Irregular Verbiage

The main lessons I’ve taken from the conference so far:

• Developing a “Hello World” XUL app looks fairly straight forward and we can do swish UI in SVG. From the talk by Ian from Songbird
• For profiling memory usage of an application Exmap is the canine testes. Talk by Tomas Frydrych
• Buying an ATi graphics card is bad if you’re using Linux. There have been a number of example of problems with their drivers on speakers’ laptops. In contrast, Intel have people here explaining the cool stuff they are writing for Linux
• Goocanvas looks like it’s quick and easy to use and I’ve been writing some code with it in the gaps here

What I suspect I’ll remember most though is realising I’d slept through a very important phone call from my pregnant wife. The first thing I knew about it was waking up for a second phone call, hours afterwards. Em had been experiencing horrible pain and an ambulance had been called. The doctor thinks it was a trapped nerve and the baby is safe though so it could have been so much worse.

So we’re married now! The wedding went very smoothly and the weather was good. Because Em wants as much holiday as possible to use as maternity leave we haven’t been on holiday. Our Honeymoon consisted of spending some time in a hotel swimming pool and an afternoon on Bournemouth beach. I’ve been back at work a few days and it feels like we’ve been married forever.

Already I’m away from home – I write this from a hotel lobby in Birmingham, I’m at GUADEC, I look forward to learning a whole lot. In most company I have plenty of geek points. Here, I’m going to be a bit of a lurker and soak up as much as I can.

A couple of weeks ago things were a little taut around here and I was a little frayed at the edges. For a few days there were lots of minor problems and tasks were everywhere; it was all a little daunting. Em is still very sleepy and is coping with a full time job involving shift work, morning sickness and wedding prep but my eyes were starting to glaze over at the thought of everything we had to do.

We’d just moved house and I had spent quite a long time cleaning the old house so I hadn’t done much unpacking at the new one. We also hadn’t sent out any wedding invitations and the big day is in early July. Within the space of a few days, our toilet and shower became blocked, I lost my keys, my car broke down in a moderately expensive manner, our digi-box started to pine for the fjords and this web site was hacked into. Each thing separately was fairly minor but it all added up to more stress than usual.

Today we handed in a final table plan and paid the remaining amount for the wedding and things are definitely settling down. We’re mostly unpacked here so I actually wasted some time playing OpenArena and Widelands. Normally after a spell where I play computer games I go through self-recriminations about the wasted time but this time I’m thankful that I had the time to waste. Things are certainly on the up

Of course, not everything is perfect. The block of flats we live in caught fire this morning but it doesn’t appear to be very major so that’s okay.

During my relaxing I also watched/listened to a lot of Jonathan Coulton stuff. The re: Your brains song in particular I can listen to again and again.

…sitting in Covent Garden eating falafel listening to a busker sing Streets of London? That’s what I was up to this afternoon before going to see the surprisingly (to me) good Avenue Q.

A lot has happened here since my last blog post – which explains the lack of posting. Em and I are going to be married on July 6th, 2006 – just a few weeks away. Em is also pregnant – we have a baby due in late November. Neither of these momentous things have actually been taking the bulk of my time though – I’ve mostly been moving house

With a lil’ un on the way we moved to a house with an extra bedroom but with Em feeling extremely morning sick I’ve been tidying the old house (hoping to get the majority of our deposit back) and have yet to finish unpacking though things are starting to get under control now and we can concentrate on the wedding.

(BTW in answer to the question posed at the start of this post, I’d guess that the answer is “no”. Whilst the fafel was great I suspect the main therapeutic effect was down to my pregnant fiance getting up early and finding me pain killers before she went to work).

Update:Em couldn’t start the car to come home from work this evening and is currently waiting for the breakdown cavalry.

Yesterday, went for drinks and food with D&A in London. We ate in the Masala Zone, Islington and I was thoroughly impressed. On Friday I went to a poker evening at lost badly but I’ll be back. Settling in nicely to the new job role so things are going well

…and Brad left a comment on my last entry which I guess is the 21st century equivalent of having your body signed by the band at a gig. Peachy.