The musings of a programmer
This is what has been consuming my time at work for the last few months. Myself and a couple of colleagues have written the entire booking engine from scratch, and we’re pretty proud of it.
If you’ve got any comments, I’d be interested to hear them :)
It’s come to my attention that recently, I haven’t actually had that much time to spend doing things that are solely for me.
It used to be that I went to work from 9-5:30, then on three days out of five I’d go to the gym, then home, and on the other two days I’d go straight home. When I arrived home, all that time was mine - I could do whatever I liked, usually watch TV, play games and just generally relax.
Lately though, I’ve been so busy with work on our new booking engine that I just haven’t had time for myself. I barely make it to the gym at the moment, because we work late and have deadlines to meet. With rehearsals for the show as well, I often don’t get home until 10:30pm, when I have about an hour and a half to do anything for myself before I really need to be in bed. Of course I rarely make it to bed at this time and end up staying up late to do the things I want to do, and then I end up at work the next day feeling very tired indeed.
I relish the challenge, and I think that these times are a lot of fun, but part of me can’t help but wish for the day that I can go back to my normal routine and actually get some sleep again.
This weekend has been very relaxing - I am sitting at my desk at work at the moment, and despite being very hungry and wanting the bacon man to show up and provide me with a sandwich and a bottle of Coke, I feel rather good. Considering I only got five hours’ sleep last night, that isn’t too bad. I just need to make sure that I kill myself off at the gym after work and then go to bed at about midnight tonight, otherwise I’ll be a total zombie tomorrow morning.
I find that usually, the weekends where you don’t do a lot are the most relaxing of all. A few weeks ago, my best mate moved out of the flat he was sharing with his girlfriend, after some relationship trouble. It’s a long story, and everything between them is fine again now (they’ve been together nearly five years, it would have been a major thing to lose) but the side effect is that we no longer have anywhere to go to chill out, drink and play games of a Friday or Saturday night. This is a shame on some levels because I really quite liked his flat, and it was great to have somewhere we could stay up late and make a bit of noise, then crash out at 4am and sleep until halfway through the next day. It’s also quite a good thing, because it means that my weekends have become a lot more about sleep and sitting around in my boxers and a dressing gown. This is a geeky comment but it’s certainly one I believe in!
Rehearsals for the pantomime are well underway, and after rehearsal on Thursday night, I went into town to meet Matt, Craig, Larman and Jo for a drink. After one pint, it became another, and soon enough I was being badgered into leaving my car in town and going to the Ivory for a load more drinks with them. I hadn’t planned on it, but the best evenings out I’ve had (both at home and university) have been spontaneous ones, and this didn’t disappoint. The only bad part was going to bed at 3am, and then having to get up at 7:45 on Friday morning for Matt to give me a lift to town to collect my car.
Having said that my weekend was relaxing, I did actually go to work on Saturday night. It’s a longish story, but I recently went to watch some kickboxing at the Stevenage leisure centre, which is attached to the Gordon Craig theatre. My old school friend Dave is a full-time deputy chief technician at the theatre and organises lightning, sound and stage management for all the productions they put on - he happened to be doing the lightning and sound for the kickboxing, and when I saw him we both had a chat about things as we hadn’t seen each other in a while.
He mentioned that they had vacancies for casual work - basically doing similar things to him but on a part-time basis - a bit of lighting and sound, rigging lights, follow spotting and the like, and said that there was a job for me if I was interested. I’ve always loved that side of theatre, and despite having got back onto the stage recently, part of me has always preferred being one of the unsung heroes behind the scenes who actually make everything work together. After thinking about it momentarily, I accepted his offer and agreed to get in contact to sort it out.
Saturday night was my first shift, doing what’s known as the “get-out” for Tap Dogs, a loud, high-energy show featuring six tap-dancing Australians, which had been running for the whole of the previous week. The get-out is basically disassembling the entire set, lighting and sound rigs and packing the whole lot back up into a lorry to send it to its next venue. The set is constructed primarily of box-section steel and, as such, is rather heavy. The majority of the sections involved six-man lifts to actually get it to move - to say it was hard work is a bit of an understatement! It was good fun though, and although I didn’t get home until 3am, I earnt a lot of money for it :-)
It is Friday, and I am bored at work. I have spent a large proportion of today on the excellent Facebook (that site truly is a procrastinator’s nightmare) and I am looking forward to going home.
This week has been absolutely exhausting to say the least. I was in a meeting room at hotel in Stevenage for the first three days of it, doing massively long days to try and get a project finished in time for Thursday. We were ready on time in the end, but circumstances changed and so the launch date has now been moved forward to a few weeks from now. I can’t say I’m not delighted about it - it’s given us more time to thoroughly test things so that we can actually release a top-notch product. This week has totally taken it out of me though, and I am seriously looking forward to crawling into bed and sleeping for about twelve hours this evening. There will be some beer being drunk in town first though, as that is definitely called for.
The show (Daisy Pulls It Off) went fantastically well in the end. We had big audiences every night and were sold out Friday and Saturday night, which was excellent. It’s much easier to perform when there’s a big audience and they keep the atmosphere and the laughs going - comedy is quite hard to pull off (excuse the name based pun) when people don’t find it funny. It was brilliant fun though and I was totally demoralised when it was over. I thought I’d escaped the post-show malaise as I was fine on Saturday night, but I think that was because I was at the after-show party and was drinking quite a bit of alcohol. It all hit me when I had to disassemble the set on Sunday morning with a bit of a hangover.
Not to worry though - rehearsals for the Christmas pantomime have now started. I’m playing Jack (one half of the famous “Jack and Jill”) and it’s looking to be quite a laugh so far, although far more energetic than what I’ve been used to! We had our first attempt at doing the dancing that goes along with the first song last night… not only was it absolutely knackering, it was damn hard as well. I’m totally out of practice! I’m looking forward to it, though.
I think I may have to be purchasing Halo 3 - having done some 3-player online on release day, I think it’s definitely going to be added to the games list. Awesome stuff!
My week off work was great fun. I had the entire house and the whole internet connection to myself, and nobody else but me to worry about for an entire week. I stayed up late, got up late and did many amusing things. I shopped for myself, bought all the things my parents don’t believe in buying, I had some hilarious efforts at cooking and just did whatever the hell I wanted to.
Unfortunately these things do have to come to an end, and it was an effort to get up for work on Monday morning. I thought that was bad, but it was nothing compared to what it was like this morning. I thought I was going to collapse when I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower - I’m totally not a morning person. People have said you can change yourself to be but I just don’t believe it. I’ve *never* been able to get up properly in the mornings, not matter when I go to bed and how much sleep I have. Still, I’m going to try and get to bed a bit earlier in future.
I think I’m going to do some experimentation with the Zend framework this evening. It’s a way of programming that separates content and layout for a site, and then ties it together using a “controller”. It sounds like the perfect scalable solution for an idea I have for a new website. I’m going to start it and see whether the idea still takes my fancy when I’ve done a bit of coding with it.
I’ve just rewritten my IRC bot (botsworth) as well, to use TuB’s framework. Unfortunately he’s changed it already and so it’ll probably be due a rewrite sometime soon. He is ridiculously impulsive and will often change his mind entirely about something in a matter of minutes!
The Premier League is looking like it’ll be an epic battle this season, from the matches I’ve seen so far. I’m tipping United, Chelsea or Liverpool for the title - I’ve been told not to write off teams like Arsenal, but I’m just not convinced. I may stand to eat my words…
While playing the increasingly-addictive World of Warcraft last night, I discovered that my warlock (who was the second character I got to level 60, in the days before The Burning Crusade) is absolutely awesome. In some cases, he’s so overpowered it’s unreal - I soloed a level 63 elite with him last night. Considering that elites have about three times the HP of a regular mob, hit three times as hard and usually have special abilities, I’m quite pleased with that. I needed a healthstone and a healing potion, but that was only because the chain fear I was using failed and he hit me over 1000 in a single hit :/
In slightly less geeky news, what the hell is going on with the weather?! As a person of slightly larger proportions, I don’t tend to complain about the weather not being as hot as it should be (it means I sweat less, and I can’t stand sweating) but seriously. It’s July and there seems to be no sign whatsoever of the sun. In fact, there’s a sign up on the wall in our office kitchen - it says, “MISSING: Large round yellow object that emits lots of heat and light. Usually seen in the blue mass above known as the sky. Answers to the name “Sun”. If you see him, tell him it’s f**king July!”
It made me chuckle when I first saw it.
Today is my last day of work for 7 days. I’m having tomorrow and Monday-Thursday next week off, which is brilliant news.
This is mainly because my friend Marthe (Shy^ from Managerleague) is coming over from her home country of Norway to visit England for a week. Myself, Kloopy and his girlfriend Charley are going to look after her for a week, take her to all the touristy places in London and make sure she has a really fantastic time here. She’s going up to Kloopy’s parents’ in Suffolk too, which should be quite an experience - they live in a lovely seaside town, surrounded by brilliant English countryside.
I also have plans to take her to a castle, which apparently they don’t have in Norway… I hope she likes it. I’ll post some pictures and stories during the week to keep you updated.
In other news - I auditioned for a play on Tuesday evening. I didn’t really expect to get anywhere, I just went along because Xsara was auditioning and said that I should go along and try for one of the male parts. There are in fact only two male parts, and they are both parts for older men (a schoolteacher and a father) so I wasn’t very hopeful, but they asked me to go back this evening for the second lot of auditions. It’d be quite nice to get a part - I’ve not acted properly since I was 18 - but I won’t be that gutted if I don’t. Rehearsals are always a lot of work and they can really take it out of you. There’s nothing like the feeling of being part of a cast though, and the adrenaline rush you get before you go on stage is fantastic.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I am now running Wordpress 2.2. This makes no difference to most people who read this as they do it via RSS, but there’s a few nice cosmetic changes in it. I need to find a template that’ll work with the sidebar widgets though, as they look like they could be quite nice.
I’ve been meaning to write about the Driver Improvement Course that I did recently, but I haven’t had the time inclination to do so just yet. I’ve got the draft saved in here and it just needs to be added to, but I am on an “IBE* week” at work this week and need to dedicate my time to that instead.
* The IBE is our new work project which needs finishing. Hopefully when it’s done, it’ll be gooooood.
I am currently listening to DJ Shadow’s “Private Press” album, and I got the urge to blog. I don’t know what to write about, though.
The new Arctic Monkeys album (Favourite Worst Nightmare) is brilliant. It took me a few listens to get into it but I have to say, they’ve done very well. Not sure if it’s quite as good as the first yet, but there’s certainly a lot of it that I like. I’ve got a trip to Redhill ahead of me tomorrow to go and install a new Cisco router, and do a load of reconfiguration to try and make it work with a customer-managed VPN solution we have to start using. It’s a good idea, but things like this are rarely simple and I see many problems occurring along the way!
It’s been a good few weeks since I last blogged but there’s not really much to say. I’ve installed Kubuntu as my main operating system and I’m attempting to switch full-time from Windows XP to Linux by using it. It’s been booted for two days now and I haven’t needed to go back to Windows yet, so maybe it’s the start of something beautiful.
I’ll try make the updates a little more regular.
I went to see the Arctic Monkeys at the London Astoria on Thursday night, and I can honestly say that it was the best gig I’ve ever been to in my life. I’ve seen Oasis, Incubus, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blink 182 (I was a lot younger, and I’m not proud), Scissor Sisters, Faithless, The Music and quite a few others, but none of them came close. Incubus were my previous favourite live band, but the Monkeys beat them into a cocked hat.
The atmosphere in the place was just fantastic. The Astoria is quite small and only holds 2000 people so it was much more personal than most gigs I’ve been to before. I arrived fashionably late and so only saw the second support band, “The Little Flames” - they weren’t bad at all, although I didn’t know any of their stuff. The Monkeys came on at 9 and started with “Brianstorm“, their new single. After that, they played “Still Take You Home”, which is probably my favourite tune off their debut album, and the whole place just went off. Everyone was jumping around and singing their heads off - I’ve had some rushes of adrenaline in my time, but only coming up on ecstasy compares to the surge I got when they started playing that tune.
They were on for about an hour and ten minutes in total, played all the popular tunes off the debut album and about four off the new album. It was just an astounding gig and I’m so glad I went. I’ll definitely be buying the new album when it comes out on the 24th - “Teddy Picker” is currently my favourite tune off it. They played it at the gig and it just stuck in my head.
I’ll write a bit more soon, but I have work to do. I’m in the London office this morning (work on a Saturday, my god!) to provide onsite technical support (for “technical support” read “sitting on IRC on my laptop”) while new carpet tiles are fitted. And when they’re done, I’m going to go and meet Andy for a pint or three somewhere in London :)
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