Xmas past

The big news for me this xmas is that I have finally been selected for the British Olympic drinking team. I will be in the four man bob with the cheap Chilean shiraz, brazil nuts and cooking lager.

Next xmas I have asked for bowel irrigation and mineral water.

Fat Dads Football Club

When I lived in London I played five-a-side football once a week. The players were in their thirties and forties and it was fab; particularly as I am incapable of doing any other exercise (jogging, gym etc) as they are duller than a dull thing from dull-land.

When I moved out to the shires I pined for the old game, tried a bit of mountain biking, but in the end just watched my man-breasts grow ever larger.

In a business meeting with a local web developer bloke I discussed the lack of football and discovered that he too would like a game but couldn't get enough players together.

Not knowing many people locally I decided to employ a brilliantly lo-fi piece of advertising: I put a card in shop windows. It said:

FAT DADS FOOTBALL

did you eat all the pies?
Call 0781 XXX XXX

Suprisingly over the next few weeks I got quite a few calls which all started with: "Hello, is that Fat Dads football?"

We have now been playing nearly a year and have a block booking at the local leisure centre.




One of the better players is 58 years old! I would be quite happy with being alive at 58 never mind playing football.

The seven habits of really dreadful people you wouldn't want to be stuck in a lift with

I am keen on "Getting things done" and was jolly pleased to discover a load of additional web material to support this.

There is a very good "getting things done wiki" here. This is full of good "how to implement" stuff.

If you only have the attention span of a gnat then at least read "How to create a really smart to-do list"

Or you could always buy;

"The seven habits of slightly weird quasi-religious nitwits who who feel the need to write buttock-clenching mission statements about how their lives are dedicated to serving some higer being or other"

Ruby on Rails version 1.0

Ruby on rails version 1.0 is released .

Somebody posted this picture and I kid you not I have at least half the books on the left.



I also am expecting the delivery of the books on the right. I plan to read em when the family are watching the xmas repeats ...

All

Miserable ghost-of-xmas-past-monkey-programmer-saddo!!!!!!

You bet.

Networking

I am a member of a number of on-line networking things. As a result I receive a the occasional message from people asking questions and suggesting stuff. It has proven very handy.

When some one contacts you the first thing you do is check out their profile to see who they are and what they do. Today I was contacted by some fella who proudly boasted on his profile:

"I love music, for example, Bruce Springsteen and I also enjoy going to concerts by Tina Turner and Phil Collins."

I'm mean f@cking hell.

That said I do like the "The Wild The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle" ....

Gay Wedding

Although Mrs Spug and I have been together for twenty years and have three kids, we are not actually married.

This makes me sort of available and as today is the day when Gay Marriages have become legal in the UK I decided to "pop the question" to couple of my mates to see if any of them would make an honest man of me.

Here's what I asked

"Being the law has changed today I just thought I would pop the question. We are both single and have a lot in commmon. I am not sure about the sex thing but I would be happy for you to see other people"


Sadly no one was up for it:

Spiney Norman said:
"You of all people should know I have commitment issues"

and Rubbery Chaploe said:
Send me a picture of you with your willy tucked between your legs and I'll give it some consideration


Well - at least I tried.

Of gaming, odd bods, dragons and beards

I don't play computer games as a rule, as I sit in front of computers far too much and to be honest I find them a bit tedious. Yesterday however, I took my middle son, who we call the "Beast of Hammersmith" to a local games shop that has a gaming centre downstairs.

In one room there were a load of people playing card games like yugioh and some with small figures so I imagine they were playing dungeons and dragons.

I peered in at them and felt a bit like I had stumbled upon an S&M party in the suburbs. I am not comfortable with the whole Dungeons and Dragons thing on the grounds that it is silly bollocks for odd bods. The only time I was ever convinced to play a game I was thrown out for persistently fighting with the wizard. I seem to remember my character being called "Doug the Dwarf". My mate Duncan said he had good fun playing once but only because he was stoned.

Any how, after we got away from the odd bod card players we were installed in front of two powerful computers and had a very jolly time playing Unreal Tournament against each other. The Beast of Hammersmith managed to kill me at least 400 times.

The staff were very helpful and enthused about bots and what crazy things happen in the on line games; the best type of guns; whether the new xbox was any good and which one of them had the best goatee beard.

They were all really nice although frankly, they could all do with a girlfriend.

Woooosh

Ruby on Rails and AJAX

I am doing a fair bit of server side java development at the mo and deep in the bowels of all the stuff you need.

Tomcat configuration
XML
Spring Frameworks
Hibernate
Struts
Xdoclet
Ant
Uncle tom cobbly and all.

What's more you can bet that they have thought of something else to include in the time I have written this blog entry.

It all smacks of the Emperors new clothes. 95% of web site just don't need this kind of complexity and aggravation. They don't need to scale but they need to be developed fast. Fast, but not by just running straight for a page based scripting approach like PHP. Page based approaches hit a glass ceiling real fast and after that maintaining any kind of coherent design is impossible.

So I am more and more attracted by the promises of Ruby on Rails particularly in combination with things like Prototype.js

It all sounds terribly clever and less of pain the arse.

Skype 2.0 - Talking to the Wookies

Today I have been video conferencing using Skype 2.0.

To test it out I skyped some of my wookie mates about stuff.

They are nice people but I have no idea what they are talking about ....





Postscript:

I forgot their names of couse.

The wookie on the bottom is Chewbacca - who was in the star wars films and above him is an equally famous Socttish wookie known as Chewbuchan.