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.