The last two weeks have been pretty hectic. This time two weeks ago I was sitting on a flight to Houston. The night before, Louise and I were working a bar together, which was a lot more fun than I was expecting.
The flight to the US was for work. Two days in Houston, visiting our seriously hurricane-proof data centre, followed by two days in Washington at a CDISC conference. For an inexperienced traveller, that’s a pretty punishing schedule; I didn’t do much useful on the Friday when I got back.
Saturday evening saw us all braving the downpours to go to the Wokingham firework show. The numbers were down significantly on previous years. I’d say only about a third the normal turnout. This had the advantage that we could park relatively closely. We left before the finale, however, as the kids had become very wet and cold.
This last week saw me scrabbling to catch up at work while trying to sort out a broken toilet flush at home in the evenings. I almost sorted the toilet out entirely on my own (with Louise on parts shopping duty during the day) but had to call in my dad for the last stage of reconnecting the water. I’ll get there one day. It only twigged with me a year or so ago that dads aren’t born knowing how to do everything, they just have twenty plus years head start on you.
I’m really enjoying work at the moment. We’re working on a new project, which is allow us to start over. This is a rarity in the application development arena. So often you’re building off someone else’s work, which limits your choices. We’re taking this opportunity to adopt some best of breed technologies and design the code in a way that we can have extensive automated unit tests. I’m very hopeful that the benefits this will deliver will be measurable. I’m also really chuffed that my team has taken my directions and run with them.
Yesterday saw my third visit to the Woking Beer Festival. The highlight, as ever, was the Whurlitzer performance by Len Rawle. Several hundred beered-up folks singing along to the likes of Old Bull And Bush and Jerusalem is great fun.