70cities blog

Given how infrequently I bother posting here, I thought there'd at least be some amusement value at posting at the very beginning of the year. True to form, I'm already off by one day.

Anyway, happy 2009. Being thousands of miles away from home gives a strong feeling of dislocation, not just physically but psychologically. I lost track of the weekdays almost immediately when we arrived, irrelevant as they are when you've got nothing to do. And the fact it's a brand new year hasn't really registered yet. 2008 was difficult in many ways, so I'm not exactly sad to see the back of it and have the chance to use the division of a new year starting to attempt to try and sort out various things.

As if by chance, today marks the tenth anniversary of me starting my first professional web development job. In 1998/9, jobs that had anything to do with the internet were both rare and fuzzily defined at best - so when I landed a job as a 'Webmaster' at a forward-thinking advertising agency in Newcastle, 6 months after leaving university and kicking around in temp jobs, I was pretty excited. In retrospect, I was very lucky, in the right place at exactly the right time. To think I'd end up where I am now, doing what I'm doing, would have been certifiable insanity.

So, whilst I don't exactly yearn for the days of administering hundreds of sites being served from a tired Powermac running System 7.6 on the end of a dial-back ISDN line, and building them out of handcranked HTML, Lasso and Filemaker Pro (shudder), I'm grateful for the in-at-the-deep-end head start I got on things in my 18 months there.

We don't arrive back in the UK until Tuesday, so I've still got plenty of time to think about what happens this year. There are vague plans, and whole areas where I just haven't done the thinking yet. Meanwhile.. ten years. Blimey.

The last few days were the hardest.

Never mind the months of late nights, missed deadlines, malfunctioning servers, storage constraints, crap data, uncertain roadmap, pressure, bad decisions (mostly my own), new surprises, misbehaving databases, etc etc. I work hard, I can work hard, I do work hard and I work on the kind of project that requires hard thinking, experimentation and ingenuity. So I can do all that - but once I knew that our long-since-planned break was around the corner, it got so much harder.

A week or so before we left, I half-joked to everyone that the moment we arrived, I'd get ill. It was inevitable, I said - indeed, it happened last time we came to San Francisco, like clockwork. The 11 hour plane ride - the longest stretch of time I'd spent doing nothing in several months - is the cue for my body to shut down all the defences, stop fending off all the bugs and actually get ill.

I finished up, made sure everyone knew vaguely what they had to do in my absence, worried about minor things that hadn't quite been done but were still niggling, unsure as to whether everything we'd achieved in the run up to Christmas was enough. Couldn't stop reading emails I'd already read twice, for nuances I might have missed. Then I was told in no uncertain terms to get the fuck out the office - in a nice way.

Home, pack, pizza. Sleep - fitfully. Wake, early. Rush around, ensure cat is OK, worry about cat, cab arrives. No time left.

M4, Heathrow, check in. Lounge - yay! Breakfast. Departure gate - upgrade! In your face! A good omen and a surprise which made the holiday feel that little bit extra special.

11 hours later, arrive. Tired, but excited. SFO, a greeting with antlers, cab to SoMa. Already, I can feel gunk building up at the back of my throat. Possibly just the air pressure or a reaction to something? No. It's a cold. The cold I've been putting off for months and months through adrenaline and exhaustion.

48 hours later - better. Jetlag's hit us like a hammer but staying up as late as we could and sleeping as late as we can has seen most of that off, hopefully. So nice to be back here again. Our gracious hosts are wonderful and we've rented, by accident, the world's most enormous car to dart around in. Haven't felt like drinking much due to the tiredness but I think I'll remedy that tonight. Mini-break in Sonoma hopefully sorted. Miles away - literally- from the pushing and pulling of our normal lives.

We needed this holiday and it's finally happened. Now - time to think. What's next?

http://service.o2.co.uk/IQ/SRVS/CGI-BIN/WEBCGI.EXE/,/?St=413,E=0000000002116867044,K=3744,Sxi=2,question=ref(User):str(Mobile),CASE=obj(12891)

Makes the heart sing, doesn't it?

I had yesterday off work (mostly anyway) and so spent most of the day alternating between boring-but-necessary chores and catching up on shows I'd bookmarked to watch/listen to. Bliss. In the evening, I headed out for a beer - ironically with people from work, although none of whom I actually work with, so that's OK. It's a big company, that can happen and I rather like it.

On the way to the pub I get suddenly redirected by the invitation to impromptu birthday drinks in town. I'm game, so I head to Covent Garden rather than Shepherd's Bush. It's not a hard choice to make.

I end up in a trendy basement lounge/bar arrangement - it's happy hour, and half full of local suits and fashionistas taking advantage of the half-price cocktails. The music's just one long anonymous boom-chk-boom affair, accurately blared out at the level at which it's impossible to have a reasonable conversation with anyone. I know a fair few people there who I've not seen in ages, and with whom I'd appreciate the chance to catch up with, but there's no chance of that. I sup a mojito, which took half an hour to procure and about three minutes to drink.

T, who's 8 months pregnant, shows up with her SO, who I've not met before. She introduces me as 'the smartest guy I know'. I offer a rebuttal, offering that I'm perhaps the tallest guy she knows. The half-joke gets lost in the din.

Hotpanted girls - I don't know if there's a name for them, or what their job titles could possibly be - float around and proffer test tubes full of God-knows-what. It's too loud to find out, and anyway my carefree vodka jelly days are very much over.

H and L show up, and we attempt to catch up. It's nice to see everyone but it's just not happening. Having made sure I've seen everyone for a hello, I slip quietly out and head home.

I'm hungry, so I scoff the tuna salad in the fridge, and am subsequently taken over by the spirit of Peter Rabbit. Conked out on the sofa in a rum/lettuce coma, the cat sits on my head. Zzzzz.

Well, a seven month hiatus - not bad going, really. 2008 has been the most hideously busy, stupidly packed year yet, and it's not over.

Things I've been up to:

• Designed and built a highly-parallelisable log processing engine, based on Map/Reduce principles
  
• Sweated blood in the process
  
• Been to York for a stag weekend, and ended up spending two nights in a dreadful 80's-themed nightclub
  
• Bought a new suit that doesn't make me look or feel like Tony Blair
  
• Went to Newcastle and wrote off our car
  
• Went to Scarborough for a wedding
  
• Bought a new car (shiny!)
  
• Spent a fantastic week in the North York Moors
  
• Stayed in a posh apartment complex in Leeds
  
• Struggled with being afflicted with recurring chronic sinusitus
  
• Drank a lot of tea/coffee
  
• Bought an iPhone
  
• Obtained new eyesight prescription and face furniture, which allows me to drive at night at last
  
• Waved sister-in-law and boyf off to live in San Francisco
  

So, not much really.

I've been playing with Greasemonkey a bit lately as I wanted to refresh my Javascript/DOM foo. I needed something to build, so I searched in my big red plastic bucket of irritations and knocked up a user script that lets you hide Twitter tweets from a definable list of users without actually unfollowing them - so you can selectively ignore people for periods of time without them being any the wiser - thus avoiding any potential awkwardness. Social networks are delicate things - they're made up of humans, after all.

(This was inspired during SXSWi, when half my Twitter follow list went and I didn't, and the endless noise about it got quite wearing - but I didn't want to unfollow anyone as my Twitter universe is generally quite lovely and interesting).

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25365

In common with everyone else with an internet connection this week, I heart Muxtape a lot. Simple, no-nonsense, works. Here's mine, although I've no idea how often I'll ever update it. Needs RSS to track changes, perhaps? Mmm. Then I could plumb it into the uberfeed and whatnot.

In other news, since VD Day passed and I shut down all the Amazon EC2 stuff, I've been mostly working, going to the Isle of Wight, drinking beer, eating nice food, hacking around with a potentially-quite-useful Twitter hack using Greasemonkey and not having my hair cut...