Friday, May 28, 2004

Bratislava - wet privates

Typical. After weeks of sunny weather i arrive in austria and is chucking it down. Struggled to bratislava to get a hotel and find there is a nato summit on. The place is crawling with huge coppers, armed to the teeth. Of course this is a prime Target for all manner of terrorists, so they are all a bit jumpy. One of them looks at me and asks in a thick slovakian accent:

"vat ees zis?"

"oh, thats my ukulele", I reply.

Guatanemo bay here i come

Thursday, May 27, 2004

sitting at the back

From my forthcoming tomb "java poetry"

Roses are red
violets are blue
i've got an enterprise java bean
and so have you


Wednesday, May 26, 2004

Flat Line

Doing some training with the Blue Meanies. Sitting at the back with my coat on as usual; this time, things got bad. During a bit about DB2 Stored Procedures I think I actually died. Tunnel vision, floating above myself and everything. If it had been ER a machine would have gone "PING!" and doctors and nurses would have rushed around pressing my chest and shouting "give him 2 mils of spanadone and FAST!"

Usually I just play solitaire and everything is all right.

Monday, May 24, 2004

Emailing the blog

Blogger now lets you email to your blog. This was a feature of the old
blogger so they have just re-introduced it with the new face lift. Oooo.



The Unsuitable Bicycle Club

So only 3 days to go before the annual Unsuitable Bicycle Club tour. This year we are cycling down the Danube from Vienna to Budepest. To make things more interesting, this year my chum and I are taking Ukeleles. In fact we have formed a band, "The Dukes of Uke" and this is going to be the "Uke's of Hazard" tour. The only question is: will we have the nerve or the tunes to busk in Budepest?

Thursday, May 20, 2004

JCreator

I am on the road a lot so resent carrying huge macho computers around. I few years ago I had to peddle a monstrous Compaq around London. It rapidly became a new Olympic demonstration sport.

I imagine an equestrian event with portable computers.

In the voice of Raymond Brooks-Ward

"Here comes Spuggy on Sanyo-Chutney IV carrying the enormous Compaq Aero-brick 4000 ....... "
"Yes! over the water jump."
"nice turn"
"easy ....."
"oh dear four faults at wave-railed verticals"
"oh ghastly .. he's refused at the wall"

A result of this policy is that I am the owner of a Dell Latitude L400 which to be honest has the whiff of lavender about it these days. This is not normally an issue for good old Lotus Chutney-Ware but for the manly world of J2EE/Websphere/Portal it just doesn't cut the mustard.

All the more lovely then to stumble upon jCreator. It's a splendid little IDE that loads in flash and intergrates nicely with Ant/JUnit and stuff to make everything rather pleasant. Bravo.

Sunday, May 16, 2004

Spug Rogers in the 21st Century

Blast Off!. Thundering towards Gotham city in my campervan, laden with hi-tech wizardry, sometimes at speeds of almost sixty miles an hour. Looking forward to an exciting week of hot computer action; J2ME Phone development, tedious upgrades and the chance of a cherry brandy with Scotland's own Billy Bob and the Portalettes.

Friday, May 14, 2004

The curse of loft

In 1922 Howard Carter and Lord Canarvon discovered King Tutankhamens royal gallery, arguably the richest archaeological find in modern history. In May 2004, in a box in my loft, I discovered an unopened Airfix Hawker Hurricane and my old school tie. Very much on a par in my opinion, infact, Time Team eat your bloody hearts out.

What is hard to imagine though, given the skinnyness of the tie, is how I managed to get it into a 1970s champion-tucker-jenkins-uber-knot like this.

"It wasn't me Sir. It was Sharpy"

Sunday, May 09, 2004

IKEA is a fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure

Surfing about and found this post from someone who has worked IKEA out as an fully immersive, 3D environmental adventure. I loathe IKEA, but periodically find myself back there. I cope by putting offensive messages in their suggestion box just before I leave. This always cheers me up enormously.

My favorite deposit was:

Don't even think for one minute we don't know what you are up to, you Swedish bastards.

Wednesday, May 05, 2004

Really dreadful

I was awoken at 5:00 am this morning by my recurring nightmare/dream. I am being chased by Pans People, they never catch me. Particularly Babs Lord (to the right in the picture). No one under 35 will appreciate the significance of this.

As I was awake I decided to make use of the time and get a bit of admin out of the way. My first task was to shuffle a bit of money about using my companies updated on line banking system. Holy mother of god, what a pile of utter tripe and bilge. The system is almost useless as it is opaque, confusing, ugly ..... it sucks. It has tiny little ok buttons way off in the far corners of the screen. When I got my password wrong it said something like "000.12321 ::: Your status is incorrect". It's a bad system.

Thing is, systems like this always encourage me, because if gynormous institutions with relatively limitless piles of cash and legions of chisel jawed consultants can produce desperate old crap like this, then there is still hope for an old sh1t kicker like me.

Monday, May 03, 2004

A new 21st century superhero

After months trapped in castle grey skull, the mild mannered janitor that was Monkey Programmer Boy, finally emerges as his true self. YES! Monkey Programmer boy is .............................





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