Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Goodest job news

I will be starting at www.clearcom.com in a few weeks. I am really looking forward to contributing in a small company again. No more falling asleep waiting for the perforce server to check out a single file. Sometimes I look at the network perforce request Q, and think that it looks like a stock-indicator, will it go up, will it go down - either way, your request is going to take 8 minutes. I suppose that's where you get a minute to read that chapter about code-refactoring. It's a plot I tell you!
Jokes aside now, Symbian Ltd has been a great learning curve. I suspect everything can look like lemons when you get swamped by 1000 developers, almost as many tools and twice as many processes; but I have worked with a really neat team. I doubt that all the teams are as much fun in reality, so I will miss a few friends, but some I hope to hang onto from the Cambridge office as well. The kind of quality needed in Open Source, and how one gets there has been most interesting to me and it's no walk in the park. I believe I am now a better reviewer and able to balance the bigger picture better, well time will tell. It has been good.

Holiday pics



OK, so this is where I sit and upload pictures of inane things we saw. Well I promised.




Rhys has started to take pics of his own, most of them are of favourite objects. But here is a pretty well composed one or two:


OK enough about my lack of image positioning control/ it's not like I have time on my hands is it? Oh, and here is another good one.

Aunt Claire baked this number. Count the candles Greg.


Still need to get the happy youngster to get into a learning gear :-).

Friday, May 09, 2008

There is no 'away'

Next time you throw something out, try to work out where it goes. It's actually not possible to throw things away, because away is actually somewhere else in the end.
BBC News: Food waste on 'staggering' scale

It's out of mind, but only for you - the planet still has to live with it. So how are we supposed to live in the age of away? It's not easy to pollute less; I had to drive 50 miles to work for 6 months (the alternative was 1.5 hours one way and 2 hours back) and now I drive only 5 miles Travelling 500 miles a week is no healthy, so being closer to the office is welcomed, but now I live closeby, I still cannot go by bus (alternative to driving 15 mins, is about 50 minutes on 2 buses) just to cover 5 miles direct. It is increasingly difficult to access effective bulk-transport, especially if all buses are one size: huge and half-empty half-of-the-time. Do the world a favour, go somewhere by bus tomorrow, it's really not a problem most of the time; and you will probably enjoy the view from the upper deck too.

Finally, those photies, we did not take any (lesson, it takes 3 adults to run a party for 16), but I will post a few recent ones anyway.