it's clementine season again
Clementines seem to be a wholly "english" thing to me, since I hadn't seen them in Australia before. They're pretty much seedless mandarins, and when they're in season they're exceptionally tasty. Outside of season they're difficult to peel and can be hard and sour, which is not so good. The fact that they're back in season again reminds me of winter last year, wandering up and down the church street market on saturdays with cold air and grey skies. I can't believe it's been a year since I was doing that. Where does time go?
some more wandering around the hammersmith farmers' market at lunch today reminds me of all the different Christmas comfort food that is around here - mince pies, Christmas puddings, brandy butter, clotted creams, bread and butter pudding, stollen cake, yule logs, and all the different types of preserves and jams you can eat with all of it. I never delved into any of this food while I was back in Sydney, and there's a large range of other foods you get used to here that aren't available at home. It's going to be hard to leave it all behind when it's time to go back...
breaking the compiler is Not Good
[more in a series of posts made while I was internetless.]
I broke the c# compiler today. Not a temporary I'm-kind-of-broken-because-of-some-strange-state-I've-managed-to-get-into broken, but actually reproducibly broken, to the point where it throws up lots of error messages with CAPITAL LETTERS and SYMBOLS and helpfully suggests that you try to examine the code at this suggested line (and above) and try to make it "simpler".
I think that just about sums up my day.
It feels really depressing to be stuck at work for another two weeks while everyone cool is leaving this week (or has left already). I'm now working by myself tidying up the rest of the precore-core merge, and generally feeling unmotivated because there's nobody there that I can whinge to about day to day happenings on the team... and I'm really starting to feel it after three days. But I have to admit that it makes financial and mental sense for me to work those two extra weeks, then take a break. I'll take myself on holiday over Christmas and then release the recruiter hounds in the new year. Especially since I've just moved into an expensive flat and spent 750 pounds on a visa to let me stay in the country, I can do with the extra dosh :P I had been planning to take some time out to learn some WCF/WPF, and part of the new drive is that I was thinking about installing vista, so why shouldn't I just... buy a new laptop that already has it installed? hehehe.
So this is all tied up in the "which new laptop should I buy?" dilemma that I have been musing on for easily the last two months. The two main contenders are a Sony vaio of impressively small size and even more impressive battery life, and a MacBook(Pro) for it's sheer mac-iness and dual boot ability. I've been wanting to build up my unix skills again and maybe think about developing things on macs. I've had lots of other stuff on the burner lately which has made it difficult to think about, plus the fact that I don't have the internet at home so I can't research anything, so I've just been "um"-ing and "ah"-ing over it. I think I'm leaning slightly towards the mac, since it gives me a lot more new features and software than the sony will, and it's pretty unlikely that i'll use it on the go to warrant the sony's size... but the appeal of a laptop that is so small is SO strong. Imagine taking that thing on planes and on holidays - it would easily fit in my handbag, it's that small. But Paul has told me that there is a mac convention sometime in January where they might be releasing some kind of mini mac laptop, which would suit my needs perfectly. The only hitch is that I have to wait until january! arg.
anyway, since I'm still recovering from my flu-like illness I should take myself off to bed. Impressed that I've managed to wrap all this up before midnight, yay for me!
for the record, I've been listening to a lot of porcupine tree lately - I think they're the new snow patrol of winter 07.
Phil and Cal Reunion
Met up with Cally and Phil tonight for a bit of a reunion, which was quite fun! those kids have spent the last three months travelling around the mediterranean and aren't at all sick of the travelling, which I heartily admire. We spent a few hours at the Elbow Room in Angel, which is a pool bar that lets you hire the tables by the hour. Had some very average food for dinner, except their "fat boy" chips which are hand cut chunky chips that are TWICE fried. Mmmm....
Was kind of cool catching up with a few different people that I don't see very often, like Mendel and Tim - who's always full of odd conversational pieces like "it takes 8 minutes for light to get to earth from the surface of the sun. How long does it take to get from the sun's core to the surface?" The answer is apparently 200,000 years because of the sheer density of stuff that is around the sun at this point in time and the frantic pace at which these reactions are happening all the time.
We also had an interesting discussion about nuclear bombs, and the ethical question of if you were Einstein, how would you be feeling right now having to live with the fact that you invented a technology that was so destructive? (as he must have been doing?) And at this point I learned something that I didn't know before - that the scientist who was working on the same thing for the Germans, a Nobel prize winner - apparently made an error in the formula calculations he used in their bombs, which made them ineffective. The question is whether or not the error was a mistake, or on purpose? And if you were in the same situation, what would you do? THe history goes that this scientist (whose name I don't remember) had a meeting with a Danish counterpart, Bohr, during the war and there is a lot of speculation surrounding this meeting. The danish scientist believed that the Nobel scientist was asking about it because he genuinely didn't know about the error, but I think many people are supposed to have believed that this scientist would have known the answer, and made the error on purpose to stop the Germans.
It also reminded me of the recent anniversary of the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and how the crew of the Enola Gay didn't regret what they did at all. I think it would be nice to have that level of unshakeable faith in *anything* that you've ever done, because I certainly know that I don't. I think there would be plenty of events and circumstances in my life that would make me re-think decisions I'd made and their effect on others. Or, mroe accurately, anything that affected myself only I could happily deal with and move on with my life, but if I made any decision with such a wide-spread magnitude and the level of destruction as a nuclear bomb I think it would haunt me forever. I'm not sure how you would move on with your life unless you had some kind of inner faith that what you were doing is completely right. Which Tim, at dinner, offhandedly commented something along the lines of "yeah, you would do anything in wartime". It makes me realise how different society is these days - no limits, no threats, nothing to worry about on any great magnitude. Just the need to keep one's mind busy.
