Well it has been a interesting day having half our dev crew suddenly up sticks at 4pm to rush home because they recognized the destroyed buildings in the BBC photos being significantly close to their own homes. Our codeshop is a few miles away in Bromsgrove where we had one of the more typical 5 minute deluge and mugginess. A tornado in South Birmingham. Who’d have thunk?
I drove a mate back to Moseley where the tornado hit. “I keep thinking we’ll turn a corner and see mass destruction”, he said. Then we turned a corner and saw a car significantly flatter than it probably was at 2.59pm thanks to the really rather big tree that had decided to sit on it.
Jane took an hour and ten to drive home the four miles thanks to our local tornado. Was surprised it didn’t take her longer, seeing all the police in the street. Reminds me of the hurricane in 1987. I had to walk through the destruction that caused the following day to go to school. Today was a bit sunnier and slightly less severe but no less impressive for 90 seconds worth of wind.
Almost finished Chapter 1, which is nice. Actually, there have been quite a lot of unique things so far this week. I recorded my first demo session on Tuesday with a local band, 22 Over 7, I’m happy with the way the book is going is general, and yesterday, I watched the darkest, strangest movie of the year so far,
Donnie Darko, came home and then had to try and prove I don’t have an eating disorder to my housemates by going to the supermarket and having some pizza for my tea. As Ozzy might say, I love them to bits, but they’re all a bit mad. Finally, had the pleasure of picking up the new
Jean Michel Jarre album,
Sessions 2000
. A departure from the norm and no quarrel about it. More an exploration into jazz than electronica, but a good one nevertheless.
There are seven very large floors in the quiet and peaceful Birmingham Central Reference Library. Annoyingly, there seem to be only ten circuit breakers for laptops across those seven floors. Never have I been so happy to have a spare battery for the laptop. Actually, never before have I had to _use_ the spare.
There are about 74 A4 pages worth of notes directly linked to the phrase ’web services’ in the .NET SDK Contents and I’ve read and annotated all of them. There are only four mistakes that I noticed. Now to read the other half tucked under the index. Inkjet has, of course, run out while giving me hard copy of the seventy four. Last few pages appear as series of dots and dashes that I defy people to decode. My notes appear as scrambled as they are in my head. Standard pre-writing jitters. Will continue to get worse until outline is constructed. Added complication that there’s the pseudo-pressure of bearing in mind how long the chapter should be - i.e. long. Chapter will actually be as long as it needs to be. i.e. Long
Am seriously considering cashing in my ISA to take Developmentor’s Guerilla Web Services.NET course next month. It’s not as though shares mean much at the moment. Quite like the idea of wringing dry the heads at DMentor of knowledge and then going from there. I shall sharpen my whittling skills forthwith.
Found self troubleshooting patch bays and noise gates in the studio today. Not because I was supposed to, mind. Surprisingly, ended up mixing a 20-track catholic sing along because I had nothing else to do while it rained for the first time in a month and the police closed half the city down for a suspicious-looking-package(tm). That’ll be someone’s shopping safe-detonated by the bomb squad then.
Brum is turning into a right place for the headlines, good, bad or laughable. Not content with this bombscare (which I missed from two minutes walk away) , in the last fortnight we’ve had a full fledged earthquake (which I slept through), city fisticuffs for the first premier league Brum derby game for sixteen years (football - hmm) and now police have broken up a people trafficking ring at addresses around here. And of course, Brum is also putting itself in the running for European City of Culture in 2008 Ah, the folly. Forget web services - I should go into social commentary, invade Aston with some dettol and cockroach shock and see if anyone has a go at me for making the place a bit cleaner.