Sleep Interrupted

After many months I’ve finally finished reading Enterprise Integration Patterns. I wish it had existed when I was working at Syngenta, as it would have thrown light on several of the integration projects I did there. Of course, at the time I didn’t even think of them as Integration-with-an-I projects, but that’s the whole point. At least I can rewrite that part of my CV to be more buzzword compliant now.

I was a bit disappointed that the section on emerging web service standards for messaging was a bit thin on conclusions. It’s certainly not helped me shake the feeling that this morass of standards won’t make a lasting impact, at least not in the way invisaged by their authors.

Another book in the Addison-Wesley Signature Series is Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. I got this for Christmas — yes, I’m that exciting — and it looks to be superb. If I had a list of books for programmers (and that’s a whole other post coming soon) it would be in the section marked “Compulsory” along with things like Design Patterns.

We asked Ben to do something the other day and his response was “Okily dokily!” — I blame Louise.

My friend Graham once suggested writing down where you think you’ll be in a year’s time, so you can look back and see how good you are at making estimates. So, thinking along those lines, here are my goals for 2006:

• Hand over the Fantasy Film League to someone else to look after. I’m done with it, thank you very much.
• Finish decorating the lounge. No, really finish, such that there’s nothing left to do.
• Redecorate at least one of the “difficult” rooms in our house, i.e. either the kitchen or bathroom. This will mean tidying out the garage too, so we have somewhere to work in while doing this.
• Sort out the remaining bits of exterior paintwork on the house that I didn’t pay the painter to do last year (because I’m cheap).
• Tame the last wildly overgrown border in our back garden. (I like digging things up, me.)
• Sort out the small rust patches on my car before they get any worse.
• Blog more. (Don’t all bloggers say this?)
• Persuade at least one of my friends or family to start blogging.
• Invent The Best MMPORPG In The World Ever.

Maybe I’ll come back and edit this post over the next few days if I think of anything else.

Updated:

• Teach Ben to throw and catch.
• Make moves in the right direction towards becoming carbon neutral.
• Go running more often, increase my maximum run to 45 minutes, and attempt a 5km run.

Eating too much. Falling asleep in the afternoon. Watching rubbish television. Drinking too much. All these fine Christmas Day activities… that I didn’t get to do this year. Instead, a very large proportion of the day was spent looking after the children. However, it was still a lot of fun, just in a different, exicited-small-child kind of way.

We managed to get out and see friends for New Year too, but we were back home before long to put the kids to bed. So, as is becoming the norm for us now, we spent the rest of the evening ploughing through our DVDs — Angel in this case — and switching back to the TV for midnight and the crazy fireworks in London.