Gash in head

There are those times in life, lying flat on your back in Wetherspoon’s with blood leaking from you head, when you think perhaps you shouldn’t have attempted to jump down those stairs.

Admittedly, these times are probably quite rare.

The circumstances leading up to this event are not really of interest, but suffice to say at around 10 o’clock on Friday night I was sat enjoying my beer “upstairs” in Winchester’s ’spoons. For those of you who haven’t been to the Old Gaol House, when I say upstairs I mean 2 stairs.

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About a week and a half ago – Saturday the 2nd to be precise – I was sat in the bar at the Brewery in Kendal and was talking about chipped windscreens. Some vague connection in my head went off and I started to wonder when my tax was due. Beer soon took over though, and I promptly forgot about it. The next day, however, sitting in my passenger seat I spotted the disc in the corner of the windscreen and took a look.

30th November 2009.

Bugger.

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Last week, after arriving home from 2 weeks in the Lake District snow Anna was already plotting a return. For that coming weekend.

Despite it being something like a 5 hour drive from here, I was also keen. Despite the nation whining incessantly about the “bad” weather, I for one was loving it. Conditions like this a pretty rare thing in much of England and getting out on the hills is even more fun than usual in the snow.

Chatting with Dave about the idea, I found he was less convinced about the driving part but still keen to get out and about in the hills. Remembering the slightly shorter drive but gorgeous scenery during our stay at Graig Wen last October, a plan started to form…

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I frequently read the BBC’s news website. I read it because it’s fast, it’s cleanly laid out, it has a short URL… I read it for a number of reasons.

There are a few things, however, I do not like about it. The rampant racism of its readers, for example. That is easily avoided, however, and it’s occasionally fun to dip in for some sport.

I’ve typed about the bad use of language before, but that’s not as bad as today’s example. Today we have an excellent example of laziness or incompetence.

This article reports, through its headline, that

Three rescued after suffering injuries on Snowdon

It goes on to say

Three people have been airlifted to safety by an RAF helicopter in two separate rescues in Snowdonia.

So far so good. Snowdon is definitely in Snowdonia; the clue’s in the name. However, we read a little further and discover that the accidents actually happened on Y Garn (about 3.5 miles away, peak-to-peak as the crow flies) and Tryfan (just over 4.5 miles away).

It’s just so damn shoddy.

Anna recently sent me a link to an article on the Guardian website entitled “DIY Christmas cards“. I like the idea of making stuff, and despise the commercial horror-show that christmas has descended into, but suffer from a distinct lack of creativity. Which means making cards is hard.

Nevertheless, Anna was keen to try and during a flying visit to Southampton we dove into paperchase, after wading past the throngs of people walking slower than slow people in slow land. With arthritis. And a broken leg. I hate going to Southampton.

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Almost a week on, and I’ve started to get some details up about the awesomeness that was the christmas meal of 2009.

All 12 people that signed up were present and correct and a good time was had by all (I hope!).

At the moment, I’ve managed to put up details of the menu we went with, including links to all the recipes. There’s also a photo gallery, and a timeline of the day’s preparations. The (now updated) page on making the christmas puds is included, as is the new page on how I created the perfect turkey. Hopefully more details will emerge, but who knows.

P.S. There’s a great recipe for leftovers on BBCGoodFood. Mmmm.

I recently volunteered to cook a christmas meal for 12 people. With assistance from the rest of my housemates, I hope to put on a veritable extravaganza. I like the idea of documenting the process, but most likely I’ll get too distracted by the actual process of cooking and not get around to taking photos/writing it up.

But, with the best intentions, I’ve started at the beginning. With the dessert.

As a side-project at work, I’ve been working on an ant task to generate an atom feed of something. The something’s not really important.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, I did a quick search on google for a Java library to take care of the feed processing for me. Sure enough, Rome seemed to fit the bill.

Merrily testing away in my Eclipse workbench, I quickly wrote the code to generate my atom feed. All was good with the world. The planets may or may not have aligned. And then I came to run it through ant.

Unfortunately, that’s where the problems started…

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Just posted my write-up of Factory Manager.

Being critical, it maybe suffers from too much description and not enough reviewing. I may well revise it at some point, if I find the time, but with so many other games, places, and who knows what else to writeup, it may just end up being a learning experience. Let’s just hope I learn from it Even if I don’t it’s still not /that/ bad .

One annoying part of developing Eclipse plugins which generate deployable JEE applications is that the server you use for deployment is often set up and started through the runtime workbench.

This means that to test your code, you need to configure the code lookup in your runtime workbench – a pain if you have multiple runtime workbenches, or frequently clear your runtime workbench metadata.

An alternative approach, which I use, is to disconnect the debugger from the runtime workbench and connect it in your base workbench. This post details how.

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