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by Aaron Brady.
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Right, postponing the blog posts is not doing me any favours.
I’m back from a weeks holiday in Ireland (or rather, I was back around the 8th). Good fun was had by all with it being capped off by my brother’s wedding.
Some quick highlights, so I remember when I read back:
It was Dylan’s first flight (or rather his first pair of them), he coped admirably. Young kids aren’t scared of anything really, I guess they don’t know to be. Me, I know enough, so I’m trying to calm him down while gripping the arm-rests during take off (the worst part).
Jack referred to the maps we were using to navigate as ‘paper sat-nav’. It’s pretty amazing how quickly new technology becomes not only taken for granted, but the de-facto way of performing a task. For what it’s worth, it was quite a lot of fun using maps over a GPS or even the Google Maps on my phone (though that proved its worth while in finding our hotel in Manchester).
There was a lot of snow on a couple of days, and we lost the power to where we were staying and relied on the coal fire to stay warm. We relied on the coal fire quite a bit as the place was actually quite cold and had a coin-fed meter, electric heating and immersion for hot water (though the hospitality was great and the location pretty amazing, so mustn’t grumble).
Fota Island Wildlife Park is amazing. My Dad mentioned going years and years ago and being very unimpressed (He’d said it was like a glorified farm), but I was amazed. There’s no real feeling of a barrier between you and the animals (except the highly dangerous big-cats and eagles), with water barriers and a kind of rockery-barrier-meets-electric-fence thing. Highly recommended, but perhaps keep small children away from seeing the “Cheetah Run”.
Finished Tom Standage’s “The Victorian Internet”. I’d highly recommend this book to anyone who likes popular history, it’s well researched but keeps the tone light and while I’m sure it’s factually correct it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to be an exhaustive history. If nothing else, it’ll give you a few more QI-style anecdotes to save up for the right moment.
Also finished Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine”. This one was also compelling, but I think that’s purely because I love war stories of developers, software and hardware.
For all that it won a Pulitzer Prize I found it quite badly written in places, it repeated itself, sometimes verbatim and, while I understand that the whole point is to record what happened and that the author would be subject to what they were able to observe, some parts of the ‘story’ were very patchily covered.
Besides all of that I still recommend this one too.
Finally, on the reading front, I’m getting through “Practical Plone 3” now that I’m back. It’s going okay and I’ll leave the full review for when I’m finished, but I am finding it less of a ‘page turner’ than Expert Python Programming was. I think I’m just not as interested in Plone as the newer Python features; oh well.
Other Current Interests:
There’s some Python on the horizon as I write scripting tasks for system administration at work. I’ve even had the chance to deliver some Python as part of a commercial product for the first time in a very long time.
Storage, Solaris and iSCSI are also big ticket topics for me, as I try to get the IOPS up and introduce sparse-volume thin provisioning. ‘citing.
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