Sleep Interrupted

We received a mysterious package yesterday, which turned out to be a limited edition CD entitled “Disaurning Ernience”. The postmark was Wallingford, so I knew I had Ed to blame.

Putting it on while the family sat down to dinner was something of a timewarp to 1994, where remembering the way to the pub was the closest thing I had to responsibility and drinking and listening to live music with friends was what Sunday evenings were made for.

Sitting in her highchair, Jessica started to dance spontaneously to Ain’t No Sunshine with a big grin on her face — she’s about ten times more dancy than Ben. Lady Madonna got the same treatment. Girl’s got taste, it would appear.

Good times… Thanks Ed!

You can catch The Cooper Temple Clause’s Jurassic Park / Dawn Of The Dead / Clockwork Orange video for their new single Homo Sapiens over at YouTube. Rock!

If you use Ubuntu, please take a couple of minutes to fill out this short survey. If you don’t use Ubuntu, there’s a different survey that you can fill in. If you don’t even know what Ubuntu is, there’s yet another survey there for you. Look, I’m sure you’re not really that busy. Go on!

This week I decided that Louise shouldn’t have a monopoly (mono/poly, that’s interesting) on this studying lark, so Wednesday will become my Study Night. However, my concentration is wandering after about 45 minutes with the big C# book, so I bring you this post…

I’m a bit of a sucker for keeping up with the latest developments in free software land and my current crush is Ubuntu, not least because it’s the Linux distrubution running on our home PC. Now I’ve really got to take my hat off to them — they’re replacing init. For those of you still playing along at home, this is a part of Unix-like operating systems that’s been more or less unchanged for 30 years.

Mark and I speculated about this a couple of years ago and came up with a few ideas about how we’d tackle a replacement for init. I have to say, though, what Scott James Remnant has come up with is something far superior.

Now this kind of thing I find really interesting, exciting even. It’s quite likely you won’t. Apologies. Move along, please.

I’ve seen some of these before, you probably have too, but it doesn’t stop the being funny: Mathematics genius.

Last year’s Ringathon was great fun, so this year I’d like to do something similar to celebrate my birthday. After due thought and consideration, I think a marathon Indiana Jones watching is in order. As “Indyathon” just doesn’t cut it as a name, I’m going to call it the “Indy 345″. Answers on a postcard.

I can’t believe Raiders is 25 years old this year!

I have to say that I’m slightly surprised at Tim’s decision not to go with morning suits for his wedding. I’m not saying it’s bad — it’s exactly the same decision I came to for our wedding — but every time I go to a wedding where morning suits are on parade, there’s a bit of me that wishes I’d not passed on the chance to dress up. I guess Tim had his go when he was ushing at Richard and Becky’s wedding.

The whole family went to Tim & Kathy’s engagement party this weekend and we all had a great time. The kids were well behaved and there were quite a few folks there who we hadn’t seen in some time. In the evening Louise held the fort and I went back. I was then party to an impromptu whiskey tasting lesson. Mmmm! Must get me one of those whiskey guide books.

Every time I meet up with old friends I end up reflecting on my current situation, due to the standard “so what are you up to?” questions that crop up. I had to laugh (somewhat explosively, sorry) when Dave put a twist on it saying, “so I suppose you’re in a management position now…?”. Yeah, right… err… no.

Compared to some other friends, in many visible ways, the progress of my professional life has turned to molasses. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a challenging job that’s paid relatively well and I have learnt, well, everything I know about (stupidly) large scale software development while there. But… I’m still doing much the same job with the same responsibilities I was doing 5 years ago when I started at the company. Worse, my raw technical skills have not moved on at all.

Of course, having a steady job with good hours has suited me very well since Ben and Jess turned up. I don’t think I want to commit to doing more work, so perhaps I should just shut up and get on with my comfortable suburban family life. But… again with the but… it doesn’t stop me from feeling a bit left behind. Like being the last one to be picked for the football team at school (but that’s a whole other post).

Now, this is not some revelation I’ve had over the weekend. Much of the past year I’ve been broadening my knowledge and I’ve just started re-tooling my brain with a 1000 page book on C# and .NET. I’m not having a whinge here; I’m more the “so how do we fix this?” kind of guy. So, what am I saying? I don’t know, this is a blog goddamit! I don’t need to know anything!

Okay, I do know. Oh Magic Internet, please conjure up a job that pays more with lower hours. There, I said it, come mock me, arseholes.

Navel gazing aside, the party was great. I got to catch up with folks and started to have an interesting coversation with Tim on environmentalism. I was getting tired, though, and sort of petered out and couldn’t argue my (slightly confused) side, especially when posited with hard questions like “why does it matter if species die out due to climate change?”. Species aside, I would direct people to a post by Gervase Markam on carbon offsetting. Or not, the link is down at the time of writing. Interesting are his rebuttals to the comments; some of the links I will have to follow. (Whoops, almost slipped into Yodaspeak there.)

Whenever I used to watch Empire, I would wonder why in the space scenes Artoo’s panels were black instead of blue. Well, thanks to a work collegue’s link to starwars.com, I now know exactly why.

Jessica has just started saying “daddy”. Or rather “daaa-deee” and usually not when I’m around. When I am around, I still get called “mummy”. Go figure. She also said her first two word sentence yesterday: “Bye-bye Tilly!”

Ben had his first full session at pre-school today. He’s really enjoyed it, to the point that he told Louise that she had to “stop coming back to pick me up so soon”. Considering my less than idilic start to formal education, I’m really pleased for him.