Neil Hopcroft

(which could almost be a Widdy-of-the-week, were it not for the faff)

8-bit tie – this is higher resolution than i remember from those days.

No music came on. He dug around in the pockets where he kept the iPod and pulled out the twisted hunk of metal that is in the pictures

Where bill?

Trams? We laugh at your puny trams

I’m on Rails.

Modulo a rather unexpected crashing of the OSX UI when I typed ‘sudo kill 1’ by accident – it *really* shouldn’t respect that (I was trying to kill background process 1, not process 1).

Lunch now.

How difficult can it be?

I’m now on the fourth machine….two windows boxes failed to install the Ruby mysql connector (admittedly one of those was cygwin, therefore not really expected to work), the linux box wouldn’t even get as far as Ruby (as an aside, I’ve managed to mangle my apt-get to a point where it refuses to do anything except complain about netbase being both needed and not needed…clues? Do I just need to keep beheading open source developers until one of them admits to causing this kind of madness?), and now I’m halfway through the install on the Mini, its looking alright so far which means it must be time for bed before I spend all night trying to make the damned software work.

I’ve not even started anything complicated yet.

Anyone know anything about Ruby on Rails?

A weekend away celebrating Simons aging, we headed to a small cottage between Glastonbury and Wells. There were five of us, Simon, Adelle, Matti, Stoo and me.

Its a part of the world I don’t know too well, having driven past a number of times without actually stopping, so it was nice to have a reason to go there. The first night we headed into Wells, where I was amused to find myself in the film set for Hot Fuzz, which was utterly unexpected. We had a fine meal in the pub in the centre of the village city.

Saturday we went to Glastonbury itself, which is almost the kind of hell I had imagined it would be. Full of hippies and shops catering for them. In years gone by I would have felt quite at home here, but now it feels a little silly, “by daring to be different we’ve all become the same”.

Sunday was Castle Cary, where we followed the path of the alleged downfall of the castle to find a grassy knoll at the back of the town. Its not a particularly spectacular sight these days, but does have a somewhat worrying cross on the hillside overlooking the ruins. Then onward to Wells again, where we found a bookstall full of crazy random books (I picked up a copy of “Gonzo Marketing – winning through worst practices”, which looks fascinating).

We wandered around the cathedral which contained some entertaining meetings of modern technology with ancient building styles. Including a wireless router above the pulpit and a switch on the wall marked ‘St John’. The latter of which struck me as somewhat concerning, presumably it is someones job to turn on St John in the morning and switch him off again before going home in the evening. I can only speculate how a man of the cloth would explain this to a new recruit.

Monday we had lunch at the local pub before heading home.

The weekend was punctuated by various playing of boardgames (of which I managed to win rather more than average, which either means I’m in for a strong run of bad luck or everyone else was letting Simon win and hadn’t told me) and walking in the fabulous, and utterly ridiculous, garden. A garden full of birds and little ornamental jokes and hobbit houses and all kinds of things you don’t actually expect to find in gardens.

Virgin Radio is sapping my will to live.

Another success for customer service – the guy in the Orange shop just suggested I should go to the O2 shop across the way where I might get a better deal. So much for being a loyal customer for the last ten years.

Can anyone suggest a network they don’t completely hate?

Time for a bit of a catch up….First up Bobs party friday last. It took me a little walking around the city to find the right basement – there was no urgency, nothing was going to start until 8, so having found where I was going later I started wandering around with the intention of finding some food. Of course the city closes by 8, and that which doesn’t is pubs populated by exactly the sort of pinstripe hoorays who are unlikely to take kindly to someone like my wandering past. I found Steve on a similar, but more focussed, quest. I decided to leave him to it and take my chances finding a cafe open in the area. Fool. I ended up, some 30 minutes later, back at the dodgy little corner shop Steve had disappeared into. So, into the basement where there were a few old faces I’ve not seen for a while. Good to catch up with people.

Then on Saturday we headed to Clapham for Gormenghast. I’ve never read the book, so I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting…I understand that it was reasonably faithful to the book given the constraints of limited budget and space. There were some interesting uses of space and ‘musical’ accompaniment to various actions on the stage. Even without knowing the story the cast projected a lot of atmosphere. I now don’t feel any need to read the book, it seems like it would be very wordy without making much progress. With most of the words somehow distilled away, on stage, leaving a certain amount of space within the story, this made for a nice packaging for a story I’ve felt should be something I know. Recommended.

30 min and 7 miles into a 200 mile journey. Its going to be a long day.