Chasing Bartleby

Goals for 2009

It's New Year soon, so here is what I want to accomplish in 2009. (Many of these really should include the text 'at least...')

• Run 5 marathons; all UK-based ones, and they don't all have to be official races
• Write a short story about Abelard and get it published: genre is fine, small press is not;
• Write 4 technical articles; (agile, test, grid, and toc-in-software-engineering)
• Row a good stretch of the Thames while in Oxford; (a _bitching_ stretch)
• Engage in political activism instead of just reading about it;
• Ride (on a bicycle) a good stretch of the Thames while in Oxford; (a _bitching_ stretch)
• Deliver 3 technical talks; (agile, grid, and toc-in-software-engineering)
• Foster a spirit of "Bring the Cool" at work; important to get this one right
• Attend 2 lectures on stuff I normally wouldn't be interested in at Treadwells; and
• Play Mornington Crescent.

Having composed the above list, I am struck by the rather solitary nature of it. (And having realised that, I don't really feel any desire to change it to encompass relationships. Ho hum.)

The One Person Bag Challenge

It's the new year and a friend pointed me to The 100 Thing Challenge. Only... I don't own a hundred things. (This ain't an achievement... it's just the way it is.)

However, I am going to be moving to Oxford in the new year, and so in the spirit of the above challenge I'll be doing The One Person Bag Challenge (T1PBC: I just invented it): everything you own has to fit into one bag.

Basically, if something you own doesn't fit into the bag, then it's got to go: trade it, sell it, gift it, donate it, recycle it, or bin it. My own version of Michael Landy's 'Breakdown' would lack impact, seeing as I'm only one desktop PC tower/monitor combination and a bicycle away from success in T1PBC.

Spring User Group Talk

I talked about Spring 3 at the Spring User Group (SUG) in London on Wednesday night.

The turnout was pretty good I reckon - thirty or so folks were there. The talk I gave was only... okay though. I really was making it up as I went along, so it has a very rough stream-of-consciousness feel to it. The audience seemed to like it though, and I tried to get some energy pumping around the room and to encourage some strong and contrary opinions to be voiced. One of the very fair comments I got back was "Stop saying cool all the time." Indeed... overuse of the words "cool", "dude", and "man" is a most tiresome peccadillo of mine. Duly noted.

Sadly, the SUG talk did suffer from fake-osity in marketing. The blurb for the talk - all done without my knowledge - said that:

"Since leaving SpringSource, Rick has continued to be one of the most prolific contributors to the Spring Framework and is therefore well-placed to deliver a fascinating insight into the next release of Spring - Spring 3.0."

I haven't contributed anything to Spring beyond a single bug report on JIRA. I'll watch out for such fake-osity in the marketing blurb in future.

The compère for the evening - I use the word compère in the loosest sense - also introduced me as "the revered Rick Evans, who probably knows more about Spring 3 than anyone else". Juergen and Arjen - to name but two of the folks who wrote Spring 3 - know a heck of a lot more about the whys and wherefores of Spring 3 than me. I was quick to puncture this balloon of bollocks-osity at the talk by telling folks how it really was... hopefully they left that bit in in the edited video.

The SUG was the first Spring-related event I have done since leaving I21, and it felt odd talking about Spring from the other side of the fence. The compelling reason for having Andy Clement swan off and reinvent a wheel in the form of the Spring Expression Language still eludes me: I daresay SPEL will find much use in Spring Batch/Integration/WebFlow in the coming releases, but the immediate applicability of it is not apparent beyond some simple scenarios. (The test fixtures for the SPEL support are very pedestrian and contribute pretty much nothing to understanding the 'why' behind the implementation.)

Still Ill

I'm just back after a three week stint in hospital... the illness of seven weeks ago was a mere prelude to the main event: major surgery to remove my gallbladder.

I'm currently tottering about the apartment with a massive - 8" - seeping cut just below my right rib. I'm not in huge amounts of pain but I'm still knocking back six painkillers every four or so hours.

I'm having the staples removed on Monday afternoon... I'll try to get some action shots of the wound while the dressing is off. The surgeon who cut me open also rather nicely preserved my offending gallstones: I woke up a week or so ago after the operation clutching a little plastic vial that had the - annoyingly small - gallstones inside.

Gallstones... bloody painful. One of the awesome nurses who took care of me said that "[gallstones] were more painful than childbirth." I have no way of ever verifying that, but if the pain of childbirth is indeed like the white hot pain of the gallstones I had, then I have new found respect for women who have more than one kid. Agony... my mom had three kids, which is testament to what an exceptionally wonderful, inspiring child I must have been because my mom obviously thought the agony of childbirth was worth going through again

I'm rambling now... it's close to 3pm which is bedtime for me. Nighty night.