom). Next.
Web Services for Fun and Profit by Paul Hammond and Simon Willison
A pretty interesting and inspiring session looking at the what APIs are, what you can do with mash-ups. Largely from a Yahoo! perspective (not surprising since both the guys work there!) the talk was light on technical detail, but interesting in the way that Yahoo! approach this area of innovation – who days where developers get the chance to try out and show their ideas – great!
Perhaps more interesting was the Q & A session afterwards – most interesting for me was the question of how to convince the big cheeses to free up their data and make it available through APIs. Still not sure there’s a killer business arguement here – the normal ones are tend to run along the lines of “other people will scrape your site so you might as well make the data available – t’ll cost you less, and you can keep an eye on them”. I guess the best one (which is a bit more subtle, is the fact that (as long as you can ensure a path back through you site, like Amazon do) you could end up generating even more business by being ore open.
The Joy of API by Jeremy Keith
Continuing o neatly from Paul and Simon’s talk, Jeremy Keith delivered an entertaining and inspiring talk going into a bit more depth about how to make a start on using and even building an API. Most interesting was his evangelistic take on Microformats. I’d heard of Microformats before, but wasn’t entirely clear about what they were – much less what to do with them. This was a good start, but then…
Microformats Picnic
Following an invite from Mr.Keith (and after a quick dash for a bagel/sandwich/burger etc.) a pretty decent sized crowd gather in the pavillion gardens behind the Dome Theatre and in with the back drop of (guess what) the Pavillion. Laid back, but inspiring, and making the best of some great weather I learnt more.
Simply put, Microformats are a set of standards based on very smple semantic mark-up of XHTML to solve the problem of making it easily readable by external applications – a bit like an API!
It got me thinking – but more about that at a later date.
After lunch, things got even more interesting… that’s in part 3
It’s been about a day since I’ve returned from Brighton and I’m still slightly reeling from from the whirlwind of web-wonder that was d.construct06. It was a great chance to meet a whole load of web people, drink, learn about some really interesting stuff (web related of course) and then meet more people and drink some more. What more could you ask for!
It all started well with a pre-conference knees-up at the supperfiacially gothic “Heist” bar on Thursday. There, my comrade from NEP/A.N.D. Duncan and I met some great people within minutes – including Phil Winstanley, Dave Sussman and Dave Verwer. For starters, most of them were Microsoft developers and mostly from up North! So, at a conference where the most common latop was an iBook/powerbook we weren’t alone. We had a few beers and good gas about techy and non-techy things – including me blabing on about the wonders of Reveal Records (in Derby) and the mighty Tunng – sorry guys! Even though I lightweight-ed and left pretty early I still woke up feeling pretty damn rough the next day!
So, we trundled round the corner to the Corn Exchange, only to be met by a queue of eager “geeks” – some already clutching their goody bags. The anticipation mounted and the queues lengthened. When inside the pretty spatious, laden with the said bags of stuff and refreshed by tea/coffee the real thing started, so here’s the real review:
Session 1 : “Web Services: Fuelling Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Jeff Barr
This was largely about the various Amazon Web Services. Most notably:
- The Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Essentially a huge online, distributed binary storage facility that you can use to store almost anything and get it back easily.
- The Amazon Mechanical Turk – described as “Atificial Artificial Intelligence”. The idea is that you have a task you want a real human to do, you submit it into the “turk”, someone (anywhere in the world) does it, sends the results back, and (if you’re happy) you pay them. Brilliant!
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) – basicly, lots of computing power for hire.
Mr.Barr’s session was pretty interesting, despite largely being a sales pitch for Amazon. It’s unlikely many us there would have access to the raw computing power needed for applications at that scale, but there’s a few possible ideas and a few wow’s to be had in looking at them. Also, the brilliant Sheep Market project – a collection of 10,000 (count them!) drawings of sheep gathered using the Mechanical Turk!
Whilst this was going on I managed to make use of the free wireless internet access to upload my first batch of pics to Flickr. As has been noted elsewhere the laptop of choice was of the Apple brand – so I guess I was in the minority there! But it was great to have this facility.
So far, so good, and my head was starting to clear!
More fun in part 2 later…
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